Great accolades, Oluwatoyin Adepoju! I assume you are saying today is Professor Ademola Dasylva's birthday. If that is the case, may I use this medium to wish the cultural icon and a man of wisdom a very Happy Birthday. As our elders pray, may 200 years be to him like the passage of a single year!
Michael O. Afoláyan
On Thursday, October 15, 2020, 9:46:49 AM GMT+1, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:
Professor Ademola Dasylva
between classical African elegance and Western refinement
How did I meet Ademola Dasylva?
It was at the University of Ibadan. He was head of the department of English.
I had come to enquire about the possibility of doing a PhD there in the literature of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge, in my resolve to penetrate classical African cognitive systems.
We met in his office. In attendance was my former student at the University of Benin, Sunday Ahwefeada, who had just completed his MA at Ibadan's English department, and was clearly highly regarded, almost a member of the department. He praised me to Dasylva.
Dasylva received me well. He was keen on the Ifa project, thereby marking my first encounter with an academic who was interested.
He asked me to draw up a bibliography of a certain number of texts, read a percentage of them, and get back to him.
I commenced the writing but also started a research centre and public library in my Benin base, using my books, which students from my University of Benin English and Literature department used to come to read, and a computer and employed a secretary, this being my use of the windfall from expanded academic salaries the Academic Staff Union of Universities had fought for.
I would travel outside Benin on research trips and the Centre secretary would type up what I wrote.
I did not see Dasylva again until more than ten years later.
This was at the Abiola Irele memorial at the University of Ibadan in December 2017.
Dasylva, as Dean of the Faculty of Arts, assembled some of Irele's contemporaries, luminaries of African scholarship, and one of his students, now grey-haired, Professor Aduke Adebayo, to bear witness to the life of the departed master of literature, philosophy and cultural studies, a memorable night, in which Dasylva referenced the creative role of Abiola Irele in his own life.
I tried to apologize for disappearing more than ten years ago but he waved it aside, praising my writings he had read on the USAAfrica Dialogue Series Google group.
World traveller, convivial friend
Who is Ademola Dasylva?
A man of deep humanity, a committed scholar, a dedicate to the cause of African enlightenment, a poet and distinguished member of the professoriate.
Please join me to celebrate the day of coming into the world of this light flaming from the city of rust and gold, scattered on seven hills like broken china in the sun, as J.P.Clark unforgettably put it, yet illuminating the world.
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