Editorial
Sierra Leonean literary scholar and critic, Prof. Eldred Durosimi Jones, who died on March 21, aged 95; and Nigerian musicologist, composer and pianist Prof. Olatunji Akin Euba, who died on April 14, aged 84, played significant roles in promoting African literature and music, particularly when African arts and culture struggled for recognition in a world dominated by Eurocentric perspectives.
Jones studied at Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone (1944- 47); as well as Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1950-53) and University of Durham (1962), both in England. He made a mark in the literary world with his critical work, Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama (1965), which won the criticism prize at the World Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966.
His book, The Writing of Wole Soyinka (1973), was one of the earliest on the writer who became the first black African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986.
As editor of African Literature Today, the oldest international journal of African Literature in the world, for three decades, Jones was in the vanguard of the effort to brand African literature and create a critical environment for the works of African writers.
He was one of the “crucial nurturers and sustainers” of “written modern African literature,” Nigerian poet and literary critic Prof. Niyi Osundare said in a tribute.
Jones lost his sight in middle age, but learned braille and continued working with the support of his wife. In 2002, the African Studies Association of the UK gave them jointly its Distinguished Africanist award. Jones was also designated an honorary fellow of Corpus Christi College in the same year.
His memoir, The Freetown Bond: A Life under Two Flags, which was published in 2012, despite his blindness, is a testimony to his wife’s productive assistance as well as his own sense of history.
Euba, who died in the US, was acclaimed as the “Father of African Pianism.” He explored how the piano, a western musical instrument, could be used to reinterpret African music.
He also introduced the concept of creative ethnomusicology, which explored the relationship between ethnographic research and musical composition.
In January 2019, a three-day international symposium and concert in Lagos celebrated Euba and his cultural stature. The concert presented 19 classical pieces, eight of which were Euba’s compositions.
His compositions synthesised African traditional material, often from his own Yoruba ethnic group, and contemporary classical music. His most ambitious composition is the opera Chaka: An Opera in Two Chants (1970).
Born in Lagos, he studied composition and the piano at Trinity College of Music, London. He also studied at University of California, Los Angeles, USA, and University of Ghana, Legon (1974) where he earned a doctorate in ethnomusicology. His doctoral dissertation is entitled “Dundun Music of the Yoruba.”
Euba moved abroad after stints as director of the Centre for Cultural Studies at University of Lagos, senior research fellow at the old University of Ife, and head of music at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation.
He was a research scholar and artist in residence at IWALEWA House, the African studies centre of University of Bayreuth, Germany ( 1986 – 1992); Andrew Mellon Professor of Music at University of Pittsburgh, USA, (1993 – 2011); and until his death, Andrew W. Mellon Professor, Emeritus in music.
He pursued his interest in modern interculturalism with passion. In 1989, he founded the Centre for Intercultural Music Arts, London, and was director emeritus of the Centre for Intercultural Musicology at Churchill College, University of Cambridge.
He also regularly organised symposia on music in Africa and the Diaspora at Cambridge as well as the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing.
Euba’s Elekoto Ensemble, which brought together musicians from Nigeria, China, India, Germany, Malta, and the United States, projected his perspective on interculturalism.
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