Jane Bryce was born in 1951 in Lindi, Tanzania, and grew up in Moshi under the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. Her father worked for a United Nations agency during the final years before independence.
Those East African years, she says, shaped her sense of belonging long before she understood what the word meant. At 13, she was sent to boarding school in England. “As far as I was concerned, I was African, born, bred, and educated,” she later wrote.
After Tanzania’s Africanisation policy was introduced in 1967, following the Arusha Declaration under President Julius Nyerere—the country’s first post-independence leader—her father was deported. The policy aimed to replace foreign officials and professionals with Tanzanian nationals as part of Nyerere’s drive for self-reliance. Intended to return control to citizens after colonial rule, it also forced many expatriates to leave. A year later, Bryce’s mother died. “That was when the world tilted,” she said. “Everything that had seemed permanent disappeared.”
The upheaval ended her African childhood but left its landscape indelible—the red earth, the acacia trees, the mountain fixed in her mind.
Bryce read English at Oxford and earned a master’s degree at Essex. In her thirties, she returned to Africa for a doctorate at Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria. Between 1983 and 1988, she researched Nigerian women’s writing and contributed cultural pieces to Lagos magazines. “Nigeria gave me a way to think about what I had lost,” she recalled. “It was the first time I understood what exile meant.”
In 1992, Bryce moved to Barbados to live, as she put it, “the African diaspora experience.” At the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, she began teaching African literature and film. To her dismay, she discovered that many of her students imagined Africa as either romantic or remote—and set out to challenge those ideas. “You have to start by undoing the myths that come alive the moment you mention the continent,” she said.
By 2009, Bryce was Professor of African Literature and Cinema. She helped launch the Barbados Festival of African and Caribbean Film and later curated the island’s selections for the Africa World Documentary Film Festival. At UWI, she co-founded Poui: The Cave Hill Journal of Creative Writing, editing it for two decades and mentoring emerging writers.
Her daughter was born in Barbados the same year she arrived. She later married Vincentian poet and scholar Philip Nanton. Their verandah on the island’s west coast became a salon for writers. “We meet to share work and ideas—banana bread, Banks beer, and rum,” she said.
Before academia, Bryce worked as an arts journalist in London during the 1980s, writing about West Indian culture and Caribbean books. She still writes, she says, “to make complicated things readable.”
Bryce’s feminist work began in Nigeria, where she studied writers such as Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta. Novels like Nwapa’s Efuru, she noted, showed that African women were not defined by submission but by agency and survival.
Her short-story collection Chameleon and Other Stories (2007) draws on her East African past. “I wanted to write about the complexities of race relations,” she said, “and the tension between being separate and wanting to belong.”
In Zamani: A Haunted Memoir of Tanzania (2023), she returned to her birthplace. “There are different kinds of belonging,” she wrote. “There’s the kind that comes with a passport, and there’s a kind of helpless, spiritual attachment.” The book traces memory through history—its title drawn from the Swahili word zamani, meaning “the sea of time.”
Bryce has judged the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment, the Guyana Prize for Literature, and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Writing, chairing its fiction panel in 2019. She describes her work as “contributing to a body of knowledge and fiction from an African perspective that sees Africa as part of the modern world.”
Now in her seventies, Bryce looks back across Tanzania, England, Nigeria, and Barbados and sees not exile but connection. “It’s not about where you were born,” she once said. “It’s about the places that continue to live in you.”
Jane Bryce’s life and writing suggest that belonging is not fixed but fluid—an inheritance carried across continents through memory, imagination, and an abiding love for Africa, the continent of her birth.
