The Transcription Centre, circa 1962-1977

The Transcription Centre began its brief but significant life in February 1962 under the direction of Dennis Duerden (1927-2006), producing and distributing radio programs for and about Africa. Duerden was a graduate of Queen’s College, Oxford and had served as principal of the Government Teachers’ College at Keffi, Nigeria and later as producer of the Hausa Service of the BBC. As an artist and educator with experience in West Africa, as well as a perceptive critic of African art he was a natural in his new post.

The Transcription Centre was created with funding provided initially by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) to foster non-totalitarian cultural values in sub-Saharan Africa in implicit opposition to Soviet-encouraged committed political attitudes among African writers and artists. Much of the CCF’s funding and goals were subsequently revealed to have come from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. The stress between the CCF’s presumed wish to receive value for their investment in the Transcription Centre and Duerden’s likely belief that politically-based programming would alienate the very audience it sought permeated his activities throughout his years with the radio service.

The center’s first effort in broadcasting was Africa Abroad, a fifteen-minute weekly program of interviews and news edited by Lewis Nkosi, a South African expatriate journalist and scholar. Africa Abroad was produced from 1962 through 1966, along with other occasional programming. In the years between 1966 and 1970 programs were funded by and produced for Deutsche Welle in Germany. African Writers Talking, a collection of interviews conducted between 1962 and 1968 and edited by Duerden and Cosmo Pieterse, was published in 1972 by Heinemann.

Beginning in 1964 a mimeographed periodical, Cultural Events in Africa, was published, carrying news items of cultural activities in Africa. As the Transcription Centre’s activities wound down in the mid-1970s, Cultural Events was for a time produced at the African Studies Centre of the University of Cambridge, with publication eventually ceasing in 1975, the year the Transcription Centre closed its final home in London at 6 Paddington Street.

Over the dozen years of its active existence under Duerden’s management, the Transcription Centre enjoyed the services of a remarkable array of writers and scholars, including Frene Ginwala, Alex La Guma, John Nagenda, Lewis Nkosi, Donatus Nwoga, Cosmo Pieterse, Richard Rive, Andrew Salkey, and Robert Serumaga.

From the guide to the The Transcription Centre Records, 1931-1986 (bulk 1960-1977), (The University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center)