Christopher Fyfe

Fyfe was active in the arts scene in Edinburgh. He helped preserve Old Town from motorway development that would have cut through the historic architecture. He died in London in 2008, aged 87.

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.

Following the publication of his book, Fyfe took up a lectureship at the University of Edinburgh in 1962, at the newly founded Centre of African Studies. He became a reader in 1964, retaining this position until his retirement in 1991. The bicentenary of Freetown was celebrated in 1987 with an international, interdisciplinary conference, at which Fyfe was honoured as a father of the Krio cultural revival.

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.

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.