Tribute to David Cook.(Tributes)(Obituary)

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 …