On July 1, Peter Nazareth, a writer, professor and critic, ended his teaching career of nearly five decades at the University of Iowa . Des...
On July 1, Peter Nazareth, a writer, professor and critic, ended his teaching career of nearly five decades at the University of Iowa. Despite having spent the bulk of his life as an educator, Nazareth had also worked as a bureaucrat in Uganda, where he was born to Goan parents in 1940.
His experience in the Idi Amin administration in the early-1970s led to him writing the novel, In a Brown Mantle (1972), which prophesied the expulsion of Asians from Uganda. In part, this led to Nazareth’s own departure from his birth country.
While he was a college student at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, Nazareth met Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o who became a lifelong friend. Before he departed from Uganda with his family, Nazareth obtained a graduate degree at Leeds University. However, it was not England to which the Nazareth family would migrate but the United States.
In 1973, Peter Nazareth accepted the Seymour Lustman Fellowship at Yale University, after which he was a Fellow of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He went on to become a professor there, Chair of African American World Studies in 1991-1992, and advisor to the International Writing Program.
As a littérateur who crosses the boundaries between fiction-writing...
