Toyin Falola Studies Review

  Image Above Constellations of Memory and Achievement: Reading Iconography Around Toyin Falola Symbols of African achievement gather like stars around the figure of Toyin Falola. A camel moves across the mental horizon, patient and enduring, evoking the long itineraries of commerce, migration, and knowledge that stitched together the Sahara and the Sahel—routes along which ideas travelled as surely as salt and gold. Nearby rises the Akan  Sankofa  bird, its head turned backward in deliberate retrospection, teaching that progress is impossible without remembrance, that the past is not a burden but a reservoir. Beyond these, the pyramids of the Giza Plateau loom in austere grandeur, monuments whose engineering brilliance continues to challenge modern explanation, their geometry embodying Africa’s ancient scientific imagination. Completing the constellation is the serene majesty of the Ife head—sculptural sublimity in bronze and terracotta—its sensitive modelling of the hum...