April 14, 2005: Headlines: COS - Ghana: Criticism: Ghana Web: Alas, for this writer and his high-school classmates who grew up during the early 1970s and 1980s, any thought of the Peace Corps, or American volunteers going to Ghana wells up a sour taste in our mouths
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April 14, 2005: Headlines: COS - Ghana: Criticism: Ghana Web: Alas, for this writer and his high-school classmates who grew up during the early 1970s and 1980s, any thought of the Peace Corps, or American volunteers going to Ghana wells up a sour taste in our mouths
Alas, for this writer and his high-school classmates who grew up during the early 1970s and 1980s, any thought of the Peace Corps, or American volunteers going to Ghana wells up a sour taste in our mouths
Alas, for this writer and his high-school classmates who grew up during the early 1970s and 1980s, any thought of the Peace Corps, or American volunteers going to Ghana wells up a sour taste in our mouths
The “Livingstone Complex” Of A White Do-Gooder
On August 1, 2003, an interesting article written by a white-American male who had just concluded a two-week, English-teaching stint in a Ghanaian elementary school appeared in the New York Times. The article was interesting because it insightfully, at least for a largely disinterested American reading public, depicted the daunting odds that the average Ghanaian pupil contends with in order to achieve a decent level of education. Such odds, noted the writer, included, for instance, a school having only “10 reading books for a class of 35 [students].”
[Excerpt]
In his fascinating article, Mr. Cohen also states that: “It was heartening to see [President Bush II] take an interest in Africa, and promise it badly needed aid… [adding that]…it was unfortunate that [Mr. Bush] did not take the opportunity to push an idea he raised in his 2002 State of the Union address: the importance of ordinary Americans’ volunteering in foreign lands.” Needless to say, I almost guffawed, literally fell off my couch, which also doubles as my desk and chair, with laughter. Indeed, it was not that the gracious suggestion of well-meaning Americans volunteering their services abroad wasn’t a noble venture or enterprise, for it incontrovertibly is, save that the last time that Ghanaians made the mistake of seriously factoring the Peace Corps into our developmental agenda, our entire national destiny almost totally collapsed. And, here, it may be significant to recall that in 1961 when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy launched it, the seminal batch of Peace Corps volunteers was dispatched to Ghana. A few years later, Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah would ban the Corps for what was then diplomatically described as some members of the organization engaging themselves in activities considered to be categorically incompatible with the publicly stated objectives of the volunteers. In other words, the Peace Corps operatives appeared to have been more on a mission of espionage and other anti-African activities than the proactive business of facilitating the rapid and auspicious development of a newly emancipated former British colony. Five years later, President Nkrumah and his CPP government would be summarily decommissioned in a CIA-sponsored coup detat that was billed as, perhaps, the monetarily cheapest military operation against a detested major world leader.
The end of the Nkrumah era did not terminate Ghana’s – and, by extension, Africa’s – romantic flirtation with the Peace Corps; and perhaps most of the activities of this U.S. government-sponsored organization were quite beneficial to their purported beneficiaries, as, indeed, I have heard a number of my countrymen and women laud the services of one or two Peace Corps volunteers whom they still remember nearly four decades later. Alas, for this writer and his high-school classmates who grew up during the early 1970s and 1980s, any thought of the Peace Corps, or American volunteers going to Ghana wells up a sour taste in our mouths. For ours was a time when such Peace Corps nuisances as Geoffrey (Jeff) Dunham and Craig Schuler, who “taught” at St. Peter’s Secondary School, one of the finest of its kind in the entire West African sub-region, brought our potentially landmark careers to an apocalyptic halt. And here, it may be painfully recalled that Mr. Dunham, who was supposed to have taught my classmates and me Mathematics, spent the entire two years that he was at St. Peter’s quizzing us on decimals, day-in-day-out, until by our third year when we were expected to be selecting courses for specialization or majoring, we discovered to our disgust and horror that almost all of us knew next to nothing about Mathematics, except, of course, juggling Nintendo-wise with decimal points. It was the critical intervention of some of our senior students who had not met with the unfortunate Jeff Experience that redeemed some of my classmates. I was so damaged beyond repair that I had to abandon my missionary’s dream of becoming a physician.
When this story was posted in April 2005, this was on the front page of PCOL:
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Story Source: Ghana Web
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Ghana; Criticism
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