Home

Extended Biography

Education

Teaching History

Professional Experience

Publications

Conference Presentations

Honors and Awards

Professional Affiliations

Sample Syllabus

Extended Biography

      Ernest Cole was born in the east end of Freetown, Sierra Leone, to James Michael Cole and Evelyn Tunde Cole. His father, a retired Pharmacist, is a devout Catholic, a Knight in the Order of St. John and currently, President of the St. Vincent De Paul Society in Sierra Leone. His mother, a retired Nurse, is also actively engaged in the Mother’s Union Organization in her church. Ernest is the last of three children; his elder sister, Selina Cole, in line with the family tradition, is also a Nurse at the central hospital in Freetown, and elder brother, James Cole, works at the Special Courts Commission.

      Ernest attended the Wellington Municipal Primary School and later the Methodist Boys' High School, where he did both the Ordinary and Advanced levels General Certificate of Education Examinations. In June 1986, he left the Methodist Boys' High School for Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone where he pursued the Bachelor of Arts program in English and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts Honors degree in English Language and Literature in 1990. In that same year, he joined the teaching staff of the English Department at Fourah Bay College as Research Teaching Assistant, a position he held till September 1994 when he graduated with a Master of Arts degree in African Literature and was promoted to Assistant Lecturer.

      At the outbreak of the civil war in Sierra Leone, he and his wife, having been married for only 9 months, left for The Gambia, a neighboring country in West Africa. There, he took up appointment at The Gambia College, as Senior Lecturer and Head of English. At the commencement of the University of The Gambia, he was appointed Lecturer in the Department of English in September 2000.
In 2003, he embarked on a Ph.D. program in English in Post-Colonial Literature at the University of Connecticut, and graduated in 2008. He worked on the interregnum as motif of disillusionment in Post-Apartheid South African literature. He is married to Everetta Cole, a graduate of the Institute of Library Science, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone and currently a student at Hope College, Michigan. They have two daughters, Ernesta and Tunde Cole.

      Ernest has two favorite writers, the Kenyan writer, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Frantz Fanon, from Martinique, both exemplary scholars in the field of Post-Colonial literature. Two of their works Decolonizing the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature and Black Skin White Masks have contributed immensely in shaping his world view and sense of self.

      He is also indebted to Dr. Oumar Cherif Diop of Kennesaw State University, Georgia, and Dr. Eleni Coundouriotis, at the University of Connecticut, who both encouraged him to dream.

      Ernest is interested in black liberation music especially South African Jazz and is a huge fan of Hugh Masekela, Abdullah Ibrahim, and Miriam Makeba. He also loves listening to Jamaican reggae, Afro-beat of Fela Kuti and thinks Emerson is perhaps the best singer to have come out of his native Sierra Leone.