by Florence Mugambi
Hannah Abeodu Bowen-Jones died on July 9, 2023. Bowen-Jones was the first PhD in African history at Northwestern. Her 1962 dissertation was entitled “The Struggle for Political and Cultural Unification in Liberia, 1847–1930.” She was also the first Liberian woman to obtain a doctorate. She completed her BA in history at Cuttington College in 1956 and then came to Northwestern on a Liberian government scholarship. After graduating from Northwestern University, she returned home and joined the faculty of the University of Liberia, where her colleagues nicknamed her “the Department of History” because she was the staff’s only Liberian with a doctorate and its only professor of history. Later, she completed postdoctoral study at the Rehovot Institute of Development Planning and Implementation in Rehovot, Israel, and taught at the Liberian Foreign Service Institute and the B. W. Harris Episcopal School. She also taught at Chicago State University, from which she retired in 2015.
Bowen-Jones belonged to the generation of African scholars who reframed the writing of African history in the 1960s. She was the director of UNESCO’s oral history research on Liberia (1968–1972), and from 1980–1990 served as a member of UNESCO’s Institute Committee that drafted the eight-volume General History of Africa. She founded the Historical Society of Liberia and served as a visiting professor on Oxford University’s Round Table from 2005–2010. Bowen-Jones also authored and collaborated on several historical studies and books on Liberia. She coedited The Official Papers of William V.S. Tubman, President of the Republic of Liberia: Covering Addresses, Messages, Speeches, and Statements 1960-1967 (1968), coauthored the Liberia entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica with Svend Holsoe and Donald Rahl Petterson. She also authored the chapter on Liberia in J. F. A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder’s second volume of History of West Africa (1973).
Besides her academic career, Bowen-Jones served Liberia in two administrations. From 1975–1978, she was the only woman on President William R. Tolbert Jr.’s cabinet, where she served as the Minister for Postal Affairs and Telecommunications (1976–1977), and Minister for Health and Social Welfare (1977–1978). During the next decade, she served as a member of the constitutional commission of Liberia in 1981 and as the country’s ambassador to the UN from 1981–1985. During her service at the UN, she was the vice president of the General Assembly in 1983.
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Florence Mugambi is a Librarian for African Studies and Economics at Northwestern.