On David Cook

David Cook first came to Makerere on a visiting basis about 1962 before returning to the same academy on a full-time basis as a lecturer, eventually climbing to the top as Professor of English Department. But the climb was a few years after I had left the academy where I graduated in English with honors in 1964. I therefore studied under David Cook for a good two years. I remember him for his classes on Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy mostly, and on Joseph Conrad. He was attracted to the more formal side of a literary text, how it was put together, how it read, and in this he was very meticulous, insisting on close reading all the time. This was in keeping with the Makerere tradition where close reading of texts was always an asset. But he was not very good at drawing the broad social and political world of the author beyond the Leavisite emphasis on the moral significance of the written text, and so there was always a formalistic approach, which did not always ignite the imagination of his students. The same approach is to be found in his critical writings, for instance in his work on my novels, The Writing of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, originally released by Longmans, where he was brilliant in the formal analysis of the sentence and the underlying structures, but often not as sure-footed in the larger significance of the works under study.

But where he lacked in firing the imagination, he more than made it up with his belief in the abilities of his students. He could be judgmental and alienating, but there is no doubt about his involvement and belief in his students. On joining Makerere, he became interested in the student writings in PENPOINT, the Department's journal of creative writing edited by students with the Faculty playing only an advisory role, and it was he who came up with the idea of an edited collection of the student contribution, a proposal that must have shocked his colleagues who probably had not seen in the journal more than a forum for undergraduate creative aspirations. But a book out of students' efforts? Not that there was any objection to this proposal. I was the editor of the journal and he and I worked on selecting the material that was later published by Heinemann under the title Origin: East Africa, in their newly established African Writers Series. By then my two novels, The River Between and Weep Not Child, written well before David Cook joined Makerere, had already been accepted by Heinemann Educational Publishers, and so there was a logic to his asking me to do the joint selection of the texts. The fact that my name was not there as joint-editor was not his fault but more to do with the internal politics of the Department at the time. (For some reason, the then Head of the Department was reluctant to let a student be a joint-editor of the project).

But perhaps his major contribution to East African Intellectual culture was in the area of theater. I had just finished writing The Black Hermit, the first major play in English by an East African, when he came to Makerere to teach full-time, and he volunteered his services as an advisor, never, even for a moment, seeing it as merely an undergraduate exercise in drama. So where some might have been slightly unsure about a project that challenged the previous assumptions about the place of African theater, at the Kampala National Theatre for instance, such as that it was not good enough for such white hallowed grounds, he was not. He also worked with the late Miles Lee, then a producer with Uganda Radio, and as an "editor" in the radio drama series, David Cook helped many an aspiring dramatist find a forum. But more lasting was his involvement with Makerere Free Traveling Theatre, which toured East Africa during the...