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Remembering B.W. Andrzejewski: Poland's Somali Genius
Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warm death after life, does greatly please.
Edmund Spenser
On 1 December 1994, Bogumil Witalis Andrzejewski (familiarly and affectionately known as Goosh by friends and admirers) died at the age of 72 after a distinguished literary career. His death ended the remarkable life of a man who began with so little and achieved so much. This mild-mannered scholar, who lived to become the world's greatest authority on Cushitic languages and literature and whose pioneering scholastic method revolutionized the study of oral literature on both sides of the Atlantic, was catapulted by fate across continents to belong, improbably, to three rather different countries: his native Poland, which he had fled in early youth in circumstances akin to the apocalypse; the England of his prime life that gave him an education, a job and a devoted wife; and the Somalia of his professional life that brought out the full play of his academic genius. In view of his turbulent beginning and later versatility, Goosh may well have approved of the above lines from Edmund Spenser which were "cut in the stone that was raised on the tomb of Joseph Conrad" (Zabel 1), another remarkable Pole whose biography by Zdzislaw Najder (Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle) includes a chapter that bears the title of "Poland's English Genius", thus inspiring the titular variation of this piece.
Like Conrad, Goosh was a man who strove -- and triumphed -- against the buffeting waves of destiny. Born in Poznan, Poland, on 1 February 1922, his father was a skin and fur merchant of lower-middle-class means. His mother hailed from a landowning family that nevertheless lost their property and peace by the turn of the century, no doubt owing to the Poles' seemingly hopeless and perversely perennial insurrections against Czarist Russia. (Parenthetically, Conrad's family too knew its share of plunder by Czarists, bringing to mind the Poles' proverb of an almost existential nature: "God almighty is in heaven, the Pope is in the Vatican, but the Russians are across the bridge!")
Goosh's mother fell ill when he was seven and died in 1939 when he was seventeen. The person in his family who appears to have had the...