Ernestyna Skurjat-Kozek, a long-time employee of Warsaw African studies program, has passed away
24 10 2024
On the night of October 19-20, 2024, Ernestyna Skurjat-Kozek passed away in Sydney.
Skurjat-Kozek Ernestyna, PhD in sociology of literature, graduate of Polish philology (UAM 1968) and Postgraduate African Studies Program (diploma thesis entitled Protest Literature in the Republic of South Africa). In 1979, she defended her doctoral thesis entitled The Rights and Obligations of the New Nigerian Elite in the Light of English-Language Novel Writing in the 1960s (supervisor: Prof. Andrzej Zajączkowski). She worked at the Institute of African Studies in the years 1970-1979. She was the editor of a series of scripts for experts of Polservice; a total of 21 scripts were published, including her own Africa in the Works of Its Writers. She was a member of the group organizing the first African Academic Expedition (AWA 1972-73). It was finally decided that the expedition would have a male composition; therefore, she traveled alone around Nigeria as a scholarship holder, implementing her own program. Thanks to her travels around Nigeria, she wrote many of her reports published in the national press. She received the award of the President of the Polish Radio and Television Committee for co-authoring a radio play based on correspondence with the South African poet Isaac Ramoppo, who lived in exile in Nigeria in the 1960s and 1970s. After the reorganization of the African Institute in the late 1970s, she was assigned to the Department of African Languages and Cultures at the Institute of Oriental Studies at the University of Warsaw. From there, in October 1981, she went to Nigeria again in order to collect materials for her habilitation thesis. A few weeks after arriving in Nigeria, it turned out that martial law had been introduced in Poland, which complicated further plans. In Nigeria, in the city of Enugu, she got a job as a journalist at the newly established television station Anambra TV Channel 50, where she spent three years. Then she was offered a one-year contract as a visiting professor at the University of Ile Ife (western Nigeria), where she had the opportunity to work alongside Professor Wole Soyinka, later winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. After finishing her work in Nigeria, she moved to Australia. She worked there in radio and television, and since 2006 she has devoted herself to activities promoting the cultural heritage of T. Kościuszko and P.E. Strzelecki. She was the long-term president of Kosciuszko Heritage Inc.
(In the photo: E. Skurjat during her doctoral defense, 1978)