For more than 50 years Professor Eldred Durosimi Jones slept and woke up reading and writing and thinking Africa literature. He reviewed fiction, poetry and drama from the continent and the Diaspora. He was central to the establishment of the study of African writing in Africa, the UK, North America and around the world. He was Principal of Fourah Bay College and a visiting professor abroad. His critical works include Othello's Countrymen: A Study of the African in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Oxford University Press, 1985), The Writing of Wole Soyinka (Heinemann, 1973), and The Elizabethan Image of Africa (University of Virginia for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1971). He is also the author of The Freetown Bond: A Life under Two Flags (James Currey, 2012) with the help of his now late wife, Marjorie Jones. Born on 6 January 1925, Prof Jones turned 95 years this week. Umaru Fofana went to spend time with him.
Umaru Fofana: Professor Eldred Jones Happy Birthday to you. 95 years on, what does it feel like?
Prof. Jones: Not a day older than yesterday. I feel pretty fit. I can’t really complain and I have pleasant memories on the whole of the 95 years that I have had.
Umaru Fofana: And how much reading do you still do?
Prof Jones: Not as much reading for myself. But I am very lucky that I have a willing group of readers who come and read to me. But I still enjoy a bit of reading for myself in what is left of my Braille memory.
Umaru Fofana: And how much of that is of African literature?
Prof Jones: Not a lot. Not a lot because not a lot is written in Braille. But what I have read to me I have quite a bit. I’ve just being reading “Africanah” which is the latest novel that I know of this remarkable woman, Nigerian writer.
Umaru Fofana: Chimamanda
Prof Eldred Jones: Chimamanda Ngozi. And I still keep up with some of the local writing. Elizabeth Kamara who looks after me and who’s one of my readers is a bit of a writer herself. So I search from there, I read some of her works, some of them are still being written while I’m reading them.
Umaru Fofana: How much would you say African literature has evolved over the decades?
Prof. Eldred Jones: It has evolved considerably. I suppose when you say over the decades you’re going back to people like Chinua Achebe, [Wole] Soyinka and that lot. It has become in some ways more intimate. People are writing about things closer and closer to contemporary life. Achebe, for instance was a great recorder of history and he recorded the changes in Nigerian life, the contact between Nigeria and the West in a remarkable way and that is there for all time. And Soyinka is still alive and doing some writing. But the kind of writing that was exhibited in the book fair that was held recently [in Sierra Leone] shows that we’re now examining life as it’s going on. Some of the stuff [that Prof Kosonineh Kosso-Thomas] is writing is so contemporary you feel it’s almost happening as we speak. For instance, his treatment of this whole business of illegal immigration from the West African area to the European continent is absolutely contemporary and it shows how much the writers are enmeshed in the environment they are writing about. So we are getting writing out of the contemporary situation and it augurs a great future for contemporary writing.
Umaru Fofana: And you don’t think there has been any downward spiral in African Literature compared to the days or the era of Chinua Achebe and I know Soyinka is still very much active but I dare say when he was at his peak?
Prof Eldred Jones: When I mentioned earlier the latest thing in Chimamanda’s works that I’ve read which was a novel called Africanah, the tittle is a little misleading because it’s not just about Africa – a considerable part of it is set in America – but it is about Africans in America. It is a remarkable book from that point of view. It starts in America in New York as the centre and ends in Lagos. And its scope is vast. So I think the future is a golden one for African writing just seeing what a person like that is doing.
Umaru Fofana: And how does the fact that you can’t access African literature in Braille make you feel?
Prof Eldred Jones: Bad, is one word. But I think even here in Sierra Leone an attempt is being made to reproduce particularly texts which occur in the teaching curriculum so that we might be having works of African writers in braille but I think so far we’re far behind.
Umaru Fofana: Especially in this era of technology where audio books of Western writers are easy to come by.
Prof Eldred Jones: Yes, I think that certainly is one accessible way of doing it. But I can never downplay the value of taking these things out for yourself either with your eyes of with your fingers. You seem to be working out things with the writer when you’re experiencing it firsthand. So I’m not decrying the value of audio material and some of the other forms of reproducing literature. But I think if we can get material in braille for blind students so that they’re experiencing the business of reading for themselves. But until we can do that, I think we still have a lot to do.
Umaru Fofana: You’re one of the leading authorities in the world on William Shakespeare, do you think the days of his books are numbered or will Shakespearian literature be there forever?
Prof Eldred Jones: Forever and beyond! Shakespeare was such a perceptive writer that you find deeper and deeper meanings into some of the things that we have taken completely for granted. Many people can recite, quote something of Shakespeare irrespective of whether they have attained high school or not because it’s become part of the language. But his understanding of human nature is extraordinary and this is why perhaps over the years people are arguing that he couldn’t have written all this himself or he couldn’t have written this at all because he didn’t go to university and all that. It’s a matter of your ability to understand the workings of human nature and being able to communicate this to listening and reading audiences. That’s what Shakespeare is a master of.
Umaru Fofana: And I understand that part of the things you did in your academic life was with Wole Soyinka, you want tell us a bit about that please?
Prof Eldred Jones: Wole Soyinka! If you look at the flyleaf of the book I wrote on Wale Soyinka called “Variety of Wole Soyinka” you’ll see the small attribution for “WS, our WS”. The first is “WS” for Wole Soyinka and the second “WS” is for “our William Shakespeare”. That is how I think of Wole Soyinka. Maybe some people who don’t like him found Soyinka extremely difficult to read at a start might disagree with this, but the more you get acquainted with his work the more you come to understand that he had something of this deeper understanding of what life is about. I remember some of the reactions to some of his works…
Umaru Fofana: “The Interpreters” I found very difficult to understand.
Prof. Eldred Jones: The very first line of The Interpreters ehhhh, enhhh, “Mortar on concrete jars my drink looms” What on earth does that mean! I gave that book to some of my friends, some of the most intelligent people I know. They didn’t read more than a couple of pages before throwing it aside.
Umaru Fofana: And that’s what won him the Nobel Prize for Literature. Was it?
Prof. Eldred Jones: Not that particular book but all his works put together. But that book I tried to analyse for the benefit of my friends. And you can see that even that first totally incomprehensible line to many people, contains something of wisdom. Not only that it makes sense when you analyse it, but it is artistically integrated to the rest of the book. And that book contains a very good view of the results of the interaction between old Nigeria and contemporary Nigeria and between the Nigerian West African culture and the Western culture – the sort of thing that Chinua Achebe dealt with in “Things Fall Apart”, but from a completely different stylistic point of view.
Umaru Fofana: And finally, what do you think is the future of African writing? I know you mentioned Chimamanda, who is the person most people cite these days. But besides Chimamanda, what other prospects do you think exist?
Prof. Eldred Jones: Well the prospects I think were demonstrated in the small book fair that we had in Freetown recently that lots of people are beginning to see the need to represent their surroundings, their culture, their own particular view of their environment and even the wider view of Africa. I see that for us in Sierra Leone writing is only beginning and the writers we’re now producing are our heralds for Sierra Leonean writing. But let me go back and say that Sierra Leoneans have been writing for a long time.
Umaru Fofana: I was going to say that, when you said writing was beginning here. How about the Sarif Easmons, the Yema Lucilda Hunters, the Professor Eldred Joneses – yourself!
Prof Eldred Jones: I was thinking of going even beyond that. Sierra Leone has a great tradition in writing but not writing fiction and that sort of writing. Sierra Leoneans have been writing about history, about civilization, about education and even science, but for some reason have not been prolific in the writing of what we now call literature. So that’s why I think we are only beginning now to express ourselves in what we now call literature.
Umaru Fofana: Professor Eldred Jones, always a pleasure talking to you, happy birthday.
Prof Eldred Jones: Thank you very much.
Copyright © 2020 Politico Online
