50 years of VSO: Nigeria in the 50s
When John Seely’s father stumbled across a letter from the Bishop of Portsmouth in the Sunday Times in 1958, he had no idea of the impact it would have on his son’s future. John became one of the first VSO volunteers. As an instructor at the Man O’War Bay Training Centre in what was then Nigeria, he spent a life-changing year doing exactly what VSO volunteers are still doing 50 years on: sharing skills and building cross-cultural understanding.
A letter in the Sunday Times changes everything
At 16, John Seely took his A-levels two years early. But he couldn’t take up his place at Oxford University until he was 18, so what was he going to do in the interim? In March 1958, the Bishop of Portsmouth Launcelot Fleming came to his rescue.
‘Two days before my seventeenth birthday my father found a letter in the Sunday Times from the Bishop of Portsmouth,’ John recalls. ‘It outlined a proposed scheme for boys who were caught in the university entrance bulge caused by the ending of National Service. It was going to be a sort of voluntary national service where you used the year working abroad on something worthwhile.’
Inspired, John’s father told him to write to the Bishop and put himself forward. ‘Since the prospect of a year mooning about the place was already beginning to look a bit dreary, I agreed,’ says John.
Bound for Nigeria with support from Alec Dickson along the way
John’s application was successful. He was offered a job in southern Cameroon, then part of Nigeria. Pre-departure preparation, according to John, was ‘a bit perfunctory’. ‘In that first year, the organisation of VSO was very much a seat-of-the-pants affair,’ he says. ‘Support structures, training programmes and field offices lay well in the future.’
John didn’t receive the insights into international development that volunteers get in training today. But he did have the invaluable and inexhaustible enthusiasm and encouragement of VSO’s founder Alec Dickson. ‘While we were in West Africa, our main point of contact and source of support was in letters to and from Alec Dickson, that professional enthusiast,’ remembers John. ‘He always replied and always encouraged us.’
Alec sent those highly valued letters to the Man O’War Bay Training Centre, where John and fellow volunteer Bruce Donald were sharing their Outward Bound skills with Nigerian men aged 20 to 40. It was hoped that these men would become the country’s leaders. ‘The courses involved trainees engaging in a variety of challenging activities such as physical education, seamanship and mountaineering,’ says John. ‘Each course also included a week-long community development project on which the trainees would lead teams of local people in building or re-building some essential piece of infrastructure, such a water storage tank or a length of roadway.’
Breaking barriers through drumming and dancing
Fifty years on, the concept of young people from the UK working with their local counterparts on community development projects is still going strong in the form of VSO’s Global Xchange programme. And just as encouraging cross-cultural understanding is fundamental to Global Xchange, so it played a key part at the Man O’War Bay Training Centre.
‘The emphasis was on breaking down the barriers between the different ethnic groups that make up Nigeria. On social evenings, Yoruba, Igbo, Fulani and Hausa would take it in turns to sing traditional songs with accompanying drumming and dancing, and we’d all join in,’ John describes. ‘Of course the English ethnic group had to take their turn at presenting traditional songs and dances, which Bruce and I found, to say the least, a bit challenging, neither of us being much of a folk dancer.’
A life-changing year
Recent research shows that volunteering with VSO is a great opportunity for personal and professional development. Folk dancing aside, John proves this has long been the case. As a 17 year-old training men old enough to be his father, he took on responsibilities and challenges his peers at home couldn’t have dreamt of. ‘VSO helped me grow up,’ he says. ‘It also gave me a strong feeling that I wanted to be involved in some kind of public service, which is why I became a school teacher and, later, college lecturer.’
Over the last 50 years John has continued to share his skills in developing countries, teaching in Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan, Egypt and Botswana. He acknowledges that his year in Nigeria was pivotal. ‘The experience profoundly affected my life,’ John says. ‘I have always been grateful to Alec Dickon, Launcelot Fleming and the fledgling VSO organisation for the opportunity they gave me.’