But Time did not report some other important facts: that the Volunteers’ mastery of Twi was woeful; that few of them, if any, would use much Twi again; that Twi, the sole language taught in training, was only one of the three main indigenous languages of Ghana; and that most Volunteers would live in secondary school compounds that were isolated from Ghanian communities. In many ways, the first Ghana project would prove a model Peace Corps program, but there would always be a tension between what the Volunteers did in Ghana and what the American public thought they did.
Someone in Washington had started things off on the wrong foot in June by sending telegrams inviting these applicants to a Peace Corps teaching project in “Chana.” At least one Volunteer’s parents fretted that the Peace Corps intended to ship their daughter off to a godless Communist country in Asia. The mistake was straightened out after some phone calls to Washington, and the Volunteers soon showed up on the campus of the University of California in Berkeley for seven weeks of training for Ghana assignments.
Few Americans knew anything about Africa in those days, but the Volunteers were fortunate to have a training faculty headed by one of the most prominent of those few, David E. Apter. The thirty-six-year-old Professor Apter, who taught political science at Berkeley, had started his studies of Ghana when it was a British colony known as the Gold Coast, and his book The Gold Coast in Transition was a landmark in African studies.
Apter, meeting Sargent Shriver in his Chicago apartment, refused to take the job at first. He told Shriver that the idea of the Peace Corps—“a couple of thousand callow Americans running around Africa at this moment”—appalled him. In that case, Shriver countered, how would he like to design and run the first training program for Ghana and make it a model for all Peace Corps training? Apter, feeling pushed into a corner by the ever-enthusiastic Shriver, hesitated and muttered that he wasn’t sure. “That’s the trouble with you professors,” Shriver said. “You won’t shit or get off the pot.” Apter finally gave in, but he set conditions—he would choose the entire faculty, Washington must not interfere with his curriculum, he wanted a pledge of no CIA involvement. Shriver agreed to everything.
“It was the best teaching I ever did in my life,” Apter said almost a half-century later. The training focused on the history, politics, sociology, anthropology, and arts of Ghana and of Africa as a whole. “When we came to Ghana,” a Volunteer said months later, “we knew more about Ghana than expatriates who have been here for years.”
On top of the formal classes, the trainees tried to immerse themselves in Ghanian culture. In the evenings, they danced the popular West African high-life. And since this was long before the age of “soccer moms” and suburban soccer play, “many of us,” as Volunteer John Demos put it, “tried valiantly to learn how to play soccer” in the afternoons.
The program came close to an embarrassing disaster in early August. Reports from Accra indicated that President Kwame Nkrumah had changed his mind, evidently refusing to allow the Volunteers into Ghana. It would be a rude slap in the face to Shriver and the new Peace Corps and a terrible disappointment to the trainees.
Apter and another member of the training team, the renowned sociologist St. Clair Drake, decided to phone Nkrumah. African officialdom was very informal in those days. Apter phoned the president’s secretary, Joyce Giddens, and she put him right through to Nkrumah.
Confirming that he had decided to refuse the Volunteers, Nkrumah stated he had agreed only because President Kennedy’s brother-in-law was so insistent. Now, he didn’t like the idea of so many Americans running around Ghana. They were unnecessary, he thought.
Apter felt that Nkrumah was hesitant but not definite. “Nkrumah was like that,” he recalls. “He was pulled in various directions.” He was moving leftward politically and therefore reluctant to become involved in a U.S. program.
“This is really an exceptional group,” Apter told Nkrumah. “I give you my word, and you know me well enough that I wouldn’t do this sort of thing if it wasn’t OK.” Drake, an African American who knew Nkrumah for many years, then took the phone. “Well, Kwame,” he said, “you’re going to have to do this.” Nkrumah listened to their entreaties and wearily gave in.
The Volunteers did not know about the near disaster. When training ended, they presented gifts to the training staff—cigarette lighters with the awful pun, “Here today. Ghana tomorrow.” The Volunteers assembled in Washington for a day of celebration before their departure for Ghana. Shriver, whom they had not met before, could not resist a kind of locker-room pep talk as he spoke to them in the State Department auditorium. “The President is counting on you,” he told them. “Foreigners think we’re fat, dumb, and happy over here. They don’t think we’ve got the stuff to make personal sacrifices for our way of life. You must show them. And if you don’t, you’ll be yanked out of the ball game.” His excitement was both challenging and infectious.
President Kennedy met the Ghana Volunteers in the Rose Garden along with twenty-four other Volunteers heading off to Puerto Rico for three-and-a-half weeks additional training for a road-building project in Tanganyika. It was a hot, sunlit, searing Washington day, and the Volunteers were outnumbered and crowded by the reporters, photographers, television crews, and White House aides who had shown up for so significant an event.
The president talked about the pioneer Volunteers as if they were goodwill ambassadors. “There are, of course, a good many hundreds of millions of people scattered throughout the world, and you will come into contact with only a few,” he said, “but the great impression of what kind of country we have and what kind of people we are will depend on their judgment in these countries of you.” Kennedy urged them to impress Africans with “your commitment to freedom, to the advancement of the interests of people everywhere, to your pride in your country and its best traditions and what it stands for.”
But this troubled some of the Volunteers. Robert Klein, a Volunteer who had taught at a junior high school in Harlem for five years, told Tom Wicker of the New York Times that they had not been trained as political missionaries. Professor Apter, Klein said, had taught the Volunteers that each would go to Ghana as an “individual with his own ideas.”
The Volunteers then lined up and walked through the Oval Office to shake hands with the president and say a few words. Most were too awestruck to say anything special. They muttered hello and their home state and whether their destination was Ghana or Tanganyika. He wished each person good luck. Newell Flather of Lowell, Massachusetts, mentioned that his brother was a roommate of the president’s younger brother Ted at Harvard. Flather then said, “You’ve been under a lot of criticism, skepticism about the Peace Corps. We’re going to serve you well.” When Flather recalled the remark years later, it struck him as saccharine.
W. Q. Halm, the Ghana ambassador, threw a party for the Volunteers at his residence that evening. The merriment did not calm their apprehension about heading off to Africa and uncertainty the next day. After the party and some nightclubbing, four Volunteers took a taxi to the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and prayed.
Once in Ghana, after conquering their apprehension, the Volunteers proved effective and necessary teachers. Nkrumah had decreed an expansion of secondary school education, and the Peace Corps enabled him to keep this pledge. Without the Peace Corps, Ghana would have had to close 22 of its 145 secondary schools. Almost half the Volunteers had come to the Peace Corps with teaching experience. For the others, facing a class for the first time was a daunting experience, but armed with their backgrounds and good sense, even they did well after a short while. The Ministry of Education was so pleased that it asked the Peace Corps to increase the number of Volunteers and replace them when their tours ended. By the close of 1962, Peace Corps Volunteers made up half of all the secondary school teachers in Ghana with at least a bachelor’s degree.
The Volunteers were shocked by the degree
of rote memorization. The students called their way of learning “chew and pour.” They chewed their notes, memorizing every fact and piece of data, and then poured them out on the examination. Memorization was a way for desperate students to cope with strange subjects taught in the foreign language of the colonialists. Rote learning gave them a sense of power over the bewildering array of facts that seemed to have no relation to their African lives. So long as their success in school depended only on their scores on standardized tests, memorization worked. Since these examinations were based strictly on the syllabus, the students did not want their teachers to wander off the subject. “Please, this is not on the syllabus,” they would say.
When the headmaster of Navrongo Secondary School, in the remote north near the border with Upper Volta, discovered that Volunteer Tom Peterson of Wilmette, Illinois, was a classics scholar, he assigned him to teach ancient Greek. That subject was offered by the British-designed syllabus, but, in Tom’s view, it made no sense for the students in Navrongo. Yet it soon became the most popular course at school. All a student had to do was write down the Greek words and memorize them, a perfect course for chewing and pouring.
One major pedagogical problem for the Volunteers turned out to be their American accents. The students had a difficult time following English pronounced so differently from that of British and Ghanian teachers. This was compounded by the difficulty for Americans in understanding some of the usage in Ghanian English. When students interrupted Bob Klein at Sefwi-Wiawso Secondary School to say, “Please, sir, I don’t hear you,” Klein raised his voice. But no matter how loudly he spoke, the students kept making the same complaint. He discovered that “to hear” meant “to understand” in Ghanian English and realized that the students simply could not understand his New York accent.
Despite their demonstrated success as teachers, the Volunteers chafed at insinuations from some Peace Corps officials that they were flawed as Peace Corps Volunteers. In the view of the Volunteers, Shriver and the officialdom around him in Washington cared more about Madison Avenue hype than about reality. In the view of some officials, too many Volunteers had fallen into the mold of the colonial teacher in Ghana. In a report to Shriver written six months after the Volunteers arrived, Charles Peters, the director of evaluation, wrote that more had to be done “to correct the conviction of several Volunteers that doing a good job in the classroom is the extent of their role as Peace Corps Volunteers.”
The issue centered on an obvious question that had a complex answer: What is a Peace Corps Volunteer? In their early discussions, Shriver, Wofford, Wiggins, Josephson, and others had tried to define a Volunteer by setting down three goals for the new Peace Corps. These were enshrined in the Peace Corps Act that Congress passed by overwhelming votes on September 21, three weeks after the pioneer Volunteers arrived in Accra:
1. To provide Volunteers, “under conditions of hardship if necessary,” to help other countries “in meeting their needs for trained manpower, particularly in meeting the basic needs of those living in the poorest areas.”
2. “To help promote a better understanding of the American people on the part of the peoples served.”
3. To help promote “a better understanding of other peoples on the part of the American people.”
Shriver and his aides did not want the Peace Corps to be just a supplier of cheap technical help to the Third World. The Volunteers, in the view of the founders of the Peace Corps, would break the image of the so-called Ugly American. They would be far different from the aloof, isolated, and insensitive Americans that Kennedy had criticized in his San Francisco campaign speech. Peace Corps Volunteers would be a new kind of overseas American. None of this was new to the Volunteers in Ghana, of course, for they had learned about the goals during training.
But the reality of the Ghana education system impeded the last two goals. Most secondary schools were boarding schools set in compounds apart from nearby towns and villages. The Ministry of Education assigned most of the Volunteers to comfortable staff housing on the school compounds. That made it very difficult to take part in Ghanian community life outside the schools.
Some quarters, originally designed for British teachers and their families at elite schools, were so comfortable that several Volunteers told a visitor from Washington that they did not have as nice a home in the United States. Not everyone experienced that kind of comfort, however, especially in new schools in remote areas. Klein, for example, was assigned to a six-room house with light fixtures and a toilet, but no electricity or running water.
The few Volunteers who lived outside the compounds had more opportunities to involve themselves in ordinary Ghanian life. Arnold Zeitlin and his wife, Marian Frank, took advantage of all the opportunities. They taught in O’Reilly School in James Town, the oldest neighborhood of Accra, but lived elsewhere in the city. They commuted to work by crowded buses, traveled everywhere in Ghana by mammy wagon and third-class train, haggled in the markets buying Ghanian food, enjoyed high-life dancing in local bars, supported Ghanian theater, had a growing number of Ghanian friends, visited the families of friends in upcountry villages, and on one occasion, trekked fifty miles through a Ghanian forest to reach the Ivory Coast.
An unanticipated and embarrassing scene sometimes awaited the Volunteers when they arrived at the schools. Laura Damon of Buffalo faced it on her first day at Opoku Ware Secondary School in Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti region. “I was taken to my bungalow,” she recalled, “and on the porch—it was five-thirty or so, just beginning to get dark—were sitting nine African young men, all hoping that I would hire him as cook-steward. The headmaster came over to welcome me. He had already hired somebody for me. I felt that was kind of an awkward beginning.”
The headmasters expected teachers to hire servants so they could devote enough time to plan lessons, grade papers, tutor students, and supervise extracurricular activities. There was a logic to this. Without laundry machines, supermarkets, freezers, and packaged meals, teachers would otherwise be consumed by the everyday tasks of washing clothes, shopping in open-air markets, and cooking over a small stove. It was a practical solution, and the Volunteers did hire servants, but still, when they were awakened by houseboys at 6:00 a.m. with early-morning tea, the scene shattered the Peace Corps image.
The Volunteers identified themselves so much as expatriate teachers that some were upset to find they would not be allowed to take the regular eight- to ten-week vacation that teachers traditionally took when schools closed for the summer. George Carter, the Peace Corps director in Ghana, announced that they would be limited to taking four weeks and would not be allowed to vacation in Europe the way British teachers did. The Volunteers would be expected to work on summer school projects in their spare time. Carter evidently sympathized with the Volunteers and felt they should be treated like all other teachers, but he had to bow to what he called Washington’s “let ’em live in the trees kind of policy.”
Although the Volunteers were treated warmly by their Ghanian colleagues and acquaintances, the Peace Corps was often subjected to a barrage of vituperation by government-controlled radio and newspapers. The media, following the line of the Soviet Union, would accuse the Volunteers of working for the CIA as spies. It was obvious that Nkrumah was having new misgivings about accepting the Peace Corps.
In early December 1962, the Ministry of Education informed Carter that Nkrumah wanted to expel all Volunteers teaching subjects other than science, mathematics, English, and French. Although the Ministry had requested and placed Volunteers in subjects like history, the Peace Corps could hardly protest too loudly, since Nkrumah had admonished Shriver in the beginning that social science teaching was out of bounds.
Carter managed to persuade the Ministry not to expel anyone by promising that no future Volunteers would teach forbidden subjects. But he was sure that Nkrumah was looking for some excuse to oust Volunteers from Ghana, and he
warned the Volunteers to tread carefully.
Yet, despite Nkrumah’s ambivalence about the Peace Corps, he feted the first contingent of teachers with a farewell party on their last night in Ghana six months later. The party was held in Flagstaff House, the presidential office and residence, and Nkrumah mixed among his guests, chatting about their secondary schools.
Shriver visited Ghana during the second year and toured some of the sites. He seemed most taken by his overnight stop at the secondary school in Asankrangwa, a village with a population of fewer than 2,000. Volunteers Frank Guido of Philadelphia and Sam Selkow of New York took him and others from Washington through the village. Everyone seemed to know the Volunteers. They stopped at the Mexico Bar for high-life music and dancing, and they visited the chief’s compound, which had several pictures of John F. Kennedy on its walls. In honor of the Volunteers, the chief gave Shriver a leopard skin to take back to President Kennedy. Guido gave Shriver a monkey.
Richard Goodwin, who was part of the entourage, told some Volunteers that they were having more impact in a post like Asankrangwa than in other schools, where Volunteers were tied to the school compound. “Well, doggone it, this made us mad,” recalled George Coyne of Plainfield, New Jersey, who taught at Sunyani Secondary School in western Ghana. “Here we are, all right, so we aren’t going out and we aren’t wearing kentes and that sort of thing, eating foo-foo and all the rest of it . . . . The real impact is on the kids that you are teaching. These are the people who will be running the country later on.”
According to John Demos, a Volunteer who would later win renown in the academic world as an historian at Yale University, Shriver “showed his dismay that we were not living a mud-hut life.” That attitude made the Volunteers indignant. Shriver did not mean to give the impression that he valued image more than the job, but that was how it sounded, especially to those Volunteers who did not see how they could fit the image without shirking their work. “We had a job to do here,” recalled Demos, who taught at Okuapemann Secondary School in Akroponga, “and that probably meant living in our houses on the school compound. There was a conflict between the needs of our job and the PR needs of the Peace Corps in Washington.”
When the World Calls Page 5