Out of Africa
That makes more sense than you would think if you only knew Lewis as a white Englishman, an Oxford graduate, an English professor and a longtime Charleston resident.
Yet his whole career harks back to Africa. As does he.
Lewis is known worldwide as a professor of African and Third World literature, a widely published author on East and South African literature, editor of an international poetry journal, leader of a College group connecting the history of the Lowcountry to West Africa and president of the global African Literature Association.
Born and raised on a farm in England, Lewis moved with his family to South Africa for nine years until he graduated from high school. Horrified by the racist apartheid system and soaked in the literature of the continent, he headed to Oxford to study English literature and took every opportunity to delve into South African writers, white and Black, who salted their works with the roiling politics of the time.
“That was exciting to me, and still is,” he says. “I have a hard time switching off my political side when I teach. I think students are befuddled when I assign a novel and get up on my hind legs and give a history lesson.”
Two years of teaching English in Tanzania convinced Lewis that he was meant to study, promote and teach world literature, so he headed to the University of Florida for a doctorate, thus beginning his American adventure.
College of Charleston has been his sole professorial home – and, as the entry point linking the African continent to colonial America, Charleston suits him. Lewis can never forget that Africans were dragged to Charleston involuntarily before much of their history and culture was erased. He has spent his career helping restore it.
Charleston won’t be home for long, though. After 30 years of teaching, he just retired and plans to move closer to his children with his wife.
Though mostly self-taught in African literature, Lewis is admired across the nation in his discipline. Having joined the African Literature Association in his first year at CofC, Lewis brought the organization’s annual conference to Charleston, the birthplace of African America. That was in 2013, the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Already a blockbuster gathering, the conference took a turn when attendees learned that acclaimed Nigerian author Chinua Achebe – considered the Shakespeare of modern African literature – had died in Boston. During the conference, Lewis and his team pivoted to honor and remember Achebe, a man admired and befriended by most of the attendees.
A decade after the rousing success of the conference, Lewis was invited to the ALA executive board and later served as president. He still can’t fathom it.
“I had no aspiration to leadership because there are actual African scholars, as opposed to an Englishman like me, with much greater right to do this,” he says.
But few would agree with that modest assessment.
“Simon’s the kind of teacher who would talk about his own background and how it shaped his interests and worldview with his class,” says Scott Peeples, a fellow English professor who shared an office with Lewis in their early days at CofC. “His courses really open his students’ eyes to the experiences of Africans and non-Western people in general.”