CAAS - About Library

Lemuel Johnson, Ph.D.

A native of Sierre Leone, West Africa, Lemuel A. Johnson, Ph.D. was an outstanding scholar, professor and poet. In 1960, Professor Johnson earned the highest marks in all of West Africa on the Cambridge University High School Certificate examinations. He receive an A.B. degree from Oberlin College in 1965, an M.A. degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1966 and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan in 1968. He joined the University of Michigan in 1968 and directed the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies from 1985-1991.

He held visiting appointments at the Colegio de Mexico, Mexico City and at the University of Sierra Leone, the Salzberg Seminar, and Oberlin College. He was elected president of the African Literature Association (1977-78) and vice president of the Association of Caribbean Studies (1983-85) and served on the Social Science Research Council’s Africa Committee (1985-1990). His honors included a Steelcase Research Professorship at the Institute for the Humanities, a Faculty Recognition Award, A Recognition Award for Afroamerican and African Studies and a Certificate of Distinction for Outstanding Teaching.

As a leading scholar of the African Diaspora, Professor Johnson was especially interested in American, Latin American, Caribbean and African literature. He authored numerous articles and published two books of scholarly criticism, The Devil, the Gargoyle and the Buffoon: The Negro as Metaphor in Western Literatures (1970) and Shakespeare in Africa and Other Venues: Import and the Appropriation of Culture (19989) and a translation into English from the Spanish of Rafael Alberti’s play, Night and War in the Prado Museum (1969). He was also the author of the much-acclaimed Sierra Leone Trilogy (1995), which comprised three volumes of poetry. At the time of his death, he had essentially completed a seventh book to be titled Private Parts and Public Bodies: The Experience of Sexuality in African Literature. Professor Johnson’s scholarly interests ranged over the globe, and he was fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and German, as well as Krio, his national language and Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo.

Professor Johnson was a demanding, committed and charismatic teacher deeply concerned with preparing his students to live in and to appreciate the diversity and complexity of human experience on a global scale, and with “detoxifying (as he called it) the noxious consequences of racialist thought and imaginings. Descended from mutinous and rebellious slaves who found their way back to African from the Americas and others taken off intercepted slave ships and resettled in Freetown, Professor Johnson was ever an advocate for human liberty and human dignity for people of all races, all genders and all creeds.