Lalage Bown

Lalage Bown (1945, Modern History) was a pioneering educationist who devoted much of her career to establishing and expanding adult education programmes in Ghana, Uganda, Zambia and Nigeria, with a particular focus on the empowerment of women through literacy.

Born in Surrey in 1927, Lalage Bown grew up looking after her younger siblings while their parents lived and worked abroad. She came to Somerville in 1945 to study Modern History and went on to take postgraduate courses in adult education and economic development.

After graduation, Bown took up a role at the University College of the Goldcoast, Ghana teaching African literature and arts. Although only 22 at the time, Lalage was prompted to question the department’s British literature-oriented curriculum, believing that poems such as Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ had little meaning for African students, and that it was important for them to encounter writing by and about African people.

The scepticism of her colleagues, who doubted such texts existed, led Lalage to bet 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 the texts she had collated 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 and Chinua Achebe. Two Centuries of African English subsequently became a core text for adult education and other classes throughout Africa. 

This story is indicative of a life devoted to expanding the provision and scope of adult education, particularly for women. Lalage spent much of her career establishing and expanding adult education programmes in Ghana, Uganda and Nigeria, with a particular focus on helping adult women learn to read and write. 

In 1974, Bown became a Commonwealth Visiting Professor at Edinburgh University. She left Africa in 1981 to take up a role as Head of the Department for Adult and Continuing Education at the University of Glasgow. In the 1990s, Bown authored a ground-breaking report on the impact of female literacy. Made an OBE in 1977, Bown has written widely on comparative adult education, community education, higher education (including student mobility), lifelong learning and adult literacy.

Professor Bown died aged 94 on Friday, December 17, 2021, following a brief stay in hospital after a fall.

Did you know? Professor Bown recorded a special message for Somerville students enduring the hardships of Covid lockdown in 2020. Recalling her own time at Somerville in the late 1940s, she offered words of comfort and urged students to look for the ‘change beyond the change’. Watch the video here.