The International Institute of African Languages and Cultures: A memory of its Beginnings

Extract

I went out to the Gold Coast as a teacher on the staff of the newly established Achimota College in October 1924, and a few weeks before I came back for my first leave, in April 1926, there came to the college a distinguished visitor, Major Hanns Vischer (later Sir Harms), the educational adviser to the Colonial Office in London. It was Major Vischer who told me about the project to establish an International African Institute.

Vischer was a remarkable and delightful character. I was told that he was of Swedish descent, which was why he spelt his name Harms instead of in the German form Hans. He had served in the British army through the First World War, but before the war he had served in Nigeria as a missionary for the Church Missionary Society. He spoke fluent Hausa, and (I was told) some other languages. He was certainly a skilled linguist, for he seemed equally at home in English, French and German. He spoke English with a slight foreign accent, which made it easy to believe in his Scandinavian origin; it was not a German accent. He stayed at Achimota for a week or so, and went on from the Gold Coast to visit Sierra Leone. He joined my homeward-bound steamer at Freetown; he remembered having met me at Accra, and told me about the projected institute. Whoever may have been responsible for starting the scheme, it was Vischer who was the driving force in organising its inaugural meeting.