Tribute to David Cook

David John Cook, Professor of English and Head of the Department of Modern European Languages, University of Ilorin, Nigeria, between 1977 and 1989, passed on, on Sunday, 30 March 2003. He was seventy-four years old. David Cook had been down for quite a while. He actually spent the last eighteen months of his life in Kingsland House, Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, United Kingdom.

David Cook studied English Literature at Birkbeck, a college of the University of London, graduating with a First Class honors degree in 1954. Immediately after this, he embarked on a two-year Masters degree program in the same college, completing it with distinction in 1956. Thereafter, he joined the academic staff of the University of Southampton and was there till 1962 when he made a decision to move to Africa. He took up a lectureship appointment at the then highly reputed Makerere University, Uganda. There he became a Senior Lecturer in 1965 and Professor and Head of Literature Department in 1967. He held the position of Head of Department till he left the University in 1977. He was also the Dean of the Faculty of Arts between 1967 and 1969. Throughout the fifteen years that he spent in Makerere, David Cook involved himself intensely in the cultural life of not just Uganda, but East Africa as a whole. In 1964, he co-founded the Makerere Free Traveling Theatre, an amateur group that took plays to several towns and villages in East Africa consistently over several years. Also in these same villages and towns as well as others, Cook collected oral literary materials for transcription, translation and publication. Immediately on becoming the Head of Department in 1967, David Cook took steps to transform the strictly English syllabus of Makerere University to that of African literature.

But perhaps his greatest contribution to the cultural and intellectual life of East Africa lies in the role he played in the development of the region's literature. Cook made himself totally available to virtually all the budding writers in the region at the time, helping them to read and edit their manuscripts and organizing regular meetings with them in his house. He also produced a weekly program on the writing on Radio Uganda. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the world famous Kenyan author, was one of the budding writers that David Cook worked closely with at the time. At the time David Cook arrived, Ngugi was an undergraduate student in Makerere. Cook read through and edited his earliest manuscripts, including that of his second published novel, The River Between. Ngugi was later to become the editor of PENPOINT, the student journal of creative writing, which Cook oversaw and from which the works published in Origin: East Africa edited by him (Cook) were selected. Four of Ngugi's short stories were included in this book, which first came out in 1965. David Cook was to edit two more books on East African writing. One, edited with Miles Lee, is on drama, and is titled Short East African Plays for Playing, and the other, Poems from East Africa, which as the title suggests is a poetry anthology, is co-edited with David Rubadiri, the Malawian writer. Cook also helped establish a Creative Writing fellowship in his department. Again, Ngugi benefited from this program in the1967/68 academic session, after having resigned his lectureship position at the University of Nairobi following a confrontation between the students and the government of Jomo Kenyatta. The other writer of world stature who benefited from the fellowship is V. S. Naipaul, the Trinidadian writer who won the Nobel Prize in 2001. On leaving Makerere in 1977, David Cook had a brief stopover in his former college, Birkbeck, where he held the post of Professor of English Literature. In October 1977, he reported at the University of Ilorin as Professor and Head of English Department. Ilorin was then a young university, only two years old, and had just been weaned...