Group photograph of the staff of Abeokuta Grammar School, Nigeria, 16 July 1963. Photo: Courtesy of Keith Archer
State of mind: For Keith Archer, an old photograph speaks to a contemporary situation
‘The best thing I could do to help Nigeria was to go home.’
Recently, as I was sorting through some clutter, I came across an old photograph, dated 16 July 1963. It was a group photograph of the staff of Abeokuta Grammar School, Nigeria, and the writing on the back described it as the ‘Send-off photograph in honour of Mr & Mrs Vogel, Messrs. Edun, Kahn, Law, Ladipo, Falase, and Keith Archer’ (that’s me, second from the end of the front row).
I was there with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO). At first, VSO provided volunteering opportunities for school-leavers; what the commonwealth’s developing countries needed, apparently, was youth, enthusiasm and Britishness. After a while it became clear that professional competence would also help, and the result was GVSO: VSO for Graduates. I was one of GVSO’s first-ever batch.
It was an amazing experience: a chance to see the world, meet all kinds of new people, and learn to stand on my own two feet. It also showed me something of the effects of colonialism, and made me realise that the western way of understanding the world is not shared everywhere. This led me to the conclusion, as I considered the possibility of a permanent appointment, that the best thing I could do to help Nigeria was to go home.
The photograph rather sums it up. Out of a staff of twenty-nine, eight were leaving. Three were Nigerians: two moving on to teacher training and another off to do a postgraduate course at Birmingham University. The other five leavers were expatriates, all returning home. Having so many short contracts guaranteed staff turnover, and with new recruits always willing to come, Nigeria lost the will to train its own teachers. As Europeans (which, to Nigerians, included Americans) we represented a culture so dominant that Nigerians felt they should imitate us rather than find their own way. The only African there who regarded himself as my social equal was the headmaster, seated there in the middle. Even my boss (Fred Oridota, second on the left, first row standing), was my inferior outside the school.
The photograph is nearly sixty years old, and Nigeria is different now. The Westminster-style parliament we encouraged proved inappropriate. The intervening decades have seen: a civil war and several military coups; a new capital, a new constitution and a new national anthem (the first was written by a Brit); a huge population increase; and the emergence of Islamist terrorism. However good the intentions of individual Europeans, the legacy of colonialism is broadly negative.
This is why I felt so excited a few years later when I discovered what looked like a new way for Britain. In September 1967 I became a student at the Ecumenical Institute near Geneva. For the next six months I was one of fifty-five people from church traditions all over the world. We were the world in microcosm: each of us lived the history, situation and worldview of the place we came from.
The empire left much of the world with English as its lingua franca, and through its wealth and power the US cemented its dominance. But I saw language as an impenetrable barrier, dividing Brits from other Europeans. Our natural partners seemed to be people from countries where English ruled – like our former colonies (to which we felt superior) and the US (to which we felt inferior). Living in Suisse romande, however, with some knowledge of French, I began to see language less as a barrier than a mountain to climb. From its heights I could recognise how much more I had in common with our European neighbours than I had imagined, even more than with those other English-speakers across the ocean. In western Europe, moreover, there was no question of superiority or inferiority, as we were all more-or-less equal. A vision began to form in my mind like that which Victor Hugo presented to the Paris International Peace Congress in the mid-1800s, that ‘all you nations of the continent will merge, without losing your distinct qualities and your glorious individuality, in a close and higher unity to form a European brotherhood… A day will come when we shall see… the United States of America and the United States of Europe, stretching out their hands across the sea, exchanging their products, their arts, their works of genius’.
At that time Britain was hoping to join the European Economic Community, which was all about setting aside the nationalism that had wrought the catastrophe of two world wars. To me it looked like a way for Britain to find an identity based not on the dubious glories of our imperial past but on a shared resolution to create a better future.
God’s will is seldom done on earth as it is in heaven, but the EEC/EC/EU, which we joined in 1973, has been remarkably successful – so much so that in 2012 it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of its contribution ‘to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.’ I was in Germany when the award was announced, and there it was widely applauded. At home, however, it was scarcely mentioned. Most Germans were deeply uncomfortable with their past, and saw European integration as a new way forward. Britain saw the EU mainly as a market, so all that stuff about peace and reconciliation meant little. We were different. We remained wedded to an idea of British exceptionalism based on pseudo-memories of the panoply of empire.
The UK, sadly, is not the only European country that has been unable to keep the nationalist genie corked firmly in the bottle. Far-right parties have emerged in almost every member-state, often in reaction to immigration and consequent cultural pluralism. Even in Europeanist Germany the AfD (Alternative for Germany), which tends towards Islamophobia and Euroscepticism and has links with neo-Nazi groups, now has a seat in the Bundestag. But these are still minority movements. In Britain a majority voted to break our links with Europe.
The debate about whether Brexit is to our advantage or disadvantage will probably go on for years. But one thing is already clear. In today’s world the big challenges overstride national borders. None is bigger than climate change, and nothing makes the irrelevance of borders more obvious. It’s like Covid: we can brag about our world-beating vaccination programme, but it means relatively little unless the whole world is vaccinated. Now is not the time to hunker down with nostalgic fantasies about how great Great Britain is. Now is the time to build relationships of solidarity and cooperation with the rest of the world. And just as charity begins at home, the first test of our seriousness is the relationships we build with our nearest neighbours.
