Introduction

This is the story of how I spent a year as a British volunteer teaching English in a newly-opened secondary school in the remote village of Kaltungo in north east Nigeria in the 1970s, told mainly through letters sent to my parents.

Sitting shivering in a medieval garret in mid- February one morning during my penultimate term at Oxford, I dreamed of how pleasant it would be to spend a year in the tropics and at the same time spin out my time in Oxford for a bit longer. I discovered you could sign up to do a postgraduate certificate in education, study for a term, then take a year off in the middle to do Voluntary Service Overseas, before returning to complete the final two terms of the PGCE. In a paroxysm of enthusiasm I fired off an application to VSO and 9 monhs later found myself in Kaltungo

It was clear from the outset this was going to be a challenging experience. Teaching began in the third week of the new term. Most of the students had arrived at school by the end of the first week, but over half were then sent home again and told not to return until they had collected together enough money from rich relations to pay their £3 school fees for the year. This seemed a somewhat pointless exercise, as many of the students came from the eastern and western regions of Nigeria and the school had to pay their transport costs home to collect the fees. In many cases the travelling expenses turned out to be more than the £3 they were going to collect!

I had been brought up in a Christian family – my parents were both members of the Christian Brethren, an evangelical movement founded in Plymouth in the 1830s, with a strong emphasis on returning to the organisational structure of the early church as set out in the New Testament. The Brethren do not generally have full time priests or pastors, believing in the “priesthood of all believers”, with each member of the local church having an active role to play in the activities of the church. Nor do they have any organisational structures linking churches together, as they believe in the independence and autonomy of each local church.

Before applying to VSO I had prayed that God would lead me where he wanted me to go, but one’s final posting is entirely in the hands of VSO itself. Things worked out wonderfully, however, as my assignment in Kaltungo enabled me to live out my beliefs and contribute in a small way to the spread of the gospel in this remote part of Nigeria.

Although 90% of the population of northern Nigeria is Muslim, there is a area called the Middle Belt, inhabited by dozens of small pagan tribes, each with their own language, who retreated into the hills to escape from both the Muslim conquerors who swept across northern Nigeria in the early 19th century from the north and the Christian missionaries and traders who took over the coastal parts of Nigeria and gradually came to dominate the whole of the south. Missionaries from the Sudan Interior Mission had been active in Kaltungo and the nearby village of Billiri for many years, although they had by 1970 almost entirely handed over the work to national leaders and pastors. Old traditions, however, die hard – fifty years earlier the Kaltungo villagers were renowned for taking the heads of the other branches of the Tangale tribe who lived ten miles or so away in other parts of the Tangale-Waja district. Ethnic and religious rivalries remained deeply rooted and though now mainly fought out in the correspondence columns of the New Nigerian, from time to time violence breaks out with different ethnic, tribal and religious groups reviving old animosities and attacking their traditional enemies. Most of the time, Christians, pagans and Muslims co-exist in peace and harmony, but occasionally total war breaks out.

As a VSO teacher, I was able to help in a very small way towards making the world a better place to live in, contributing to the development of the country through improving the English of my students, helping the local Christian community to carry out its programme and at the same time carrying out the duty of every Christian to “preach the gospel to every creature, even to the uttermost parts of the earth. ” This is the story of how I spent 1971.