Working on the Crossroads

Stifling in Nigeria's rainy-season heat, the shanty-filled town of Shagamu seemed hardly the place to find 15 fresh-faced American college students. But there they were last week, and not snapping pictures of the natives from an air-conditioned bus. Up at 6 every morning, boys and girls spent the long days chopping trees and shoveling dirt to hack out a road from a school to a chapel back in the bush. In credulous Africans followed them everywhere; a dozen English-speaking Nigerian students worked beside them, jabbering questions about life in the U.S. Asked if religion was anything of an issue among the students, one Moslem student exclaimed: "We are too happy with one another to worry about heavenly things."

Man-Sized Jobs. The 15 American toilers in Shagamu are part of a 180-student group called Operation Crossroads-Africa, one of the most ambitious and useful summer work-camp ideas yet devised in the U.S. Chosen from 700 applicants, they come from 75 colleges of all kinds and sizes. Nearly half are girls, and the roster includes 25 Southern white students, 35 U.S. Negroes, two U.S. Indians, two Chinese-Americans and 13 Yalemen led by the university chaplain. Many of the students had scholarships to pay their expenses; those who could paid $800, or about half the cost of the trip, which is financed by private donations and foundation grants.

Last month the group mustered in Manhattan for a week-long briefing by State Department and U.N. experts before splitting into work parties in ten West African states. Joined by African students for two months of hard labor, they live in primitive villages and tackle man-sized jobs: a youth center in Senegal, a small hospital in Cameroon, a library in Liberia. To test their changing attitudes toward Africa, a researcher from M.I.T.'s Center for International Studies has gone along to travel from group to group talking to the students; he will later return to the villages to see what lingering impression the students have made on the Africans.

Good Will on the Spot. Crossroads-Africa is the idea of the Rev. James A. Robinson, Negro pastor of Harlem's Presbyterian Church of the Master, who has run interracial programs in the U.S. for 20 years. "The purpose," says he, "is to demonstrate tangibly that we are able and willing to work together, alongside our African friends." Apart from good will on the spot, the most important byproduct lies in a pledge made by each participant: he must average one talk on Africa every week for a year after he returns to the U.S.

The first 60 veterans (in 1958) found plenty to talk about. In Cameroon, one group built a two-room school and a 400-seat chapel in the impoverished village of Buel. Others built a seven-room school in Ghana's remote Ashanti village of Safo. In Sierra Leone another team dug out a village water-supply system for the hamlet of Gbendembu--and had to kill six cobras and black mambas in the process. Working with Africans, they became, as one American student said, "increasingly able to accept and respect opinion, ignoring momentarily whether we disagreed with it or not." By friendly persuasion, they were also able to deal with the anti-American notions of African students who had pictured the U.S. as a kind of coast-to-coast Little Rock. Ordinary Africans needed no persuasion. The sight of Americans swinging pickaxes in their behalf moved them to heights of hospitality. Recalls Dr. Robinson: "Sometimes people would walk 30 miles to bring us gifts of eggs, bananas, vegetables or firewood. This is really a tremendous adventure." In time, he hopes to expand the project to several thousand students.

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