Samuel HM Jones

Samuel Horton Maurice Jones , commonly known as Sam Jones (born 1923 in Bathurst ; † December 24, 2017 in Great Britain), was a Gambian educator , civil servant, diplomat and columnist.

Life

Origin and education

Jones went to Bathurst Methodist Boys' High School (now Banjul) and then to Achimota College in Ghana. In England he attended the University of Exeter and then the London Institute of Education . He was one of the first Gambians to be awarded a British Commonwealth Scholarship in the 1940s when he was sent to the UK to study.

Working as an educator

After returning to Gambia, he worked as a teacher in elementary schools from 1944 to 1947. From 1952 to 1960 he taught at the Methodist Boys' High School in Bathurst. Later, when the British were convinced that independence was inevitable for the Gambia, Jones was among the few Gambian graduates selected for careers in the civil service. From 1960 he was an education officer at the Ministry of Education and delegated to the World Federation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession .

Work as a civil servant and diplomat

During the colonial period in 1962 he was the representative of Gambia in London; so he was one of the pioneers of Gambian diplomacy. He opened what is now the Gambian High Commission in London and spent 15 months in this office until he was recalled as Director of Education at the end of 1963. He was the first Gambier to hold this office. He became Deputy Minister (Permanent Secretary Ministry) to the Minister of Education in 1966. Together with his boss, the education minister Paul L. Baldeh , he worked on the definition of the first education policy in 1964/66, which established the technical secondary schools. When the students of the Gambia College protested in 1964 and the Gambian teachers began their first and so far only nationwide strike in 1966, he helped resolve the problems amicably. Jones also served as President of the Gambia Teachers' Union at times .

In 1970 he retired from the Gambia public service to take over the management of the London office of the West African Examination Council (WAEC). He stayed there for more than a decade. He was one of the pioneers who founded WAEC in 1953. After Gambia's independence, Jones was Deputy Financial Secretary in the Treasury.

Work as a columnist and writer

Jones has also worked as a writer, columnist, and church historian. As early as 1952, he wrote articles for Gambian newspapers and at that time published the first Gambian book review in the Gambia Echo newspaper in Bathurst. He published his pithy and, in the opinion of historian Hassoum Ceesay, well-written articles in the local press on issues of national interest until the late 1990s, when pro-government officials vandalized his house in Fajara after he published a criticism of the excesses of the regime at the time would have. In 1983 he published a brief history of the Anglican Church in Gambia.

He and his wife Mary Letitia Jones moved back to the UK, where he died in 2017.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Ralph Uwachue (Ed.): Africa Who's Who . 3. Edition. Africa Books Ltd., 1996, ISBN 0-903274-21-3 , pp. 669 .
2. ^ ^{A b} Samuel Horton Maurice Jones. In: gazette-news.co.uk. January 23, 2018, accessed September 19, 2019 .  
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Hassoum Ceesay: SHM Jones (1923–2017) Gambian pioneer civil servant, diplomat and educationist. In: standard.gm. January 24, 2018. Retrieved September 19, 2019 (American English).  
4. ↑ A flashback into the past by Alh Ba Musa Tarawale. In: thepoint.gm. May 14, 2014, accessed September 19, 2019 .