The Dutchman was painted after Okediji spent time in the United States and gained greater insight into the daily realities of African Americans. He encountered firsthand how artists confronted that reality in their work. It was inspired, in part, by African American poet Robert Hayden's poem about the Atlantic slave trade titled, Middle Passage:

Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy:
Sails flashing to the wind like weapons,
sharks following the moans the fever and the dying;
horror the corposant and compass rose.

Middle Passage:
voyage thorough death
to life on these shores.

This painting perhaps best embodies the theme of this exhibition. It may also signify Okediji's own psychic reconnection to his long lost ancestors strewn across the Atlantic and to those who survived in the New World.

Prominent tints of blue, competing with orange complements, have dual signification — the deep waters of the Atlantic and the pain at the root of African American blues music. Here is the Middle Passage experienced through Yoruba eyes, now opened to the deeper aspects of that passage.