IN their headlong rush for development, many Afro-Asian nations have tended to assume that technology equals progress. But in recent years, research has isolated another factor, the human factor, which must be included in the development equation if it is to prove workable. A nation can plan all the 'right' economic moves --- attraction of sufficient foreign aid, diversification of industrial and agricultural infra-structure and production, recapitalization at an appropriate rate --- but unless its people are aware and interested, ready and able to make an effort themselves, all the fine paper schemes will come to nought.
What is needed then is mobilization and improvement of human resources. Education is the chief means of upgrading human resources and integrating them into the development process. But it will take years --- decades in many nations --- to build enough schools, train enough teachers and print enough textbooks to bring fledgling economies to and through the takeoff stage. As a long-term stopgap measure, most Afro-Asian countries are simultaneously finding other ways of mobilizing under- and unemployed manpower. One of these is youth service.
Two factors have combined to make Afro-Asia(2) a fertile testing ground for numerous types of youth service. The first is the desperate and worsening situation of many Afro-Asian countries and their consequent need to utilize all available manpower. The second is the indefatigable versatility with which, on obtaining independence, national leaders have experimented with different means of harnessing young people to development tasks.
The combination of urgent needs and a willingness to experiment has not always had happy results. In one African country a variety of ministries and private organizations, working independently of --- and sometimes at cross purposes with --- one another have, in the seven years since independence, launched no less than fifteen separate schemes for voluntary mobilization of young people. Two coups d'état confused things even more and none of the minuscule three or four surviving programmes is self-sufficient. When one mentions 'voluntary service' to a young citizen of this country, the invariable come-back is a disdainful laugh.
International rivalries have not helped matters either. In their laudable haste to find suitable formulas for youth mobilization, African governments and youth organizations have called on foreign advisers from Britain, France, Israel, the US, the USSR, Yugoslavia, Cuba and other countries as well as the U N. Sometimes, requests for aid have been issued to several foreign bodies simultaneously, which is less commendable.
The capital of an African country was once host to four missions, each of which was invited to plan a national civic service, at the same time. Two, from the ex-metropolitan country, spent much of their time sabotaging each other's work while the others painstakingly prepared two conflicting plans. It was months before the trouble died down, and in some quarters feathers are still ruffled.
This country finally went ahead with one of the plans but elsewhere loquacious inaction has undermined youthful enthusiasm and thrust frustrated governments to unfortunate verbal extremes. Every time disaffected students of one Asian nation go on strike the Prime Minister rumbles menacingly about instituting compulsory universal youth labour service---an unworkable scheme in this huge nation of meagre resources. The offended students retort by rioting, the premier sends in baton-wielding police, the strike is broken and an uneasy calm returns to university campuses until a new pretext is found to strike, whereupon the whole tragi-comedy is repeated. The sad thing is that in over ten years of recurring and intensifying clashes the government has opened no channel for effective voluntary service by even a minority of young people.
The simple logic of harnessing available youth-power to urgent development tasks has turned out to be riddled with pitfalls. Yet the concept's basic correctness is irrefutable and it is a rare Afro-Asian nation that has not experimented with one form or another of youth mobilization. So great is the variety of schemes being evolved --- within one country or from country to country; over a period of years or at any given time; by governments or private bodies, or governments and private bodies together; with one or more kinds of bilateral aid or with multilateral aid --- that classification is a perilous enterprise. Nevertheless, the two distinct main streams of youth mobilization present in Europe of the thirties reappear in Afro-Asia of the sixties. The crises are radically different, the sense of crisis much the same, the need for and approaches to youth service not dissimilar.
In tapping human resources, as good a way to start as any is by mobilizing the mobilizers, the lucky educated few with knowledge to share and the time to spare. These are the students and teachers, young employees and functionaries,, the elite of Afro-Asia who constitute the thin modern crust of their societies. They are part and parcel of the monetary economy and readily adopt the idea of progress. Their parents conceived of and then brought about national independence. They make and execute national development plans. Their talents are underemployed in the same way as those of European and North American workcampers are, that is they work an eight-hour day or study a nine-month year. And they volunteer their free time in much the same self-sacrificing way and for much the same idealistic reasons. They seek no personal gain from service --- they are drawn on only by the carrot of national development. In service schemes, they are disinterested agents of growth and change.
The other stream of Afro-Asian youth mobilization draws its manpower from the uneducated, unlucky, now volatile, now apathetic mass with little to lose and everything to gain. These are the young peasants who work only a few months a year, and the jobless city youths who have fled rural poverty only to discover urban misery. They grope gingerly round the bewildering fringes of the money-based economy. They reject ancestral tradition and cannot grasp (much less believe in) the idea of progress beyond subsistence farming, but only dimly perceive any but the most superficial trappings of the industrial alternative. They actively supported the independence campaign but, as often as not, misunderstand or are indifferent to the drive for development it unleashed. They are unemployed in the millennial pre-industrial fashion that cannot comprehend, let alone hope for, regular hours and year-round employment. And when they join a civic service camp, it is for economic reasons, with the hope of gaining as much as they give. Their attitude may change once there but, at the outset at least, they are driven into mobilization schemes by the stick of necessity. In service schemes they are beneficiaries as much as agents of development.
'Don't forget India!' Pierre Ceresole admonished civilists at the end of his life. Totally absorbed in European post-war reconstruction, they and other workcampers could do little more than dream about overseas service until the end of the 1940s. At that time, it was becoming evident that a return to pre-war colonialism was out of the question and that the colonial peoples would increasingly take their destinies into their own hands. Here was a golden opportunity for workcamping. The ferment of new nationhood in economically backward areas, thought European organizers, would be an ideal condition for spreading the method of self-help voluntary service and for replacing suspicion and bonds of subjugation with links of friendship and co-operation.
In the past decade-and-a-half, voluntary service by Afro-Asian elites has developed in three phases. First, in the early 1950s, came the period of evangelism, when the workcamp idea was spread by ship, plane and --- in one case --- bicycle. Then came the stage of implantation and generalization when, often with overseas aid and sometimes as branches of foreign organizations, local existing youth and student movements took up workcamping. Today --- the last stage --although workcamping and similar programmes are being created at an accelerating rate, the total impact of elite service in Afro-Asia is still largely symbolic, and some countries are experimenting with schemes designed to mobilize greater numbers of educated youth for a variety of development tasks.
.Predictably, Service Civil International supplied many of the evangelists, who, fifteen years ago, took workcamping from Europe and North America and Asia. One of the earliest was Ralph Hegnauer, a Swiss whose background and upbringing destined him to become anything but a civilist. Born of a well-to-do Zürich family, Ralph showed an early bent for international commerce, an inclination appreciated to this day by often unbusiness-minded civilists. At the height of the Spanish Civil War. he decided his banking job was futile and joined the SCI's team evacuating Madrid children.
By 1950, after a further year of service with American Quakers for Arab refugees in the Gaza strip, he was ready to heed Pierre Ceresole's admonition not to 'forget India'. Ralph, his wife, a third Swiss, two Englishmen and a German, later joined by Americans, Finns, a Norwegian and a Japanese, set to work building New Faridabad, a city created not far from New Delhi for Hindu refugees from Pakistan. They aimed to provide people in distress with practical help and, by practising the civilist gospel they preached, to interest at least a few young educated Indians in SCI. The Indian Government was providing money and material; the 30.000 inhabitants of New Faridabad were expected to build, or at least help build, their new homes. But they had steadfastly refused to work with their hands. The situation was at stalemate when the civilists arrived.
The only way to break down the refugees' refusal was to do what Pierre Ceresole had done in Bihar sixteen years earlier: set an example. Ralph's recollection of the first day is vivid.
I'll never forget the shiver that ran down my spine when, as we attacked the quarry with picks and crowbars ... we felt ourselves stared at by hundreds of pairs of eyes that were astonished, no, worse: aghast.... We'd chosen to work in the quarry precisely because the toil there was considered as particularly hard and 'inferior'.(3)
The work continued for many discouraging months before the refugees --- and even a few students --- finally joined in.
The foreign civilists then moved on to Khajjiar, a village perched 6,000 feet up on a foot-hill, to lay water-pipes, a project more closely linked to development than refugee relief. There, the second goal was achieved. The Gandhian tradition of social service was far from dead and students came from Delhi and Calcutta to work with them. 'For the first time in their life they became acquainted with third-class train travel, manual work and a household without servants' remembered Ralph.
Later, one student wrote to us: 'Of course, we knew that peasants and workers existed. But this was theoretical knowledge, nothing but figures. Now we have met them face to face, we've even worked with and for them. We've discovered that they, too, are men who live, who have ... mostly wretched poverty ... !'(4)
A nucleus of Indian civilists had been formed and the foreigners moved on, some to other areas of India, others to Pakistan.
While Ralph --- today SCI's International Secretary --- and his team-mates sowed the seed of workcamping in the Indian subcontinent, a French workcamp evangelist took 'civilism' to North Africa. Influenced by his friend, Louis Lecoin, the anarchist whose 'hunger strike to death' wrested recognition of conscientious objection from the French Government in 1963, Pierre Martin-Dumeste was jailed as a pacifist during the 1939 mobilisation générale. An ardent SCI camper in post-war reconstruction projects, Pierre realized at the end of the 1940s that workcamping would be of use in Africa and Asia and set off hopefully on a one-volunteer odyssey from Morocco to India overland --- by bicycle. What cut his voyage short in Algeria was not the hardship of travelling in this singular fashion --- he had crossed a desert on the way from Morocco --- but the need for inter-racial workcamps in a country which Franco-Arab conflicts would soon plunge into war.
For Pierre, reconciliation was not a means of maintaining the status quo. He aimed, on the contrary, to facilitate progress, but sought to bring it about through inter-racial co-operation on concrete development projects. Hopefully, he gave a book about his Algerian experiences the title In the Trenches of Peace. It was already too late. If later, and particularly since Independence in 1962, French and other organizations have helped revive workcamping in Algeria, it should not be forgotten that voluntary service antedates the war in which civilists of both Arab and European origin perished.
In the late 1950s, Pierre made a number of workcamp promotion missions to West Africa for Unesco and the Co-ordinating Committee for International Service. Since 1960 Pierre has lived with his wife, a French civilist, in Senegal where he is responsible for a variety of governmental development schemes. Characteristically, he refuses the extravagant salary and posh quarters furnished to expatriate technical assistance personnel. He is the only European with the grade of Senegalese Civic Administrator, 'a satisfying assimilation for a citizen of the world', he notes, 'but disastrous as far as finances are concerned, which is not at all important. Both of Pierre's sons are citizens of Senegal.
A third workcamp evangelist, typical like Ralph and Pierre of a host of others, was an English Quaker civilist, Gordon Green. Gordon served as a conscientious objector during the Second World War when he 'acquired a taste for unskilled manual labour at nominal rates by picking spuds at 4d. an hour'.(5) Then, after a series of post-war camps on the Continent, he took part in Quaker projects in America. 'Meeting Negroes for the first time there got me interested in the colour problem,' he remembers 'and in going to Africa.'(6)
In 1954, Gordon went to teach at fashionable Mfantsipim School at Cape Coast (Ghana). Ghana was still the Gold Coast but agitation for Independence had already jelled into a coherent political movement. To give students an opportunity to experience --- and combat --- underdevelopment first-hand, he helped organize occasional workcamps. As Independence approached, however, he saw the need to hold camps on a regular basis. With like-minded African and European friends, Gordon founded in 1956 the Voluntary Workcamps Association of the Gold Coast (VWAGC---'G C' being changed to 'G' for 'Ghana' in 1957).
By 1958, VWAG was strong enough to host the Unesco Coordinating Committee's First West-African Regional Workcamp Leader Training Project and its administration no longer depended entirely on Gordon's free time and battered Volkswagen, a less romantic but more practical workcamp vehicle than Pierre Martin-Dumeste's bike.
Soon, after ten years in Ghana, Gordon could move on; for VWAG, while welcoming all nationalities in its camps, had become a thoroughly Ghanaian organization. Today he teaches in Cyprus where he is helping to launch workcamping.
The most constructive contribution of the evangelists who took workcamping to Afro-Asia in the early 1950s was not that they came, but that they inspired (as much as trained) nationals to take their place, and above all that they knew when to leave. Everywhere, the second generation of organizers was composed of local young people excited by the workcamp spirit and determined that workcamping should not wither as soon as the foreigners departed.
In a moment of respite during the 1950-51 SCI expedition to India, some of Ralph Heganuer's civilists went round secondary schools and universities to enlist volunteers. After a talk on SCI at a Delhi college, one young man with a flashing smile and insatiable curiosity rained questions on the lecturer. 'That's one chap we'll never see on a workcamp,' thought the besieged European civilist. But Devinder Das Chopra, son of an industrialist, was not sparring merely for the sake of it.
He wanted the full facts before making up his mind. After considering the question from all angles he decided to give workcamping a try. By 1956 Devinder was convinced and became a co-founder of SCI's Indian branch. Two years later he was appointed Asian Secretary to the organization. In this position he travelled untiringly (and often without a penny) to form a network of SCI national branches, groups and representatives throughout Asia.
In numerical terms the results of their work in Asia are not impressive, as civilists readily admit. After a decade, the Indian branch has fewer than 600 individual members and annually organizes only about a dozen short-term and three long-term camps. Though of modest size, Asian 'civilism' has had an influence out of all proportion to its small membership and few projects. President Prasad, Prime Minister Nehru and other Indian leaders visited the New Faridabad team in 1950-51 and came away resolved to promote volunteer service for young Indians, especially through the Congress Party (see below).
Maintaining SCI's policy of positive neutrality, Indian civilists have invited volunteers from a wide variety of political backgrounds to work with them, including a Soviet team that participated in a 1963 West Bengal project. And throughout the years and vicissitudes of the Indo-Pakistani dispute SCI workcamps have been a unique haven of meeting and co-operation for young people from both countries.
Devinder's successor as SCI's Asian Secretary, Hirosatu Sato, began workcamping as a student in Japan and served as a long-term volunteer in India during 1956-7. After marrying an American team-mate and studying for a year in the United States, he led the Japanese branch to a position of permanent strength. Today Sato is striving to multiply intra-Asian volunteer exchange and improve projects involving long-term volunteers from the industrialized countries.
Several workcamp-sponsoring organizations have followed SCI's policy of establishing local branches in Afro-Asia. The International Builder Companions (IBO), for instance, have made a special effort to implant a locally-run branch in Congo (Kinshasa), a country long on development needs but short on stable structures to meet them. A Congolese student's impressions of an early IBO camp which built houses for the poor near Luluabourg in 1961 suggest that, although it has its droll peculiarities, African workcamping offers satisfactions similar to those of European projects.
On the building site, the camp director
tried to oversee the whole project but found himself irresistably drawn to getting his hands into the potopoto (mud) from which the bricks were made. Meanwhile, the shovellers sang lustily with a heavy swinging rhythm, but the masons, who were afraid of getting potopoto mortar in their mouths, preferred to whistle.
At the end of the camp
you would have realized that the volunteers were there not just to get to know one another or to escape from their books! And when they went home they took with them not only empty pockets but also a happiness that is hard to match: the happiness of being young and helping someone they didn't even know.(7)
The Afro-Asian affiliates and branches of numerous other international organizations for which workcamping is only one of many activities, have organized projects in a number of countries. Among these are: the Junior Red Cross, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, the World University Service, the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the United Towns Organization.
One 1959 inter-racial project sponsored by the World Council of Churches built a YWCA centre in Zambia when it was still Northern Rhodesia and was able to pierce at least temporarily the wall separating black and white elites. 'Many Africans were surprised to see European men and women doing hard manual labour,' wrote the New Zealand camp leader afterwards.
Many Europeans were surprised to see us doing our own washing and cooking; they were more surprised when on visiting day they were issued a shovel or pick and sent off to work in a group headed by an African! For the first time in Kitwe some of the educated European inhabitants were able to know personally some of the educated African inhabitants...(8)
One early and particularly active workcamp-sponsoring branch of an international organization was the Young Men's Christian Association of the Philippines. In 1959 a month-long YMCA camp at Samoki barrio in the, Philippines' Mountain Province demonstrated that, as well as doing a job of work, a workcamp can help change a way of life. A preliminary survey showed that disease was prevalent in Samoki and that the 2,000 inhabitants were hostile to outsiders --- rumour even had it that they resorted to various forms of savagery on occasions, including head-hunting. A singularly inhospitable welcome augured badly for the project and campers were a little nervous when they met with the barrio elders to select appropriate projects. As the days and weeks passed, however, local people began to take part in repairing the school compound, digging a sanitary latrine (nicknamed Fort Samoki because of its formidable sturdiness) and organizing a Mothers' Club and Boys' Club.(9)
Workcamping spread --- the Co-ordinating Committee estimated the annual Asian volunteer total at 115,000 in 1956. And a new phenomenon, which one might term feedback, appeared in Afro-Asia. Thanks largely to the labour of the evangelists and their and other organizations, workcamping was firmly established in many countries by the late 1950s. However, governments and youth organizations in still other nations wanted to launch programmes of their own and called on European and North American movements for help. For the most part, feedback assistance has been provided on a bilateral basis between independent groups rather than from an international body to an Afro-Asian branch.
A result of such feedback widely known in North America is Operation Crossroads Africa (OCA), the experience, popularity and publicity of which helped to ease the US Peace Corps' birth pangs. Founded by Dr James Robinson, a jovial Harlem pastor, as a means of familiarizing American and Canadian students with the problems of Africa, while contributing to their solution, OCA sent its first workcamp-seminar team, eighty strong, out on field-work in the summer of 1958. Since then volunteers from different racial and religious backgrounds and all parts of the US and Canada as well as Central and South America have worked on projects in East, West and North Africa varying from construction work to athletic coaching.
A novel feature of OCA is that each volunteer agrees to give a minimum of fifty talks on his of her experience within two years of returning from Africa. Most Crossroaders have no trouble in finding topics to speak about for, although brief, the experience is intense. 'In Senegal we taught a fairly new concept of the dignity of labour,' remarked a student from Queen's University in Ontario. 'But we learned that " underdeveloped " is an economic term; it has very little to do with the spiritual or mental attitudes of people.'(10)
Some cynics have suggested that OCA and other bodies sending out short-term intercontinental workcampers would do better to contribute the cost of the exchange --- about $1,600 per participant for return travel and six week's work and study --- to struggling African youth groups. One critic told the author of a particularly unsuccessful OCA project he had witnessed where 'a bunch of American Ph.D.s broke up pebbles under the tropical sun to trim someone's garden path, the laughing-stock of hastily mobilized local schoolboy "volunteers" who lolled about under adjacent shade-trees waiting for lunchtime.' Nevertheless, Crossroads' contribution --- particularly to already operating African workcamp associations --- has been a greatly appreciated stimulus.
Other bilateral programmes for strengthening independent workcamp schemes in Afro-Asia have included aid from the Christian Peace Movement to Moroccan camps, Yugoslav Youth Union assistance to the UAR's Wadi el Natrun series described in the previous chapter and Soviet Komsomol, Free German Youth (East Germany) and Czech Youth Union help to the Algerian National Liberation Front Youth's (JFLN) projects.(11)
The proliferation of local or national associations has been the third facet of the implantation and generalization stage of Afro-Asian elite workcamping. Chronologically, it has overlapped both initiation of projects through local branches or affiliates of international organizations and bilateral co-operation between independent bodies. It is due in part to both types of aid, indirectly to the first --- which created a climate favourable to workcamping and directly to the second --- which supplied varying degrees of assistance. Two types of associations have been founded: those organizing workcamps among other activities, and those devoted primarily or exclusively to workcamping.
Several Indian organizations, keeping alive the Gandhian tradition of selfless service by the elite to their needy countrymen, fall in the first category. Chief among these is the prestigious Bharat Sevak Samaj (BSS --- Service to India Organization). BSS was created in 1952 as an umbrella organization for a cluster of service groups related to the Congress Party, and designed to mobilize support and action for the first Five-Year Plan. It soon cornered the Indian voluntary service market and by 1956 had some 50,000 members of a variety of castes and religions, political and ethnic affiliations, all over the sprawling country.
A constantly growing activity of BSS has been student workcamps which, though often limited to four hours daily work for a fortnight, have reached impressive numbers of India's future elite. In 1956, for instance, 86 camps were held for shifts of an average of 80 boys and girls; the volunteer total exceeded 30,000 The boys participated in Shramdam village self-help schemes repairing roads, irrigation tanks and wells, the girls conducted sanitation campaigns and both took afternoon general culture courses. Bharat Sevak Samaj's activities soon quadrupled. Then, by the end of the last decade. it was organizing a thousand camps annually. Adapting the planner's jargon, the organization terms itself 'the people's voluntary sector', a bridge between the contributions of the public and private sectors to the development of India.(12)
Though smaller than the mammoth BSS, a number of other, independent national or local organizations have undertaken workcamp and other voluntary development activities. Antedating the creation of BSS by two years, for instance, was the Indian Socialist Party's Rashtra Sava Dal service programme.(13) Other sponsors include the Malaysian Association of Youth Clubs, the Young Buddhists Association of Thailand and the National Commissions for Unesco of Upper Volta and South Korea; the last named of these formed a National Workcamp Conference of all sponsoring bodies in the country. Following the 1954 Geneva Agreements., 5,000 North Vietnamese young people built 90 kilometres of railway destroyed by the French before Dienbienphu as well as a number of dams and dikes to prevent crops from being waterlogged.(14)
Local Afro-Asian organizations devoted primarily or exclusively to workcamping and acting independently of political parties, churches or other ideological attachments, have come into being more recently than the bodies described above and as often as not with the aid of the Co-ordinating Committee and its members in the industrialized countries. One or more workcamp associations exist today in Ghana, Nigeria, Morocco, Pakistan, South Vietnam, Togo, Uganda, the UAR, Kenya, Rhodesia, South Africa(15) and Lesotho. Typical of the way in which the method took root and spread through these associations was the story of Ghanaian and Togolese workcamping.
When, at the creation of the Voluntary Workcamp Association of Ghana, Gordon Green agreed to be a spare-time one-man office, it was on the understanding that a Ghanaian would replace him as soon as it was feasible. The job was thankless, endless work, with minimal security and no status --- but Kwaku Frimpong, a founder-member of VWAG, consented to give it a try. After studying workcamp methods and administration in Europe, Kwaku returned to VWAG's makeshift Accra headquarters. Armed with a typewriter and duplicator donated by Cadbury's, he attacked his new task with quiet fervour. In 1962 the Co-ordinating Committee organized its second West African Workcamp Leader Training Project in Ghana and Togo. VWAG's administration, and Kwaku's health, were stretched almost to breaking point. 'If all the blood we sweated over that were spread out in thin drops,' remembers Gordon who was teaching full-time five hours' drive from Accra during the preparations, 'It would reach from Accra to Timbuktu and back via Bobo Dioulasso and Ouagadougou.'(16)
It was significant that the regional project could take place in both countries simultaneously for although they were neighbours their official relations were far from cordial. Friendship and co-operation among workcampers in the two countries had ignored government quarrels since the first regional training project held in Ghana in 1958. A single Togolese, Gerson Konu, a teacher from Palimé, took part in that project and carried the workcamp idea home with him to found Les Volontaires au Travail (LVT --- Volunteers at Work), a workcamp association patterned after VWAG. Largely on the strength of his organization's success Gerson was elected to the Togolese Parliament. The independence and work of VWAG and LVT were so widely appreciated that both organizations survived the increasingly volatile political situations which culminated in coups d'état in Ghana and Togo.
The geographical extension of workcamping in Africa and Asia is as gratifying to the method's well-wishers as the numbers of people involved in a body like Bharat Sevak Samaj are staggering to Western organizers. Yet it must be recognized that only a fraction of elite energy is being mobilized and a tiny percentage of problems attacked, let alone solved, by existing bodies. Often, particularly in local settings, spontaneous outgrowths of voluntary service have sprung up only to subside because someone graduated or lost interest.
Just as civilist, Quaker and youth-hostel volunteers of the 1930s were unable to stem or slow the drift of events into the Second World War, present-day Afro-Asian workcampers are not making much discernible progress in the struggle against underdevelopment. Aware of the inability --- probably inherent, given the funds, structure and leadership required --- of even State-aided non-governmental bodies to involve more than a small minority of educated youth in voluntary service, several Afro-Asian governments are exploring avenues of systematizing elite mobilization.
In some cases this is done indirectly. Schools and universities supply the manpower while appropriate ministries provide financial backing and technical supervision. An early programme of this kind was the UAR's Ekhdem Karyettak (Serve Your Village) scheme under which for nearly a decade students have spent their summer holidays doing a variety of jobs to raise rural living standards. One of them was Atif Abdul Hamid Salah, a versatile twenty-year-old fourth-year medical student at the Ein Shams University of Cairo.
For three consecutive summers Atif joined a ten-man student team in his home village, Ashleem. 'As a medical student, Atif was keenly interested in health and hygiene,' reported an FAO writer. After conducting a survey on local feeding habits he worked on agricultural projects, helping farmers with chemical control of pests, showing them how to use fertilizers properly, teaching improved ways of cultivation and how to use and care for farm machinery. One of the most important jobs the students did was to write simplified versions of the Ministry of Agriculture's pamphlets.(17)
In South Korea 20,000 students a year (one sixth of the country's university population) spend two or three weeks each summer in villages where, supervised by the Community Development Bureau, they carry out tasks ranging from roadbuilding and cattle care to sanitation campaigns and nutrition improvement. Similar schemes exist in the Philippines, Tanzania, Indonesia, Nepal and Thailand, while in South Vietnam young people of the Voluntary Youth Association have been able, according to Quaker reports, to work 'in border areas without being disturbed either by the Viet Cong or the South Vietnamese'.(18)
In 1965 350,000 Ceylonese school-children proved themselves unexpectedly useful by hoeing and weeding some 120,000 hectares of rice-paddy. Organized by the Ceylon Freedom From Hunger Committee in co-operation with various government agencies and led by their own teachers three hours a day during growing seasons, the children are estimated to have increased the country's rice production by a remarkable 21.7 per cent.(19) So successful has been this scheme that the government is now preparing legislation to make paddy-weeding an obligation for all school-children. Which raises the crucial question of the voluntary element in Afro-Asian elite youth service.
Many Western workcamp organizers, including the author, tend to raise one or both eyebrows on hearing talk of forced youth mobilization. The problem is more widespread and acute among civic corps schemes and other aspects of the 'stick' stream of Afro-Asian service and will therefore be dealt with in detail below. Suffice it to say here that, as far as the elite is concerned, much depends on the spirit in which young people work. Students coerced into nominally voluntary projects by the pressure in a country where corruption is rife and mistrust in the air, will not make very successful agents of change.(20) On the job, they will learn little more than hypocrisy, and, begrudging every second of 'service', they will work sloppily and only goad the peasants and underprivileged city-dwellers with whom they come into contact further back into their cave of millennial suspicion.
On the other hand, schemes may be nominally obligatory but inspire enthusiasm in helpers and helped alike. Here, the spirit depends largely on the organizers' motivations. Systems can succeed if the government's chief objective is not to quash youthful restiveness but to hasten social and economic progress.
Such is the motivation --- and the result --- of the Ethiopian University Service. As a prerequisite to receiving their degrees, Ethiopian University students must serve one year in rural areas in a capacity related to their field of study. In 1965 twenty-three participants from the College of Building Technology worked with twelve Ethiopian engineers and seven technicians from the Swedish Volunteer Service to build classrooms. Far from viewing their obligation as compulsion, many students rejoiced at the perspectives opened up by their year's toil.
'Blessed be the individuals who are responsible for the Ethiopian University Service,' wrote one particularly enthusiastic Building Technology participant.
We owe these far-sighted people a great deal. This service removes the curtain of prejudice and opens our eyes to see what we have around us.... This service year enabled us to know something about the communities which are very far from the capital; but the time is so short that we could hardly learn enough.(21)
If Western organizers tend to blink on hearing of obligatory service, they --- and especially those of a pacifist bent --positively wince at the idea of military conscripts carrying out civilian service. Yet that is just what 20,000 young Iranians have done since the creation in 1963 of the Sepaheh Danesh (Education Corps) under which the better educated of those drafted may, after basic military training, choose to serve their eighteen-month conscription as development agents in rural villages. The Corpsmen have become the standard-bearers in the Shah's 'Holy War on Ignorance', and the pride of a country which in 1966 contributed a day of its military budget ($700,000) to Unesco's World Literacy Programme.
The key to the Corps' indisputable success is that it provides simultaneous answers to two grave problems in an ambitious yet inexpensive enough fashion to fire the nation's imagination. The 1963 land and electoral reform threatened to founder for lack of educated village leaders capable of exercising the managerial and political rights accorded them. City-orientated Iran had provided primary education for less than a quarter of rural children, while 84 per cent of young townspeople received schooling. And even those country youths who learned to read had little access to agricultural training, medico-social instruction or education in other technical skills which could raise the standard of living. As often as not they relapsed into illiteracy and, in any event, their villages profited little if at all from their meagre schooling.
Meanwhile, the dissatisfaction of young members of the educated urban elite intensified in proportion to their inability to find jobs in an unequally expanding economy. Long months of sterile barracks life only sharpened their disaffection. The genius of the Education Corps' creators lay simply in linking manpower supply to manpower demand within existing administrative structures which could be modified at relatively little cost.(22) The Education Corps is now complemented by smaller specialized Health and Community Development Corps. Eloquent proof of villagers' esteem for the work of the Corps is that in its first year of operation they contributed more than two million dollars' worth of time and materials for school construction alone.(23)
An important question asked by the Corpsmen was what would happen to them in completing their stint. The answer was easy. By the end of 1964 twelve thousand of them had signed on with the Education Ministry as paid personnel, doubling at a single stroke the number of Iran's rural primary school teachers.
One of the main obstacles to development in Afro-Asia is underemployment. Afro-Asians are underemployed because in the countryside they lack the tools and skills to peck more than subsistence from tired land. And because the younger, more dynamic elements --- who might change the situation --- flee to the towns, where gorged industrial and service sectors cannot absorb them. And, in the short run at least, education is no panacea. A few statistics show that this interpretation is not as oversimplified as it first sounds.
In Ceylon, four fifths rural. 31 per cent of farm labourers average less than three days' work a month. Sixty-five per cent only work one day out of two.(24) East Pakistani peasants are idle 15 to 25 per cent of the total work-days in any year, which partly accounts for their heavy debts, one of the country's major social plagues.(25) A similar enforced idleness in rural areas of the Ivory Coast has sent droves of young people to Abidjan in the last ten years. increasing the capital's population by one third between 1954 and 1962.(26) In Brazzaville in 1963 just under half of the jobless (who themselves constituted just under half the city's working-age population) were young people, mostly of rural origin.(27)
Where schooling exists, it can have a more disruptive than integrating influence. This is because the function of education is to teach new ideas and skills which clash with traditional thinking and methods, but also because, among the minority of young Afro-Asians in primary schools, only a few finish elementary education. Fewer still --- an infinitesimal number--- go on to secondary schools. Twenty-nine Indian school-children out of a hundred complete elementary schooling. In Burma the proportion is 19 per cent, in Laos 13 per cent.(28) Only one twenty-fifth of Nigerian school-leavers find a place in secondary schools.(29)
What happens to the rest? In 1966 roughly 260,000 Kenyans reached the age of fifteen. About 110,000 had never been to school or had dropped out after one, two or more years of instruction. Of the 150,000 finishing primary school 30,000 had to repeat their last year. 30,000 entered secondary, vocational or other educational establishments and 30,000 found paid jobs or returned to agriculture. The rest --- 60,000 --- drifted into what worried authorities call 'The Gap', an indeterminate and unproductive period lasting four or five years or longer between school and marriage (for girls) or some sort, any sort of employment (for boys). Sooner or later many will also drift into trouble with the law.(30)
In Senegal the situation is even worse. In 1964 Only 35.3 per cent of school age children were actually in school and, of 12,800 leavers that year, 8,214 were listed as 'available'. Most found no work. Many drifted to Dakar. Only one half of the city's inhabitants are native Dakarois. The rest have emigrated --- at the rate of 20,000 a year --- from the country's other regions. Over one eighth (44,000) of Dakar's population is classified as 'migrant floaters'. Half of these are young people.(31) In Zambia the migration from the land has reached dramatic proportions. A 1963 survey showed that no fewer than three quarters of the young people in Lusaka with primary school certificates had arrived in the city from rural areas during the previous twelve months.(32) Rural exodus had siphoned the brightest young people from villages and hamlets that desperately needed all of them to the city that couldn't possibly hire half of them.
A few do find work. Others run occasional errands. Some, whether they have been to school or not, try to educate themselves. Every night in Bombay and Douala (Cameroun) groups of ragged adolescents cluster under street lamps to pore over a single tattered textbook. But they can afford neither books nor fees and never see the inside of a classroom, let alone an examination paper. Most take advantage of the extended family's hospitality and find a niche in a distant relative's compound. Some sleep in the street. None starves. But all have mouths to feed and minds and muscles that are not contributing to development.
Well before Independence, and increasingly since, nongovernmental bodies have attempted to provide at least partial solution to the rural exodus problem. These, and succeeding programmes, have focused m the three categories of unemployed out-of-school young people indicated above, i.e. those --mainly in the country --- who have never been to school; those --- in town and country --- who have dropped out of school; and those ---often of rural origin but concentrated in urban areas --- who have completed only primary education. Like the schemes of the Scouts in Dahomey, the Young Christian Workers in Congo (Kinshasa), and the Catholic Archbishopric of Yaoundé (Cameroun), most non-governmental attempts have had moderate success with reinstalling one or two dozen boys in rural areas. And they have met similar problems: difficulty of obtaining and amortizing initial investment and high continuing overheads; misunderstandings arising from the diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds of those enrolled; inability to reintegrate uprooted rural youth in the countryside once they have had a taste of city life.
The sponsors' ideology has often been adapted to local circumstances and, on occasion, even been indirectly challenged. Recently, a European visitor to the Kenyan YMCA's farm school found a surprising interpretation of the organization's initials blazoned across the familiar triangular emblem posted at the institution's gate: 'Young Men's Cow Association'.(33) Valuable though non-governmental projects are, they can do little more than trace a footpath where an eight-lane motorway is needed. Some willingly, others less so, most African and a few Asian governments have experimented with a variety of fulltime training-cum-service schemes designed to get jobless boys and girls off the streets and through the limbo between school or childhood and productive activity.
Since many of these schemes have been inspired by --- and some patterned on --- the para-military Israeli Nahal (short for 'Pioneer Fighting Youth') a few words may be said about this successful institution. Launched in 1948 and systematized under the 1949 Defence Service Law, the Nahal affords boy and girl conscripts who volunteer for it, and who have been pre-trained by youth movements, the opportunity to receive agricultural training and carry out civilian development tasks during their military service period. The ultimate aim is to channel the hardiest young people to sparsely populated areas with difficult terrain where, it is hoped, they will subsequently settle in collective or co-operative communities.
Knowing they will be called up at eighteen for two years' national service, Israeli young people may under this unique system prepare in advance to volunteer for the Nahal. This preparation takes place in traditional private youth organizations or in the State-run Gadna youth movement. On being drafted, the youngsters usually volunteer for the Nahal in a group. After a brief period of basic military instruction, most of the groups are sent for a year to Kibbutzim or other types of farm settlement, after which they decide whether or not to join or found a community after their service, which they finish in jobs corresponding to this decision. In the past decade about a third of Nahal members (who in turn account for a quarter of all defence conscripts) have chosen to remain in the country.
Since the creation of the institution, Nahal trainees have worked in some 100 communities and are involved in the founding of a further hundred. As for the two thirds who return to urban life, according to ILO it is felt that while it would be preferable if a greater number were to persevere, their service in the Nahal has been none the less beneficial in itself because of the experience it has given them ... as well as because of the material part they have played in the Nahal during their period of service.(34)
Afro-Asian experimentation with systems like the Nahal became widespread about 1960, thanks as often as not to assistance of Nahal-trained Israeli experts.(35) Its present evolution poses four major questions. The first two deal with why youth is mobilized: production or education? Is 'back to the land' possible? The other two cover how youth is mobilized: voluntarily or by obligation? Heavy structure or light structure?
Should mass service accentuate immediate and concrete or long-term and intangible results, should it absorb unemployment and produce or train and educate? The obvious temptation facing governments is to put young people to work and think about educating them afterwards. An early Tunisian programme, the chantiers de chômeurs ('workcamps for the unemployed') was a good example of the first alternative. Launched by protectorate authorities in 1954 and continued by the Tunisian Government after Independence, the chantiers had the twin aim of tiding jobless over slack periods in the labour market while accomplishing odd jobs of public works. Open to physically fit men over eighteen who received a ration of US-supplied semolina and worked in ten-day shifts to spread the benefits among as many unemployed as possible, the chantiers were a welfare measure of doubtless immediate utility but dubious long-range value.
They were revamped and renamed 'workcamps in the struggle against underdevelopment' in 1958 when, significantly, responsibility for them was transferred from the Ministry of Social Affairs to the Direction of the Plan. Although literacy and adult education classes were introduced, the government remained, as President Bourguiba put it in 1959, 'essentially preoccupied by the increase of production'.(36)
Such systems vary from country to country in organization, clientele and degree of dependence on external aid. But they share the objectives of sponging up unemployment and obtaining maximum production from unused manpower, whether young or not. The Burmese Rehabilitation Brigade is an example of a body that puts particular stress on re-education. Unemployed boys receive vocational training while girls take homemaking courses. In the decade following its creation in 1950, the Rehabilitation Brigade carried out a variety of construction projects and mobilized some 5,000 young people. Another programme balancing education and production is the Kenya Youth Service whose prime objective is 'to put unemployed young people into an environment that will inculcate good citizenship and provide an opportunity to contribute to the social and economic development of the country'.(37) Founded in 1964, the Service has enlisted some 3,000 volunteers --- the equivalent of one twentieth of a single year's unemployed school-leavers --- in road, bridge and dam building, tree-planting, bush clearing, tsetse fly control and irrigation works, demarcation for settlement schemes and development of National Parks. Though still in its infancy, the scheme is already considered by the government to have 'become a major force in Kenya's development'.(38)
A growing majority of countries experimenting with mass youth mobilization have chosen to make it an educational experience as much as, if not more than, a production force. Generally, a distinction is made between vocational training and general education, both being included in teaching provided. Thus, the Malian Service civique aims to inculcate more than basic technical knowledge and seeks to make its 2,000 recruits more than unthinking, if skilled, producers. Citizenship training is of utmost importance in the Malian Service which devotes one third of its time to educational activities. Camp life itself is organized to be a permanent living lesson in individual awareness of and commitment to collective goals, be they those of the camp or those of the nation. Each evening, recruits and staff gather round the camp fire to discuss and analyse the day's important events from a local villager's unexpected hostility to a new development project announced by President Keita or a debate in the UN Security Council.
Through this and other forms of education, progress is made towards solving a problem vital to the growth --- even to the survival --- of many African countries: tribal differences and rivalries. Like the Brotherhood and Unity Yugoslav Brigades, Malian and other national service systems aim to transcend ethnic divisions and instil through national co-operation a national consciousness. Even in the Central African Republic where there is no tribal problem and a single language --- Sangho --- is understood throughout the nation, a major function assigned to the 500 strong Young Pioneers Movement is 'to give the youth ... a training based on learning and a love of their country.'(39)
An early error of some mass mobilization organizers was to assume that once volunteers had worked and been trained for a year or two, they would automatically find jobs or return to the land on leaving civic service schemes. Recent experience indicates that insufficient attention has been paid to post-service reintegration of volunteers into developing economies and changing societies.
Since the aim of some schemes is to resettle in agriculture youngsters who have already migrated to the city or would have done if given the chance, it must be queried whether 'back to the land' programmes are realistic. One, a Cambodian Government project for resettling several hundred unemployed boys from Phnom-Penh (the capital) in special youth villages, does seem to have had a modicum of success. In Dahomey, the success of Scout and other resettlement projects is directly proportionate to their proximity to large towns. Yet it is obvious that not all that country's young unemployed who have fled the land (one half of Cotonou's fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds, for instance) can be regrouped within its three or four greater urban areas. Another African nation's female civic service was radically overhauled a few months ago when its leaders realized that rural girls were volunteering not --- as the government wished --- to become good village homemakers but because they thought service a short-cut to the capital city.
Indeed, success with 'back to the land' programmes is the exception rather than the rule. Unemployed young Africans want one thing: a job in town. And if they can't get that they settle for only one alternative: unemployment in town. 'Once a young person has emigrated to the city,' a West African youth leader told the author, 'you won't get him to resettle further than an hour's walk from the nearest cinema.' As long as the disparity of living standards between town and country continues to widen, Afro-Asian rural exodus will be incurable. But can it be prevented?
Mali thinks so. By statute, three quarters of its civic service volunteers must be rural youths and all recruits are warned at the start of their two-year period that they will be neither trained nor aided to find administrative, industrial or other urban jobs. The accent is, rather, placed on arousing a sense of responsibility in youngsters who have not yet been tempted to leave the countryside and providing them with agricultural and craft training so that, according to the Decree that created the Service in 1960, 'back in their villages, the young recruits who have completed their Civic Service will contribute by their enthusiasm and knowledge to the regeneration of the peasantry and the development of the Malian economy.'(40)
Through an extensive network of post-service technical and political backstopping --- local government officials have a list of and regularly visit 'graduates' settled in their region --- every effort is made to hold the young men on the land. According to an ILO expert, resettled youths endeavouring to leave their villages are rare 'thanks to community and party discipline and the fact that when a young man returns home on leaving the Service his special responsibilities are acknowledged.(41)
Senegal and Togo are also arriving at the conclusion that rural exodus is more readily prevented than cured. So is the Central African Republic. There, the Pioneers themselves decide where they and their families will settle. But authorities encourage them to choose areas in a state of decline because, reports an ILO observer, 'it has been confirmed that cooperative villages have a truly germinal effort.' So much so that 'in a spontaneous surge of interest the representatives of every region are asking to have co-operative villages established in their constituencies.' This expert concludes that 'if what has been accomplished so far appears a little limited, there are indications that seem to justify future optimism.'(42) No mean success in the problem-fraught operation of preventing rural exodus which, in Asia as well as Africa, has strewn many a disastrous failure along the roadside of experimentation.
If preventing the flight to towns is hazardous, curing it by resettlement on the land is, as we have seen, all but impossible. What, then, can be done for unemployed urban youth? The Jamaica Youth Corps (JYC) is one answer.(43) Though realizing that only accelerated and diversified industrialization would absorb nearly one fifth of unemployed urban Jamaicans, the island's youth authorities decided in 1955 to equip at least some of the jobless, unskilled and often illiterate young men to fend for themselves more competitively on the labour market. They knew that by creating the Jamaica Youth Corps they could not reduce unemployment. But they hoped to mould among young job-seekers an elite characterized by initiative and integrity as well as skill, boys who would be valuable citizens as well as good workers. Since then, roughly 10,000 fifteen- to twenty-year-olds have spent twelve to eighteen months at the Corps' two camps.
The Corps works 'on the assumption that every man can be a leader in some situation [and offers] each camper the opportunity for leadership training'. This is done by delegating responsibilities, conducting leadership courses and 'by placing campers in positions where they then can give of their special skills and talents'.(44) This policy of consciously organizing camp life as an educational experience has paid off handsomely. In a situation of continuing high unemployment, the JYC's reputation enables 70 per cent of Corpsmen to find jobs immediately on terminating service.
One blistering afternoon in mid 1962 the author was urging a cantankerous 2CV along a dirt road joining the national capital of a French-speaking African country to an important county seat. For the first time, he was personally faced with the problem of compulsion in African youth mobilization schemes. Rounding a sharp bend he came upon --- and nearly ran into --- a majestic tree four feet in diameter and neatly felled across the track. A group of smirking young peasants, axes and machetes in hand, gathered round the car. One, who spoke some French, explained that they had 'volunteered' for highway maintenance and that the tree had blocked the road 'by mistake'.
Under closer questioning and having ascertained that the author was not a government inspector, the young man readily affirmed that they had been mobilized by force. In the face of threats, sabotage was the only means left of expressing their displeasure. And the author's two-hour detour through the jungle was inaccessible to the coastward bound mahogany transport lorries usually using the blocked road. Such 'voluntary service', probably dreamt up by some bright bureaucrat in an air-conditioned office, successfully alienated numerous young people from national development objectives and programmes. Where they resorted to sabotage, it slowed rather than accelerated the economy.
Whether termed 'voluntary' or not, a number of African youth mobilization schemes have been criticized by International Labour Office (ILO) missions as treading dangerously near the sensitive toes of international conventions on forced labour. Governments have reacted vigorously to such warnings, pointing out that their economic situation is dramatically different from that of the countries that originated such conventions many years ago. Rich nations organize military defence conscription without being subjected to ILO criticism, they also argue, why can't poor nations organize economic defence mobilization? Universal obligatory education is an internationally accepted goal whose realization is urged and facilitated by Unesco --- a UN agency; how can a sister agency condemn stop-gap work-and-study measures?
This discussion still rages today although in most quarters it is evolving from argument to dialogue. What is accepted by all concerned is that voluntary service has a different meaning in Afro-Asia from in North America and Europe. Material sacrifice, firstly, is absent from most mass mobilization schemes. Indeed, the basic difference between elite and mass service is that the latter's recruits gain materially from joining a pioneer corps or civic service. A pair of boots, a uniform, regular pocket money, a camp-bed to sleep on at night and three square meals a day may represent a sacrifice for many a university student or white collar employee. For the jobless youth, they are a godsend. More important, as suggested in the previous section of this chapter, is the spirit in which youngsters are mobilized. 'In the long run, a lot more will be achieved with a handful of volunteers than with an army of conscripts!' exclaims one student of African youth service, meaning that the faith of a few committed militants is more effective than the muscles of hundred of unthinking recruits.(45) This rather rhetorical view is perhaps too Western and one wonders if the Yugoslav brigades aren't proof that large numbers of young people can be mobilized voluntarily. In any event, a distinction must be drawn between obligation and compulsion.
Past-masters at empiricism, English-speaking Afro-Asian countries have generally made even para-military systems of youth mobilization strictly voluntary. Several French-speaking countries, sharing the French weakness for viewing in the light of absolute theory things which may be impossible to apply to present reality, have made their civic services obligatory. Thus the Malian and Central African schemes are both obligatory in principle. Some countries even provide for fines and imprisonment for refusal to comply with youth service conscription. In practice, however, neither Mali nor the Central African Republic nor most other countries with 'obligatory' schemes has ever felt the need to use compulsion: the number of volunteers regularly outstrips enrolment possibilities. In Congo (Brazzaville) call-up notices have been issued on occasions. But many more youngsters applied than were actually served with notices. In one instance there were 1,600 applications for 150 civic service places.(46)
Thus, in the immediate future, the main problem of youth service recruiters will be to place eager volunteers, not to drum unwilling conscripts into the ranks. By virtue of the very underdevelopment they are attempting to overcome, youth corps organizers are often unable to accommodate more than half of the young applicants. In addition many have only recently become conscious of the limitations of cost. Six or seven years ago when Afro-Asian governments considering founding civic services were becoming numerous, but when experience actually acquired was still slim, youth mobilization seemed particularly attractive as a self-financing proposition.
The value of work projects carried out by participants would, it was thought, offset the costs incurred to house, feed, outfit, supervise and train them. In some instances --- e.g. the Senegalese workcamp schools and Jamaica Youth Corps --camps do nearly succeed in feeding themselves. In most cases, however, those hoping for a high short-term return on initial outlay found their expectations unfounded. In spite of the work executed, youth mobilization is, like education, generally a long-term low-return investment in manpower improvement. And, as such, the necessary infra-structure --- camps, cadres etc. --- can only be built up progressively.
Even accepting that mass youth mobilization cannot be self-sufficient, organizers still ask whether a heavy structure or light structure is more appropriate. Usually influenced by Israeli experts and/or attracted by the advantages of military organization, those favouring a heavy structure point, first of all, to the need to take people out of the conservative village milieu for a prolonged period. It takes between one and two years, they argue, for the recruit to be made literate in rudimentary English or French, taught the basics of modern agricultural techniques, tool care and elements of general education, as well as the necessary leadership qualities to use and transmit new skills when he returns to his native village or moves to a pioneer settlement. Furthermore, in order to imbue volunteers with a sense of discipline and an esprit de corps, and to obtain allegiance to modern ways of living and working, it is felt necessary to dress them in uniforms, put them through military drill, house them in cinderblock houses and instruct them on tractors and trucks. Most of the countries organizing mass mobilization programmes have opted for some variation of the heavy structure.
Recently, however, evaluation of schemes that have already existed for a number of years has led a few countries to experiment with more flexible structures. Ivory Coast, for instance, has withdrawn responsibility for its Civic Service from the army. In a more striking about-face, Senegal abandoned in 1963 its original decidedly 'heavy' youth mobilization system for the current, markedly 'lighter' workcamp-schools. 'To covet a model chicken-coop imported from abroad like the one at the livestock station,' the government earthily explained 'is an error. To approximate that chicken-coop with the materials at hand, so that it can be reproduced locally, is to have the pioneer spirit.'(47) On terminating his service period, the volunteer
has become accustomed to acting instead of waiting passively. He knows how to shift for himself as regards all vital necessities: housing, agriculture, hygiene. He knows how to organize himself and organize a human group... . . He knows henceforth that with the means at his disposal he can live better.(48)
The double reason for this evolution appeared in the grey 'morning after' Independence when it was recognized by some countries that certain grandiose development schemes were too unwieldy and costly to be practical. Firstly, it was found that prolonged withdrawal from villages was so successful in inculcating new ideas and methods that many participants were positively alienated from rural life and only returned home or remained in the countryside against their will. Some programmes were seen to quicken rather than staunch the flow of young blood to the city. The light structure seeks therefore 'to polarize the youths towards their village, not to make them want to leave it'.(49)
Instead of full-time service fulfilled in centralized camps for a year or more, proponents of the light structure suggest successive 'short and intensive mobilization periods near home villages to avoid disadaptation'.(50) It follows that service education should be adapted to a country's immediate needs and possibilities. Literacy, as some organizers point out is not good per se. What do reading and writing profit a young millet farmer if he cannot be supplied with simply conceived reading matter telling him how to use chemical fertilizer? And what does such reading matter profit him if he cannot be supplied with chemical fertilizer? Better to teach him simple arithmetic so he can no longer be cheated by grain merchants.
Why train him to drive and maintain a tractor since he will seldom see let alone own one, and couldn't afford petrol or upkeep even if he did? Furthermore, housing, clothing and other conditions of service should be patterned on --- while being a bit better than --- village living standards. Teach boys how to dig sanitary latrines, but don't accustom them (as is done in one rural training centre) to flush-toilets. 'Where there are buildings,' advises the French specialist quoted above, 'they should be made out of local materials that villagers can find and use; if there are means of transport, they should be modest --- otherwise they only accentuate de-ruralization . . .'(51)
The second, financial, defence of the light structure dovetails with this psychological argument. While admitting the need to recognize youth service as a long-term investment, cost, it is maintained, must be kept to a minimum. Average expenditure on each corpsman in the light structure is reckoned by the above-quoted expert at three times national per capita income; in heavy schemes it is many times that figure. Uniforms. cinderblock houses and tractors are alarmingly expensive as well as pedagogically harmful.
In short, advocates of the heavy structure for Afro-Asian mass youth mobilization belong to the optimistic school of developers. They abhor doing things on the cheap, believe in building a complete economic and social infra-structure as quickly as possible and hope confidently that resultant debts will be covered by increasing national production and foreign aid. The light structure's proponents may be situated in the pessimistic school. Noting that foreign assistance is stagnant and timidly increasing national economic growth is overtaken by worsening international trade terms and galloping demography, they believe in balancing the budget, surgically controlling infra-structural cancer and making do with the means at hand. Only time will tell whether optimists or pessimists are right. For the moment, it may be said that the schemes of most Afro-Asian governments for mass youth mobilization still prefer solid if costly imported chicken-coops to rickety --- and cheaper --- models of local manufacture.