Christopher Fyfe

Christopher Fyfe (9 November 1920 – 26 August 2008) was a Scottish historian most noted for his work on Sierra Leone in West Africa.

Christopher Hamilton Fyfe was born in England in 1920 to a family of Scottish ancestry. His father moved to Ontario, Canada, where he became principal of Queen's University. The family subsequently moved to Aberdeen, where his father served a similar role at Aberdeen University.

Fyfe graduated from Gordonstoun School and entered University College, Oxford. His studies were interrupted by a spell in the Army during World War II as a gunner. After graduating from college, he became a school teacher in Düsseldorf, West Germany.

In 1950 Fyfe was invited by his brother-in-law, who was with the colonial secretariat in Freetown, to organise the Sierra Leonean archives. After two years as the government archivist, preserving and classifying precious documents, and teaching assistants, he returned to England. There he lived first in London, then Bristol and Belfast.

Fyfe spent ten years working on his seminal History of Sierra Leone (1962). He modelled his 852-page text on James Joyce's novel Ulysses, writing it as a single block of text. When the publisher demanded chapters, Fyfe inserted numbered breaks.

In his masterwork, Fyfe explored the history of the Creole (Krio people) of Sierra Leone, celebrating their role as "the unrecognised vehicle by which not only British rule but trade, education, and Christianity, were conveyed to west Africa". His work stimulated scholars from Sierra Leone, who studied the Creoles specifically. They later adopted a new identity as the Krio people, marking their sense of ethnicity.

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