Lalage Bown obituary

Adult educationist whose anthology Two Centuries of African English helped transform approaches to literature in the continent

Lalage Bown, who has died aged 94, was appointed to her first teaching post in the new University of the Gold Coast (Ghana) in 1949. Although only 22, she immediately questioned the department's British literature-oriented curriculum, believing that poems such as Wordsworth's Daffodils (I wandered lonely as a cloud) had little meaning for African students, and that it was important for them to encounter writing by and about African people.

Challenged by the department's senior members, who doubted that such texts existed, she bet them 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 mimeographed copies of the relevant works were distributed to students and teachers.

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