James Ngũgĩ (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o) was the first African writer I ever met. This happened some time in 1962, while he was still an undergraduate at Makerere University College but was already contributing a fairly regular weekly or fortnightly column for Nairobi's Sunday Nation entitled ‘As I See It’, which was meant to represent an African point of view of Kenyan affairs, just as a parallel column under the same title by N. S. Toofan was intended to provide a voice for Kenya's Asians. Ngũgĩ had earlier published a few short stories in Penpoint, a campus literary magazine, as well as in the Kenya Weekly News, and he had completed the first draft of a longer story he called ‘The Black Hermit’, which he entered in a novel-writing competition sponsored by the East African Literature Bureau, but at the time I met him he was known primarily as a journalist.

I was then teaching English and History at a boys’ boarding school in Kisii, Western Kenya in a program called Teachers for East Africa, which had been set up by the U.S. Government to supply American teachers to East African secondary schools in need of qualified instructors. Those of us in the first wave of this program had had a six-week orientation at Makerere before going out to our schools, but I did not chance to meet Ngũgĩ at the university. It was only after some months of reading his newspaper commentary that I decided to seek him out on one of my trips to Nairobi. I found him at the Nation office, and we went off to have a chat at a hotel bar nearby.

I cannot recall everything we talked about, but much of it may have concerned local topics he had written about in the paper: education, politics, history, language (especially the importance of Kiswahili), women's issues, etc. We also discussed some of the new writing that was emerging in parts of Western and Southern Africa. I had started reading African novels, plays, and poetry while at Makerere, and I was curious to learn about his own literary education and the opinions he had formed of Western and African authors whose works he had read and studied.

African Literature Today, launched in print in the UK by Eldred Jones in 1968, was the successor to a Bulletin of the Association for African Literature in English that he had started editing in a modest cyclostyled format four years earlier in Sierra Leone as an outlet for scholarly commentary on the new literatures that were emerging in Anglophone Africa. The Bulletin wasn't the first journal published in Africa to carry literary criticism. It had been preceded by Black Orpheus in 1957, Transition in 1961, and Abbia in Cameroon in 1963, as well as by a number of campus magazines such as Penpoint at Makerere University in Kampala in 1958, The Horn at University College Ibadan in 1958, and The Muse at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka in 1963. But in these other journals, discourse on literature was a sideline, not the primary focus. Eldred Jones, one of the earliest university teachers of African literature, was also one of the earliest scholars to devote serious scrutiny to what African writers were producing. And through his pioneering editorial efforts he made it possible for others to express their ideas on this interesting new phenomenon too. His initiatives helped to turn African literary studies into a proper academic discipline.

But he was not the only one promoting this kind of cultural activity. Scholars elsewhere who were beginning to study the emergence of new English language literatures in areas of the world outside Britain and America were also engaged in developing vehicles for communication of their ideas. The 1960s saw the founding of a Journal of Commonwealth Literature in England in 1965 as well as a Conference on British Commonwealth Literature Newsletter in the United States in 1966, which in 1971 was expanded into a journal called World Literature Written in English. An older American journal, Books Abroad, founded as early as 1927, became World Literature Today in 1976. In addition, three Anglophone literature journals in India – The Literary Criterion, The Literary Half-Yearly, and The Commonwealth Journal – all published in Mysore, became increasingly international, and Canadians established Ariel in 1970 as their contribution to the broadening of English literary studies. In the process the word Commonwealth, a hangover from the British Empire, tended to be displaced by the word Postcolonial, which included non-British territories as well.

A month later, Aldridge set out on his next extended Continental tour. A report in the Era said he was on his way “to fulfill engagements at St. Petersburg and other places in Russia.” When he passed through Paris en route, a local theater there offered to employ him, but he proceeded directly to Rybinsk, where an important market fair was being held. There he started performing during the last week in May.

At the conclusion of his run, he wrote to Amanda with disappointing news:

Aldridge began his next Continental tour in November 1865, heading first to Odessa, more than a thousand miles away, where he had performed four years earlier with great success. On December 1, he sent the following letter to Amanda:

The “little stranger” was the child Amanda was expecting. She was now about six months pregnant.

Aldridge wrote her again on January 2 with disturbing news:

My dear Amanda,

Aldridge had initially been invited to appear in Stockholm nearly three years earlier when he was touring the Continent. Newspapers in England had been following his travels with interest and curiosity, reporting on anything extraordinary that happened. On July 2, 1854, the Sunday Times told its readers:

Aldridge may have been unable to accept this generous invitation at that time because he was too busy fulfilling back-to-back engagements at theaters in Germany, Prussia, Austria, and the Netherlands for the next nine months. On returning to London in the spring of 1855, he had rested for a few months and then had resumed performing at theaters throughout the United Kingdom.

Meanwhile, the Swedish royal family had not forgotten him. On March 3, 1857, the invitation to perform in Stockholm was offered again, this time through the office of Major Norman Pringle, the British consul there, who had received the following letter from Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius, the director of Stockholm's Royal Theatre:

Aldridge had performed in Prague with great success five years earlier, in the spring of 1853, so he was welcomed back enthusiastically by those who remembered the vivid impression he had made as Othello, Shylock, Macbeth, and Mungo—the same roles he was now to perform again at the Royal Theatre. They also remembered that he had formerly appeared with a mediocre British troupe, so they were relieved that he was now supported by an excellent Germanspeaking Czech group.

As usual, Aldridge opened as Othello, which many thought to be his best role:

However, at least one critic considered his Jew superior to his Moor:

We do not know the exact date of Aldridge's arrival in London on the completion of his seventh tour of Russia, but it must have been close to a year after the death of his wife Margaret at the end of March 1864. Aldridge was now ready to move on to a new phase of his life by marrying his paramour, Amanda, with whom he had already had two children, Irene Luranah Pauline and Frederick Olof.

The wedding took place at St. John the Evangelist Parish Church in Penge, a southern suburb of London not far from their house on Hamlet Road in that community (fig. 13). The witnesses were J. J. and Mary Sheahan, his old friends from Hull. On the marriage registration certificate, Aldridge was listed as a widower, histrionic actor, and son of Daniel Aldridge, a clerk (fig. 14). His bride was described as Amonda [sic] Pauline Von Brandt, a spinster and daughter of Uloff Von Brandt, a Baron of Sweden. There is no mention of Aldridge's illegitimate teenage son, Ira Daniel, as being present at the ceremony.

However, Ira Daniel wrote respectful letters of congratulation to both his father and new stepmother on the day they were married:

Aldridge's second Continental tour was turning out to be the same kind of triumph his first Continental tour had been. Welcomed everywhere, he won full-throated praise and enthusiastic applause for his three principal roles. The comments were much the same as those voiced in 1853–55, when he began working exclusively with local troupes who performed in their own language while he continued to speak his lines in English. As Othello he was admired for the energy, passion, dignity, and deep understanding he brought to his interpretation of a noble but impulsive man who loved not wisely but too well. As before, the extreme emotion he displayed in jealous outbursts of pain, rage, and despair was “highly disconcerting” to some audiences but was thought to be justified by his “tropical temperament,”—that is, by the fact that he was an African playing an African. Such eruptions “are taken to the outer bounds of what is permissible—piercing, terrifying, and usually incredibly effective.” Yet a critic in Krakow, who had seen him perform the same role five years before, felt that there was now “a greater temperance in the outbursts of passion, an attempt to accommodate our views, our timid bourgeois sentiments, our civilized feelings.” He was the same Aldridge, giving the same stirring performance, but doing so now in a manner that cultured Europeans would find more tolerable.

There were suggestions that his interpretation of Shylock had changed too. He was still “every inch the Jew with his burning hatred of Christians and his insatiable thirst for revenge,” a Jew whose “harsh traits of character break through with a certain confident haughtiness,” yet who reminds us of his tribe's pathetic heritage of suffering. Aldridge deviated from Continental convention by making Shylock, despite his flaws, a sympathetic figure. A few critics pointed to a new feature of his performance: a tendency “to repeat the German words of his dialogue partner in German,” and to slip in “German phrases that naturally weren't learned well.” This was something he had not done before, and it had an estranging effect.

Aldridge, through his London agent J. W. Anson, had received a letter from a theater manager in Kharkov, proposing that he return to perform there at the end of May and also appear at other towns nearby:

Aldridge evidently accepted this proposal, for a few days later he mentioned these arrangements in a letter to his old fried J. J. Sheahan in Hull:

We can only speculate on what would have happened had Aldridge performed in New York and other cities in the United States only a few years after the Emancipation Proclamation and the conclusion of the Civil War. Shortly after the announcement of his impending arrival from Europe, the American press began to comment on some of the problems that he and his manager might face. The New Orleans Commercial Bulletin reported in July that “the manager who is to bring to this country on a starring tour Mr. Ira Aldridge, the coloured tragedian, finds a difficulty in getting a ‘leading lady’ to support him.” This was contradicted early in August in a more detailed account published in the New York Clipper:

The New York Times, without offering an opinion on the matter, said only, “We are curious to note his reception. His picture before us represents a full-blooded negro, with crinkly wool, flat nose, thick lips, and skin of the blackest hue, while the decorations on his breast prove him to be [the recipient of many distinguished awards]… . Thus balanced, he will appear before an American audience, and we doubt not the question of the day will be, ‘Have you seen Ira ALDRIDGE?’”

Aldridge's diary entries for April 8–10, 1867, reveal that he spent some of his time in London visiting old friends and associates, establishing contacts at the Italian Opera and Sadler's Wells, and calling at his family home at Luranah Villa. Before the end of that month he and Amanda were back in Paris, attending the Universal Exhibition. “Never had there been so resplendent an exhibition. There were 42,237 exhibitors—over three times as many as at the Crystal Palace [in 1851]—and the 11,000,000 visitors included two emperors and more than eighty other royal personages.”

On Tuesday, April 30, they happened to meet Hans Christian Andersen on the exhibition grounds, an event recorded in Andersen's autobiography:

However, Andersen was mistaken about Aldridge's appearance at the Odeon. Jackson C. Boswell has discovered that “not a single paper in Paris recorded his appearance in any scheduled performance in any of the various theaters of the city” during this period. Apparently despite Aldridge's success at Versailles a few months earlier, Kuschnick had been unable to arrange an engagement for him in the capital, which must have been a great disappointment to Aldridge, who had been longing to perform there for at least fifteen years, ever since his first Continental tour.

Instead, he started playing Othello in a few towns about one hundred fifty miles north of Paris near the Belgian border—first at Boulogne-sur-Mer on May 9, then at Roubaix and Lille the following week, in all of which he played his part with his accustomed vigor, even though he was supported by mediocre companies.

In the summer of 1852, when Aldridge was planning his first Continental tour, he had intended to make his debut in Paris with an experienced British company of actors and actresses he had recruited. Unfortunately, his arrangements with a theater there did not materialize, so he took his troupe to Brussels instead, and thereafter to Prussia and Germany, where he met with great success. However, in the years that followed, he retained a strong interest in performing in the French capital. Though he did occasionally receive tempting offers in the interim, it was not until November 1866 that he finally was able to fulfill his ambition of appearing before Parisian theatergoers.

But even this long-delayed satisfaction was spoiled to some extent for him, for he “searched in vain for a theater where he could show himself to the French public for the first time.” The best that could be done by the impresario handling his tour, Charles Joseph Kuschnick, who had been ridiculed in Le Figaro as a mahout (elephant- driver), was to arrange a performance for him for a single night, November 22, at the Grand Théâtre de Versailles that was preceded by a dinner for distinguished guests served in the dining room of Louis XV's mistress at the Hôtel des Réservoirs and followed by a “mouthwatering supper” in the same venue afterward. The guests included Alexandre Dumas père, the playwright Théodore Barriere, and about forty of the leading newspaper editors, theater critics, literary personalities, and caricaturists in Paris, all of whom had been conveyed to Versailles on a special train. This was a strategic ploy by Kuschnick, for it guaranteed extensive coverage on Aldridge in the press afterward. Some of these accounts were as much concerned with what happened at the banquet as with revealing what happened on the stage, but they at least gave Aldridge more exposure than he otherwise would have garnered in such a remote location.

Aldridge decided to spend the summer of 1858 in Britain, possibly for family reasons. His wife Margaret, at sixty years of age, was no longer a hardy traveler and had fallen ill in Pest. His eleven-year-old son Ira Daniel, who did not now accompany his parents on tour, had been enrolled at the Collegiate School of Camden Town, presumably as a boarding student, and he may have needed a home for the summer holidays. Also, Aldridge may have been feeling tired out and ready for a rest.

In early June London's Sunday Times announced that “Mr. Ira Aldridge has just returned to the metropolis after a most successful tour through the principal towns of Germany, Hungary, and Poland.” The report went on to describe his enthusiastic reception in these towns, the awards and testimonials he was given by resident royalty, especially in Saxe-Meiningen, and his induction as an honorary member of the Imperial and National Hungarian Histrionic Conservatorium in Pest and the Imperial Orphan Institution in Buda. “He returns again to the Continent by special engagement, after a lapse of a few months of repose and quiet.”

Aldridge was already busy seeking engagements for that next foreign tour, as this letter, written for him in German, attests:

While resting in London, Aldridge nonetheless was quite willing to do a few favors for his friends. Samuel Lane, the lessee of the Britannia in Hoxton, was planning to rebuild, remodel, and vastly enlarge his theater, and he asked Aldridge to participate in a farewell benefit for one of his actresses, Miss C. Borrow, on June 23, the last night before he closed his theater so refurbishment could begin.

On arriving in London, Aldridge learned that a fellow British actor had gone to Berlin to perform, taking along a professional “company of twenty-five actors and actresses, complete with a stock of costumes and scenery.” Curious to know how they were faring, Aldridge wrote to a friend there, Gebrüder (Brother) Kohn, asking for information on their reception:

Aldridge had good reason to be curious, for this rival Othello was not an ambitious amateur but rather Samuel Phelps, the actormanager who had run the Sadler's Wells Theatre for the past fifteen years, winning acclaim for having rescued it from degradation by improving its offerings and disciplining its audience. He had taken over the management in 1844, the year after passage of the Theatre Regulation Act, which had licensed all theaters in London and surrounding areas to act regular drama, a privilege that earlier had been reserved only for the city's patent theaters in the West End: Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and the Haymarket.

Phelps's first objective was to clean his house thoroughly, making it a fit place for elevated entertainment of the highest standard. In an essay published in Household Words in 1851, Charles Dickens had praised Phelps's complete transformation of this rather disreputable establishment: