In pursuance of my research into the use of Africans and black characters on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, I had the rare privilege to do research at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D. C. in 1960. This was America before the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the great Selma civil rights marches in Alabama in 1965. John F. Kennedy was in the thick of the campaign which was to make him the youngest President of the United States of America while also breaking a religious barrier as the first Roman Catholic to be elected to that high office. It was indeed an exciting time to be in the States both as a scholar and as a citizen of the world in a period of transition and change. It was an equally exciting time in Sierra Leone, which achieved its independence on 27 April 1961 while I was still in America. Indeed, I spent Independence Day itself ending a seminar on Language in Sierra Leone, in the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where the only Sierra Leonean student, a young lady, turned up at my final lecture displaying a large placard with the slogan ‘Sierra Leone Independence Day, April 27 1961’