Lalage Bown obituary | English and creative writing

Lalage Bown, who has died aged 94, was appointed to her first instructing submit within the new College of the Gold Coast (Ghana) in 1949. Though solely 22, she instantly questioned the division’s British literature-oriented curriculum, believing that poems equivalent to Wordsworth’s Daffodils (I wandered lonely as a cloud) had little that means for African college students, and that it was vital for them to come across writing by and about African folks.

Challenged by the division’s senior members, who doubted that such texts existed, she wager them a bottle of beer that she may produce quite a few passages written in English by African authors over the earlier 200 years. Inside two weeks she gained her beer, and mimeographed copies of the related works have been distributed to college students and lecturers.

Ultimately Bown edited the ensuing anthology, Two Centuries of African English, together with prose by the 18th-century writers Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano, in addition to extra up to date politicians and authors equivalent to Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere and Chinua Achebe. The anthology was revealed within the Heinemann African Writers Sequence in 1973, quickly turning into a core textual content for grownup schooling and different lessons all through Africa. This was simply one among quite a few books she edited and co-edited.

All through her three-decade profession in Africa, Bown established a community of grownup schooling establishments and organisations in Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Her vitality and formidable talents as a supervisor, linked to a expertise for encouraging collaboration, introduced lasting achievements for grownup literacy in these nations. Collectively together with her African colleagues in Zambia, for instance, she established a nationwide extramural programme that emphasised present points, launched particular programs for commerce unionists, politicians and police, and drew on radio and tv as a media for schooling.

She additionally arrange the primary systematic coaching for grownup educators in Africa, and was the founding secretary of the African Grownup Training Affiliation. When she returned to Britain completely in 1980, she devoted her appreciable energies to widening entry to grownup schooling all through the UK.

Bown gave explicit consideration to serving to ladies in Africa study to learn and write. In a 2009 interview for the Unesco schooling sector publication, she commented: “I used to be left with the large conviction that even the best acquisition of literacy can have a profoundly empowering impact personally, socially and politically. On the subject of ladies, there’s a enormous change of their self-worth and confidence.” In 1990 she drew on expertise in Africa, the US and Britain, and as an energetic member of the Canadian-based Worldwide Council for Grownup Training, to provide a extensively cited report for ActionAid, Making ready the Future: Ladies, Literacy and Growth.

Born in Croydon, Surrey (now within the London borough of Croydon), the daughter of Dorothy (nee Watson) and Arthur Bown, Lalage was the eldest of 4 kids. Her uncommon identify, pronounced Lallagy, derives from an ode by the Roman poet Horace.

Her father labored for the Indian civil service in Burma (now Myanmar), however the kids stayed in kids’s vacation properties and boarding colleges in Britain, visited by their mom throughout the summer season holidays, and their father solely when he was on go away as soon as each three years.

Lalage was educated in Wycombe Abbey college and Cheltenham Women’ school, earlier than learning trendy historical past at Somerville School, Oxford, graduating in 1949. She subsequently took an MA in grownup schooling and financial growth.

After six years as resident tutor on the College of the Gold Coast, Bown taught within the extramural division at Makerere College in Kampala, Uganda. In 1960, she marked Nigeria’s independence whereas serving as assistant director of extramural research on the College of Ibadan. Following 4 years as director of extramural research on the College of Zambia, and the tip of the Nigerian civil conflict, she was appointed professor of grownup schooling in Ahmadu Bello College, northern Nigeria.

In 1977 Bown moved to the College of Lagos, the place in 1979 she was appointed dean of schooling. Whereas in Nigeria, she took into her residence five-year-old twin ladies, Taiwo and Kehinde, whose household had been victims of the conflict, and she or he turned their everlasting foster mom.

Bown’s achievements within the area of grownup research didn’t go unnoticed exterior Africa. She was appointed OBE in 1977. In 1975 she obtained an honorary doctorate from the Open College for companies to the schooling of the underprivileged, and was the primary lady to obtain the William Pearson Tolley medal from Syracuse College, New York, for excellent contributions to lifelong and persevering with schooling.

In 1981 she was appointed director and titular professor to the College of Glasgow’s division of grownup and persevering with schooling. Underneath her management, that division supplied the widest vary of topics of all persevering with schooling departments within the UK.

After her retirement in 1992, Bown remained an energetic member not solely of her native Rotary Membership in Shrewsbury but in addition of quite a few worldwide societies and boards, together with the Council for Training within the Commonwealth from 1999 until 2006. She was made a fellow of the Academic Institute of Scotland and likewise of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1991, and was inducted into the Worldwide Grownup and Persevering with Training Corridor of Fame in 2009.

She is survived by a brother, Hugh, and by Taiwo and Kehinde.