I'm Dennis Duerden

After Oxford University and national service, Dennis Duerden, who has died aged 78, became an education officer in the Nigerian colonial service, thus beginning a lifetime’s passion for West African culture. He had an inexhaustible interest in people, ideas, and art; friends met in Africa in the 1950s, among them the writer Wole Soyinka and the potter Michael Cardew, remained close to him.

In 1956 Duerden became assistant curator at the Jos museum, in central Nigeria, learning firsthand from writers and artists about the culture, arts and crafts of the area. Back in Britain, he became director of the Hausa service of the BBC World Service and, in the 1960s, established the transcription centre, where he built up a tape archive of interviews with African writers. Some can be found in the 1972 book, African Writers Talking, which he edited with Cosmo Pieterse. A few weeks before Duerden’s death, the British Library completed the digitization of these tapes as part of their African Writers’ Club collection, making them available online. The transcription center also published the influential Cultural Events in Africa and introduced the work of African writers, artists, and musicians to the London scene.