Lalage Bown obituary

Adult educationist whose anthology Two Centuries of African English helped transform approaches to literature in the continent

Lalage Bown, who has died aged 94, was appointed to her first teaching post in the new University of the Gold Coast (Ghana) in 1949. Although only 22, she immediately questioned the department’s British literature-oriented curriculum, believing that poems such as Wordsworth’s Daffodils (I wandered lonely as a cloud) had little meaning for African students, and that it was important for them to encounter writing by and about African people.

Challenged by the department’s senior members, who doubted that such texts existed, she bet them a bottle of beer that she could produce numerous passages written in English by African authors over the previous 200 years. Within two weeks she won her beer, and mimeographed copies of the relevant works were distributed to students and teachers.

Eventually Bown edited the resulting anthology, Two Centuries of African English, including prose by the 18th-century writers Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano, as well as more contemporary politicians and authors such as Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere and Chinua Achebe. The anthology was published in the Heinemann African Writers Series in 1973, rapidly becoming a core text for adult education and other classes throughout Africa. This was just one of numerous books she edited and co-edited.

Throughout her three-decade career in Africa, Bown established a network of adult education institutions and organisations in Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Her energy and formidable abilities as a manager, linked to a talent for encouraging collaboration, brought lasting achievements for adult literacy in these countries. Together with her African colleagues in Zambia, for example, she established a national extramural programme that emphasised current issues, introduced special courses for trade unionists, politicians and police, and drew on radio and television as a media for education.

She also set up the first systematic training for adult educators in Africa, and was the founding secretary of the African Adult Education Association. When she returned to Britain permanently in 1980, she devoted her considerable energies to widening access to adult education throughout the UK.

Bown gave particular attention to helping women in Africa learn to read and write. In a 2009 interview for the Unesco education sector newsletter, she commented: “I was left with the huge conviction that even the simplest acquisition of literacy can have a profoundly empowering effect personally, socially and politically. When it comes to women, there is a huge change in their self-worth and confidence.” In 1990 she drew on experience in Africa, the US and Britain, and as an active member of the Canadian-based International Council for Adult Education, to produce a widely cited report for ActionAid, Preparing the Future: Women, Literacy and Development.

Born in Croydon, Surrey (now in the London borough of Croydon), the daughter of Dorothy (nee Watson) and Arthur Bown, Lalage was the eldest of four children. Her unusual name, pronounced Lallagy, derives from an ode by the Roman poet Horace.

Her father worked for the Indian civil service in Burma (now Myanmar), but the children stayed in children’s holiday homes and boarding schools in Britain, visited by their mother during the summer holidays, and their father only when he was on leave once every three years.

Lalage was educated in Wycombe Abbey school and Cheltenham Ladies’ college, before studying modern history at Somerville College, Oxford, graduating in 1949. She subsequently took an MA in adult education and economic development.

After six years as resident tutor at the University of the Gold Coast, Bown taught in the extramural department at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. In 1960, she marked Nigeria’s independence while serving as assistant director of extramural studies at the University of Ibadan. Following four years as director of extramural studies at the University of Zambia, and the end of the Nigerian civil war, she was appointed professor of adult education in Ahmadu Bello University, northern Nigeria.

In 1977 Bown moved to the University of Lagos, where in 1979 she was appointed dean of education. While in Nigeria, she took into her home five-year-old twin girls, Taiwo and Kehinde, whose family had been victims of the war, and she became their permanent foster mother.

Bown’s achievements in the field of adult studies did not go unnoticed outside Africa. She was appointed OBE in 1977. In 1975 she received an honorary doctorate from the Open University for services to the education of the underprivileged, and was the first woman to receive the William Pearson Tolley medal from Syracuse University, New York, for outstanding contributions to lifelong and continuing education.

In 1981 she was appointed director and titular professor to the University of Glasgow’s department of adult and continuing education. Under her leadership, that department offered the widest range of subjects of all continuing education departments in the UK.

After her retirement in 1992, Bown remained an active member not only of her local Rotary Club in Shrewsbury but also of numerous international societies and boards, including the Council for Education in the Commonwealth from 1999 till 2006. She was made a fellow of the Educational Institute of Scotland and also of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1991, and was inducted into the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame in 2009.

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

• Lalage Jean Bown, educator, born 1 April 1927; died 17 December 2021

Contributor

Lyn Innes

The GuardianTramp

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