A GLOBAL ODYSSEY: Logbook Five – Canadians Coming of Age in the Third World – The Story of CUSO in the 1960s

“Said the father to the double-seeing son, ‘Son, you are seeing double.’ ‘How can that be’, the son replied. ‘If that were so then I would see four

moons in the sky instead of two’”—An old Suffi Proverb

The Challenge of Preparing for Success in a Different Culture

The insightful Suffi proverb reminds us that preparation for success in another culture requires us to understand our own perceptions of the world. It should help us recognize that in preparing to function successfully in other communities, there is a need to build awareness both of the other culture and the unconscious elements that we carry in our minds about our own culture.

Becoming involved in designing and delivering orientations for CUSO volunteers was to serve as a powerful learning opportunity for me to develop and utilize these different levels of awareness.

My Early Involvement with CUSO Orientations

Besides my continuing contact with Bill McWhinney and other friends in the national CUSO group and my assistance in raising funds, my only direct involvement in CUSO’s work in the first half of the sixties was: (i) my involvement with the local committee at Western led by a noted political scientists, Dr. Peyton Lyon; and (ii) a brief involvement in a CUSO orientation at MacDonald College at McGill University in 1962.

I was surprised and somewhat uneasy in my participation in this early orientation in Montreal. To my mind the only rationale for my involvement was my summer spent in Nigeria with Crossroads in 1960. This hardly prepared me to function as some kind of African expert. Perhaps they were also taking into account that I was a high school teacher who had enjoyed serious involvement with many Africans through the African Students Foundation (ASF). In any case, the challenge of how best to prepare volunteers for their overseas assignment in a completely different culture was an ongoing concern for CUSO staff.

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Excerpt 31: My Expanded Involvement with CUSO – The Challenge of

Orientation

CUSO Orientation Staff in London, Ontario

LOGBOOK FIVE, Excerpt 31

So when I found myself at the Althouse College of Education in 1965 I began advocating that, as part of our international education interests, we should offer to design, develop and operate an orientation for CUSO volunteers that was more focused, both on their professional abilities (the majority were going as teachers but were untrained as educators) and on developing some informal sensitivity to the culture they were entering. In 1967 I suddenly found myself with the responsibility to organize a program to deal with such a challenge.

Notes on the Orientation We Designed

Organizing Opportunities for Teacher Training

We operated brief teacher training opportunities for those going as teachers. This required us to organize our own brief summer school held at my old place of work, Beck Collegiate. To our surprise we had no problems attracting some students to serve as guinea pigs. They came as volunteers partly to get some more mentoring in subjects, but mainly they said to meet young Canadians who were heading out to contribute in Africa. To our delight, the high school students expressed a desire to play some small role in helping the CUSO volunteers to do well in Africa.

By year two, amazingly, we were attracting over 1,000 interested high school volunteers for the 600 students we needed for our summer CUSO teacher training initiative.

Hiring Experts from the United Kingdom

I was surprised to find that I could engage top experts from the University of London who had extensive front-line educational leadership in the British colonies (two individuals, both named John Wilson). These two individuals were outstanding, caring individuals and represented, for me, examples of some of the best practices in colonial services. One of the reasons I could afford them was the restrictions UK citizens faced at that time in taking much money out of the country. Offering them a Canadian experience with modest fees paid in Canadian dollars, made our small program attractive to these outstanding individuals. It also led me to have an entry point into the prestigious University of London.

Finding Medical Personnel with Expertise in Africa

For medical personnel, we organized a special orientation on medical issues drawing on two prominent doctors, Sibley and Lenczner. Dr. Jack Sibley was the chair of the Crossroads Africa Board and a medical educator with extensive experience in Africa. Dr. Lenczner at that time ran at the Toronto General Hospital the only clinic in Canada specializing in tropical diseases. In this early stage of our country’s engagement with the continent of Africa, there was not a high demand for his services. However, the movement of hundreds of CUSO volunteers into Africa and

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LOGBOOK FIVE, Excerpt 31

the other Third World countries was starting to change that and most returning volunteers stopped at Lenczner’s clinic to get their health checked upon returning to Canada.

Language Instruction

We introduced the teaching of several West African languages using mainly grad students from Michigan State University whom I recruited. These grad students also played the lead role in introducing volunteers to various African cultures.

Some external critics suggested that our small attempt to teach African languages was a waste. In my mind we were doing this not because we expected most, if any, volunteers to get enough grounding to be immediately helpful for them to converse with non-English speakers. But I had come to realize particularly through my evolving interaction with Aboriginal communities in Canada that one’s language reflected the way one viewed the world. My hope was that an introduction to the underlying structure and context of the language of a different culture would help the CUSO volunteers see that the basic assumptions driving these persons might in some key ways be different from any assumptions of the world that these young Canadian volunteers.

My interaction with the language instructors was a fascinating learning experience for me. I began to recognize that the absence of certain concepts in a language reflected a significantly different world view (for example, the absence, in some languages of a concept of past, present and future—the lack of words to denote scientific determinism and the core idea of cause and effect). I also was introduced to the fact that some languages had been created through mixing different languages (Swahili in East Africa; Creole in Sierra Leone).

All this was fascinating to me and led me to add the topic of language and its impact on culture to my list of priority reading.

Recognizing Natural Leaders: Learning from Alfred Opubor

Our exploratory efforts to teach languages in order to surface cultural issues and a better understanding of different world views led me to have serious conversations with Alfred Opubor, the creative, insightful, sensitive Yoruba graduate student whom I selected to head this program.

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LOGBOOK FIVE, Excerpt 31

The role of being a director of a sizeable program (150 CUSO volunteers) with a staff to organize and lead was all new to me. Many different people helped me to learn this role and to develop the insights, the implementation skills and the relationship skills to make the program a success. No one played a more important role for me than Alfred.

Clearly, within his peer group of language and cultural instructors Alfred was a first among equals. I had made the right choice in seeing him as their leader. He helped me get over my initial uneasiness as to what kind of contract arrangements with the orientation staff would most likely lead to the outcomes we wanted and also be fair to all concerned. Out of these discussions Alfred and I ended up having serious conversations about cross-cultural negotiations and particularly negotiations between blacks and whites in the United States and between Africans and the Western donor agencies.

He focused initially on the constraints caused by insensitivities, potential prejudices and lack of awareness, which sometimes inhibit such negotiations. But the discussions that most influenced me were those related to acknowledging the power imbalance in most of these negotiations—with the power inevitably in the hands of the white negotiator. Alfred did not rant about these things—he calmly analyzed the realities in order to be better prepared to deal with them. He indicated his interest in exploring these issues with me as he felt I was trying hard to be fair in negotiating with him and that I was eager to position our relationship as one of equals.

He pointed out to me that the power balance even within our orientation was still in my hands whether or not I was consciously aware of it and whether or not I was eager to apply my power. As a professor with a secure appointment and salary, I was negotiating with graduate students struggling to earn enough to finish their degrees. He was helping me to recognize that, regardless of the desire of the two of us to operate as equals, the basic power relationship was not in balance. It was another good learning experience for me.

Alfred and I became good friends. I introduced him to John Hart, head of Western’s young Computer Science Department. John was an instinctive innovator and collaborator who was initiating some breakthrough efforts in using computers to teach Chinese to Westerners and to help capture the Inuktitut language of the Inuit. John introduced me to the fact that the Inuit were going to engage in a

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Professor Alfred Opubor

John Hart

LOGBOOK FIVE, Excerpt 31

breakthrough innovation in cross-cultural communication using the Anik satellite. I was later to have a small role in this exciting project.

John was a creative technologist with a respect for relationships, individual learning and cross- cultural sensitivities. He was eager to get Alfred interested in working on how best to utilize computer technologies in Africa. Alfred felt it was far too soon to consider this type of work. John , on the other hand, argued that if left alone, Western technologists would embed IT technology in African cultures and these technologies would be driven by Western values, a Western view of the world and Western approaches to learning—and these might not always be what served African needs.

As for Alfred, he returned to work at our orientation for several years and we kept in touch for some time. He was successful in becoming the first African to get a PhD in communications and was one of the first generation of specialists in Africa in the field of communications as a behavioral scientist. Upon his return to Nigeria he became the head of the Department of Mass Communication at the University of Lagos before moving to take on a number of leadership roles. He was the founding chairman of the Board of the News Agency of Nigeria and information and training adviser at the Pan African News Agency (PANA) in Dakar, Senegal. In 1986 he established Multimedia, a private communications consulting company in Nigeria, focusing on training for media, private sector and government institutions and development agencies.

From 1990 to 1998 Alfred served as Senior Technical Advisor in Information, Education and Communication with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), covering twenty countries in eastern, western and southern Africa.

He was from 2003 to 2007 the Coordinator of the World Bank/Norwegian Trust Fund-supported by the ADEA Working Group on Communication for Education and Development. He was a Board member of Inter-Press, an international news agency and Trustee of the Wole Soyinka Award for Investigative Journalism. Recently he was the Secretary General (CEO) of the West African News-media and Development Centre (WANAD).

Alfred also wrote several books, including one that anyone teaching English in West Africa should use as a resource. The title is: Four African Languages.

Early in December of 2011, I got word of his death at 74 years on December 2. The press release on his death ended with these words.

“Africa has lost a visionary, an incredible human being whose dream was to see Africa become the centre of excellence. He championed education as his life’s mission and his ideas have changed the perception of Africa.”

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LOGBOOK FIVE, Excerpt 31

His death sparked some email exchanges among several of my old colleagues from CUSO days, both African and Canadian. Ian Smillie reminded us of Alfred’s strong ethical approach to life and wrote:

“Alfred leaves a big footprint. He was a real inspiration in my formative years. I remember when he returned to Nigeria from Michigan, importing his Triumph Stag and paying 100 percent duty on it when a small bribe would have got it in for much less. He said that many Nigerians couldn’t avoid corruption because they couldn’t afford to. He said, ‘I at least can afford to be clean.’”

I fondly remember my interactions with Alfred and proudly position him as one of my leadership heroes.

Making Volunteers Aware of Racist Realities in Canada

In shaping the content of our orientation, I did not feel it was appropriate to send a group of idealistic white Canadian volunteers into countries just emerging from colonial rule without helping them to better understand some of the racial realities in our own country.

So I took some steps at that orientation to prod them to create this awareness. I opened a spot in the program for this type of conversation and eventually engaged three powerful activists in the field:

Alan Borovy—the human rights activist who, at this time, was creating the Canadian Civil Liberties Union, which he proudly and successfully led for several decades.

Michael Adams—gathering and sharing data about the realities of the education, health and poverty deficits among Aboriginals.

Rocky Jones—Canada’s Stokely Carmichael (the Canadian media had labelled him), who at our orientation, pushed the mostly white volunteers mercilessly about their racist attitudes. He was doing this with the conscious intent of getting them to not accept the guilt he was projecting on them, but to have the courage to engage with him in meaningful discussions on black-white relationships in Canada.

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LOGBOOK FIVE, Excerpt 31

All three individuals added greatly to our orientation program and I was later to cross paths several times with Alan Borovy through my interactions with our country’s first Human Rights Commissioner, Dr. Dan Hill Sr. Alan was the young lawyer who had worked on many of the human rights challenges that Dan Hill and his wife had initiated (see Logbook Three, Excerpt 19).

It is my interactions with Rocky Jones, however that stand out in my memory of this part of our orientation programme Rocky was a charismatic individual, impressive in flowing African robes and

persuasive in his challenging stories about black-white relations in Canada. These were based strongly on his own experiences in Nova Scotia and in Toronto where he lived briefly as a teenager, and where his profound political awakening occurred. His consciousness raising came partly through lively discussions with social activists in bars and coffee shops and partly through meeting and marrying Joan, whose commitment to equality was well developed.

In 1965 Rocky had gone to the United States with the Student Union for Peace Action. Shortly after that his public image developed suddenly after a Toronto Star article on an anti-U.S. racism demonstration downtown dubbed him Canada’s own Stokely Carmichael. Jones responded laughingly to this label with the comment, “And I didn’t know shit from shineola, the press in Canada wanted to have a black militant that they could relate to. And I filled the bill.”

On his return to Halifax, the impatient crusader among other activities founded the Kwacha (Freedom) Club, a group of 50 or so blacks, roughly aged 15 to 25, to which he taught his philosophy of social reform.

Around the city and throughout the province, Jones—resplendent with his traditional African clothing, his Vandyke like, Malcolm X beard—gave impassioned speeches with dire undertones. With one glare through his large dark-rimmed glasses he terrified many whites in Halifax. Certainly the authorities took him seriously. The national press could not resist him either. Rocky brilliantly turned this attention to his advantage by exploiting a fundamentally unsophisticated media to deliver his messages and help alter the national consciousness.

At our orientation, Rocky chose to play his role as the ‘Revolutionary Black Power Person,’ challenging the whites in a way that was totally unfamiliar to them, drawing on some of his old Halifax speeches.

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Alan Borovy

Burnley Allan "Rocky" Jones

LOGBOOK FIVE, Excerpt 31

“You whites who merely mouth the words of sympathy, while asking us to wait just a little while longer, rank no higher in my estimation than the white bastards who so very methodically put the bullets through the heads of young black children. There is much to be done, but the door to freedom has been thrown open wide. I’m going to sing—no! I’m going to shout. I’m going to demand freedom now!”

Then he would walk over to me and ask seriously, “Don how far do I have to push these young white CUSO volunteers before they find the courage to push back and defend their culture?” Rocky went on to enjoy an influential life as an activist lawyer and was particularly proud of the face that he was able to get one of his activist cases in front of the Supreme Court and to argue the case in front of that impressive body.

Mid-Orientation Crisis : The Biafra War

Part way through the orientation we faced a crisis because of the Civil War underway in Nigeria. CUSO had volunteers in all parts of that country and a sizeable group in the Eastern Region. Many of the volunteers in our orientation program were scheduled to work there. But now the East was fighting to break away from the Federation and establish itself as the independent nation of Biafra. Halfway through our program the new Nigerian

program was cancelled.

For a comprehensive and insightful account of the Nigerian Civil War and its impact on CUSO volunteers and on public attitudes in Canada, please read Chapter 5, Where’s Biafra? in the book on CUSO by one of those 1967 volunteers, Ian Smillie, (The Land of Lost Content,1985). Smillie reminds us that the Nigerian Civil War, which began in June 1967 and ended in January 1970, up to that point in time “was the most monstrous and destructive man-made event to take place in post-colonial Africa. It cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, pitted African nations against one another and set back the development of Africa’s most populous country by a generation” (p.57).

The sudden cancellation of the Nigeria CUSO program understandably might have led to us sending home all the volunteers preparing to go to Nigeria, but that was not the spirit of CUSO. So instead we sent John Baigant to West Africa while the orientation was underway. His Challenge was to seek out new options for placing these volunteers somewhere in West Africa that summer. John was a returned volunteer and assistant director working with me on the orientation.

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John Baigant

Orientation – Inside the Resource Centre

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The Nigeria-bound participants continued in their program with the others with very little apparent anger or frustration and instead eagerly reviewed the daily cables from John as he quickly found new assignments for them in Ghana and Sierra Leone. The planned intake of sixty-five CUSO volunteers to Nigeria in 1967 was directed to other countries. This volunteer crisis related to the Biafran war was handled well by our team at the orientation. But I was to confront another major crisis over the war with volunteers in Nigeria once I took up my surprise post as Regional Director.

Sending the Volunteers by RCAF Hercules

The volunteers from our first orientation in London, Ontario headed off to West Africa in 1967from Downsview Air Base in Toronto on RCAF Hercules flights. Canada’s unusual position in international affairs made it possible for us to use military planes to move our volunteers without stirring up any negative reactions.

Soon after the volunteers left I had to organize a similar departure for me and my family on a commercial flight to Accra with a week-long stop at the University of London and a brief visit to Paris and Rome. Here I would reconnect with the two Wilsons who had worked at our orientation. They would help me experience a quite different approach to university teaching than the one I was starting to familiarize myself with at Western University.

This was the start of another major phase in my evolving Global Odyssey. I was so pleased that on this, my third visit to Africa, we were going as a family.

LET THE JOURNEY CONTINUE!

Contact: dsimpson@innovationexpedition.com

Visit: www.donaldsimpson.ca

Note: An extensive collection of archival resources from Don Simpson’s global odyssey has been organized professionally by the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collection at York University, Toronto. They are available for public use. (See “Don Simpson Fonds”)

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