Fifty Years On: A Conversation with Professor Eldred Durosimi Jones, Founding Editor, African Literature Today

Summary

I talked with Prof. Jones at his residence atop the Leicester Hills overlooking Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. In 2016, a few short months after his beloved Marjorie (co-editor ALT 15-24) died, a partial house fire engulfed their library, and with it a lifetime collection of African literary classics, including copies of the Bulletin of African Literature, which preceded ALT, and a copy of Polyglotta Africana, Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle's comparative study of over 156 West African languages. Despite these two life-changing events, Prof. Jones, 93, is remarkably present, as alert, witty, and charming as I remember him when I was a student in his class. Our conversation took place in the reconstructed library, now pared down to a cloth upholstered chair, a bookshelf on top of which sat a combination radio and audio cassette player (to listen to classical music), a few paintings, framed newspaper cuttings hanging on the walls, and a desk in front of which he sat in a black high-back office chair on a swivel. On the morning I walked into the library, Prof. Jones (henceforth EDJ) had been reading Shakespeare, in Braille, ‘to keep my mind sharp’, he explains, after which he told me he had voted in Sierra Leone's March 2018 presidential elections.

PH: How did ALT come about? Take us through the steps that led to the inaugural edition.

EDJ: The 1960s saw a good deal of activity among scholars teaching African Literature throughout Africa and the world, and this led to a series of conferences in African Literature. There was one in Dakar, one in Nairobi, and one in Freetown at Fourah Bay College. At this latter conference, talk gathered around the idea of communication between the various English Departments which took an interest in African Literature. We decided on a bulletin, which was just a kind of newsletter between departments saying what was going on. That lasted for a year or two and possibly it was that bulletin that showed the potential of this kind of communication. Heinemann, which had the largest list of African authors, took an interest in the bulletin. We talked about it and after that we started African Literature Today which was founded as a journal inviting articles on the works of African writers.

PH: Was there a set of scholars that made up this ‘we’?