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PROFILE: ROGER LANDRUM

With his usual care and attention to practical results, Landrum has moved into the international arena with his newest organization: Youth Service International (YSI).  With YSI, he intends to expand "youth service programming and policy support for young people in developing democracies to serve in their own countries."  Landrum has pilot programs starting up in Hungary and Zimbabwe.

His contributions and achievements in bringing back home the spirit of the Peace Corps serve as a model for what Returned Volunteers can accomplish to improve our society. He has taken the journey and "preserve(d) the true course," as Henry David Thoreau said we must.

From all-state, multi-sport athlete at Reed City High School, Michigan, to a 1997 Honorary Doctorate in Public Service from his alma mater, Albion College, Landrum's work affirms the viability of independent initiative in social change, and the beneficiaries have been tens of thousands of American young men and women. For his contributions, Landrum received a Lifetime Achievement Award for "your vision, commitment and leadership for the national and community service field" from a group of ten organizations, including United Way of America, National 4-H, and Points of Light Foundation.

He credits early Peace Corps volunteers and staff for changing his life: "It was like finding my lost tribe." Landrum's remarkable contributions to American society after the Peace Corps demonstrate what most PCVs have always known:  trainees who challenge the status quo are likely to become the most successful activists for social progress.  Landrum says he and his best friend were labeled by the Peace Corps psychiatrists as "'high risk, high gain' prospects and [they] threatened not to let us go unless we toned it down."

Assigned to Nsukka University as an English teacher, Landrum and twenty-nine others arrived with the American spirit of openness and flexibility, foreign to the British-trained Nigerian students.  With access to such Nigerian authors as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, the volunteers helped reorient the curriculum toward West African literature.

Landrum lived in the college dorm and would go "into the villages and walk around, learn some Igbo, observe ceremonies, meet people."  Although he realized he wanted to be the "excellent PCV," he genuinely liked mixing and learning the Igbo culture.  Although Landrum returned to the US and served as a recruiter and training officer for three years, his "his high risk, high gain" personality drove him into exploring his own dreams, or as he quotes Joseph Campbell: "following his bliss."  First he created Teachers Inc., (67-72), a domestic Peace Corps that placed teachers in inner city classrooms and racially integrated school districts.

During a five-year hiatus, he developed a teacher preparation program and The Whole Earth Curriculum for upper elementary schools at Yale, and completed his doctorate in Human Development at Harvard in 1977.  He was appointed to direct a commission on national youth service at the Potomac Institute and later served as senior policy advisor for Senator Alan Cranston.

Twenty years after returning from Nigeria, Landrum had recorded a distinguished career engaging America's youth in service programs.  But his greatest achievement was yet to come.  In 1986, he co-founded Youth Service America (YSA) with foundation and corporate support.

A "networking and policy advocacy organization," YSA encourages and supports "grassroots youth service programs." In the nineties, YSA's pioneering work has evolved through Congressional legislation into AmeriCorps and the Corporation for National Service.  With YSA, Landrum initiated a number of programs that continue today.  One is the National Youth Service Day, with two million participants annually.  Another is the Fund for Social Entrepreneurs, a program selecting each year, and supporting for three years, six young entrepreneurs launching new youth service organizations.  Beginning with a Ford Foundation grant, Landrum was able to recruit support from many large foundations and corporations, including Kellogg, Microsoft, and Prudential.

When Landrum decided to move to international youth service recently, Father Ted Hesburgh of the University of Notre Dame, commended Landrum "for the wonderful and inspired leadership you have given YSA over the past decade. You have been an inspiration to many of us."

One of Landrum's most difficult achievements as an RPCV was overcoming political opposition to the Peace Corps 25th Anniversary Conference in Washington, DC, in 1986.  Reagan advisors worried about anti-administration demonstrations from a large gathering of RPCVs.  When national Peace Corps officials refused to sanction Landrum's plan, he organized a coalition of RPCVs and got a MacArthur Foundation grant to support the conference. The national Peace Corps office decided to join in.  Over 6,000 RPCVs joined in the Capitol for the three-day fall celebration.  Landrum credits this gathering as the catalyst that "kick-started the National Peace Corps Association and many local 'Friends of' RPCV organizations."

A remarkable life for a boy whose Texas parents were semiliterate and who separated when he was three. His over-protective father "kidnapped" Roger and ran off to work for Gulf Oil in Michigan, defying a court order.  Landrum claims his childhood was "relatively happy," spent hunting, fishing, and playing sports.  He was educated in a one-room country school and read every book in the library.  So, how does an all-state halfback and forward recruited by major state universities become a major intellect and actor on the national scene?

For one, Landrum admits that his unusual childhood gave him a sense of detachment, "carrying a private world of my own thoughts and imagination."  He developed a thirst for adventure early.  He also felt the need to be independent, to control his future.  And, from his athletic ability he gained self-confidence.

The strongest influences on Landrum's character were mentors, especially Elkin "Ike" Isaac at Albion College.  Competing with Michigan State and the University of Michigan for Roger Landrum the athlete, Isaac told him, "I know you are a young hot shot in sports, but I want to warn you not to come to Albion College unless you can cut the mustard intellectually because we take academics more seriously than sports here."  That "turned me on," Landrum says.

Elkin recruited Landrum for summer counseling work in Arizona and for tutoring local minorities near the Albion campus.  In short, Elkin combined both mental and physical talents in serving society, a model that has served Landrum well throughout his career.  Still, Landrum had his mind set on sports in college until knee injuries forced him to become "a serious student.... I had to find a different kind of identity."  He went on to complete a master's in English literature at Bowling Green University in Ohio and the doctorate at Harvard.

Landrum has been giving to young people the support and encouragement that his mentors gave to him.  "During all this time, the most satisfying work has been mentoring young people in the community and national service field."

Robert Curvin, Vice President of Communications for The Ford Foundation, hailed Landrum as "one of the handful of people who built today's youth service movement."  Whether planned or not, Landrum's life itself echoes Thoreau who wrote, "my life has been the poem I would have writ. But I could not both live and utter it."

Editor's Note:  The author is a teacher of English in Arlington,TX.
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MEMBER'S FORUM: WHY SHOULD IT MATTER?

"When I was in Nigeria I met with the American Consulate representative and was told to get the hell out of the country as soon as possible due to the dangerous conditions that exist as a matter of everyday life.  My life was constantly at risk.  Even in the countryside there wasn't much safety.

"Friends of Nigeria?  You must be joking.  Do yourselves a favor and focus your lives on matters of substance."

Indeed, Mr. Theo raises the central question about our existence as a group.  Why should we, or any Americans, care about Nigeria?  If Mr. Theo's impressions are accurate, what possible benefit is there in maintaining a dialogue about Nigerian life and future?  Since independence, Nigeria has one of the worse records of stability on the continent, and the one sure bet is there will be another coup, possibly before the August elections.

The Pope cared, but he didn't change life in Nigeria.  President Clinton conspicuously bypassed this largest of African nations, obviously to relay American's displeasure with the political mess in Nigeria.

Of course, we can pull out the textbooks and cite "potential trade" with one of the largest nations in the world.  We do it with the Peoples Republic of China, so why not Nigeria?  Maybe the oil would enable us to extricate ourselves a little from the Middle Eastern stranglehold.

We can argue that African economic strength and growth is the wave of the twenty-first century, and ultimately, Nigeria, with its rich resources, must become a continental leader.We can pretend to represent an American Idealism that is concerned with the quality of life of people on a continent with ancestral ties with a quarter or more of our population.

But let us close the textbook and examine the issue Theo really addresses.  Why should we care?

I care for the same reason I worry that as I write, dozens of North Korean children are dying of starvation.  I care for the abandoned nine-year-old who roams the streets of an inner American city committing crimes.  I care because that is the essential test of my humanity, the necessary quality for defining myself as a human being.

I care about Nigeria in particular because that is where I left a significant piece of myself.  The people, not the Nigerian government, changed me radically.  If I had spent the same quality time in Honduras or Borneo, I would care as personally about those people.  Nigeria made life real for me.

If, as Theo suggests, it is a fiction, that my sentiments are misplaced, then I must adapt the wisdom of poet Wallace Stevens to my own situation: this is my "supreme fiction," that guiding philosophy and practice that determines who I am each morning when I face myself in the mirror.

The persons we are in the end can only be the result of how we renew ourselves from day to day. The value of caring is in defining ourselves, who we are, each of us as an individual.
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SOUVENIRS

The farthest I had ever traveled was Newfoundland, which I reached with my family by car. Television was only just beginning to bring the world into our living room.  I had grown up mostly in small, midwestern towns, worked my way through college living at home, counted my year-younger sister as my best friend, and had never had a friend of any color but white.

When I announced I was joining the Peace Corps, my mother first wept, then worried.  My mentor and chairman of my major department at the university was disappointed I was not taking a good job in the city.  Some of my friends warned me of the dangers I would face in Africa.  A current date was sure I was about to throw away two of the best years of my life.  My younger sister started to plan a trip to come visit me.  My father was quiet...I think he envied me the adventure of it all.

During the first weeks I was in Nigeria, my host family was the Chief J.O.O. Ojo family, Wesley College, Ibadan.  Chief Ojo was a logical host for me because his home village was Ifaki-Ekiti, where I was assigned.  In fact, he actually delivered me to the Ifaki Methodist Girls High School when my stay at his home was over.  The entire Ojo family was warm and welcoming to me, and the younger of the five children were especially curious, so I pretended not to notice when they "accidentally" touched my arm or hair.

I got violently sick the first week at their home, unable to leave my bed except to dash to the bathroom at regular intervals.  After almost two days of not eating, Mrs. Ojo came into my bedroom and insisted I had to have some nourishment.  I dreaded any yam or rice but nodded I would try to eat something.  When she reappeared, I will never forget the tray she set down beside my bed.  "When we lived in England, this is what we ate when we were sick," she said as she uncovered a bowl of tomato soup, tea, and crackers—my own, half-English mother's remedies.

Chief Ojo granted this naive volunteer unearned respect.  We would sit and chat, and I particularly remember one night the Chief questioned me about how I thought the Nigerian economy could be improved.  He listened intently as I babbled about needing local industry, such as processing groundnuts into peanut butter rather than exporting the raw product and importing the peanut butter.

One evening just before we left for Ifaki, Chief Ojo asked if all the black people looked alike to me.  I hesitated to answer...so he quickly went on to tell me how when he first went to London to study he was shocked not to be able to tell the people apart.  White people all looked alike!  But, he recalled, it didn't take long before he began to see the individuals.  Perhaps it would be that way for me, too.

How right he was.  Within weeks after starting to teach, I could not believe there was ever a time beautiful Adunni looked like forlorn Grace to me, or I didn't appreciate how fetching Funmilayo was, or how cute little Comfort.

Having experienced this, it still appalled me to hear my students confuse me with my British, missionary principal. I was 22, blonde, clear-skinned, 125 pounds, and shaved my legs. She was older, dumpy, brunette, had a bad complexion and several long dark chin hairs, wore glasses, and-worst of all—did not shave her dark hairy legs!

One morning, sometime during the second year at my school, I awoke, went to the bathroom to wash up, looked in the mirror, and startled myself. I was white. Chief Ojo had not warned me that this would ever happened.

During my two years in Nigeria, I visited the Ojo's whenever I was in Ibadan and really felt they were my Nigerian family.  When my sister came to visit Nigeria, I took her to visit them. Judie delivered to Chief and Mrs. Ojo one of my parent's silver goblets from their prized set of twelve: their gift to the Nigerian family which had cared for me.

After I left Nigeria, I kept in touch with Chief Ojo and his family through Christmas cards. Ten years later I was living in Liberia, and my widowed father on his first trip to West Africa was my houseguest. I received a note from Chief Ojo. He was coming to a college not 100 miles from where I was living in Liberia to give a speech and asked if we might be able to see each other.

My father and I were delighted and joined Chief Ojo in Gbanga, Liberia, for a reunion. We took pictures. My favorite is the three of us—me, standing between my two fathers.

That was more than twenty years ago.  Now that they are both gone, the picture is a special treasure. Me and my fathers, one white, one black.
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NEW YORK HAS AFRICAN FILM FESTIVAL

A role I often played as a PCV was that of observer.  Thirty-some years later I came to Lincoln Center (in rain reminiscent of a Nigerian wet season) to reinvent the role:  this time, to see films by mostly young African directors and hear them talk about their work.

My plan was to sweep across Africa and to home in on Yorubaland via Cameroon. I, therefore, attended three of 14 programs and saw five films.: Gypsy Cab or Clando, three selections from Africa Dreaming (from Zimbabwe, Senegal and Namibia), and Sango.

Clando (95 min.), Les Films du Raphia, 42 Rue Monge, 75005 Paris, France, 33-1-4529- 1427, fax 33-1-4662-9290).

The Q & A sessions were themselves a pleasure. Especially good was Jean Marie Teno (b. 1954), the Festival's featured artist (with Clando and two others). Short, clever and funny, wearing a dashiki and black-rimmed glasses, Teno is a sweet, serious man. Although his principal background is in documentaries and most of his current projects are non-fictional, he is also a fine storyteller

Jean Marie Teno was  the Festival's featured artist (with Clando and two others).  Short, clever and funny, wearing a dashiki and black-rimmed glasses, Teno is a sweet, serious man.  Although his principal background is in documentaries and most of his current projects are non-fictional, he is also a fine storyteller.

Asked about the dangers of filming political oppression in the country where it occurs, Teno evoked the familiar unreality of many of the world's polities.  He was allowed to borrow police uniforms for Clando's jail scenes, but a detective was assigned to shadow the crew so the uniforms would not disappear.  As the filming progressed, this detective turned into a valued associate, instructing the actors on important details.  His best work was instruction in the torture of a prisoner.  In the event, the prison scenes in Clando are harrowingly authentic-to me, at least-and flavored with a balance between humor and sympathy, and fear and anger, which make them rich and-well-lovely.  I suppose the success of these scenes is a tribute to the detective and to Teno's general humanity and particular ability to learn from, and appreciate, his ersatz colleague. Not to stereotype, but the tone of these scenes seems distinctively "African."

The Douala cab scenes will remind old hands of Lagos in the 60's and 70's and of books like Ekwenzi's People of the City.  Not all of Clando is this good.  The remarkably candid Teno admitted it was hard to find the same creative energy shooting the German scenes as the Cameroonian, a familiar and sad plaint of many diasporas.

I also enjoyed in Clando (and, in the three short films from Africa Dreaming) a strong story. Clando is a very political, but very undoctrinaire film.  The plot is open-ended, and Cameroonians complain the film lacks solutions, but he passionately observed how presumptuous it would be for a filmmaker to preach to his countrymen courses of action likely to cost them their freedom or lives.

Africa Dreaming (82 min.) is available on videocassette at some libraries and may be ordered from California Newsreel Films (African Library Series) 149 Ninth St., Suite 420, San Francisco, CA 94103, 415-621-6196, fax 415-621-6522.

The other Q & A that night was with Farai Sevenzo, a polite, handsome young man with a shaved head, leather jacket and purple shirt, much younger than Teno, and several generations removed from me. Sevenzo spoke interestingly enough about such topics as technique, themes and influences (from Rhodesian documentaries to Spike Lee to The World of Apu).  He explained that Africa Dreaming was made by six filmmakers from across the continent, each given a brief to make a half-hour film about love.  They then met in Johannesburg to workshop their "rough drafts," after which they went home and completed their films.  Of the three included in the Film Center's program, Sevenzo's The Last Picture was shown first.

This film combines a young man's exuberance with a wonderfully mature mind.  What viewers may remember from this version of the old January-May triangle is Marjorie Masukusa, a young actress whose beauty lights up the screen.  The Last Picture is remarkable for its African "take" on the old story.

Since audiences are presumably familiar with what always happens in comedy when old fools marry young beauties, it is very suspenseful to watch the unfolding of Sevenzo's version, which is subtle, measured, beautifully paced, affecting and unaffected.  (Of course, a Zimbabwean might be less surprised by what happens than I was.)  The actor who plays the old man makes that role complex and credible.  (The acting in most of the films was very fine.)  But, interestingly, it is the young beauty who, at each juncture, dictates the course of events.  To return to the opening idea of this review, my role as observer, this film about a photographer who is both actor and observer adds a new layer of intellectual onion for theoreticians of cinema-not me-to peel.

The three films in Africa Dreaming go from strength to strength. So Be It, Joseph Gai Ramaka's adaptation of Soyinka, is a stark, chilling take on juju in a Wolof village. The story pits tender love and sensuality against horrible force and unreason.  The feeling and tone of this film might be described as a completely African mixture of Poe and Sartre (Huis Clos).  And the last film, the Namibian Richard Pekleppa's The Homecoming, is perhaps the most affecting of the five I saw, in its straightforward depiction of a nearly tragic family rift caused by economic forces.

Like Clando's street and prison scenes, Africa Dreaming touched my heart and left me with vivid images: children in The Last Picture rolling across a dusty space in a tire; in So Be It, a sick girl pulling a homemade doll on a string and a sick boy beating the doll with a stick as they wander across an empty landscape; and in The Homecoming, three Namibian women, young, middle-aged and very old, squatting in the shadow of a truck skeleton, lighted by firelight, softly negotiating their way around the tragedy to a peaceful end which they mark with a hymn in three-part harmony.  Again, I do not mean to generalize about things African, but the three films in Africa Dreaming have several common features which, together, leave a strong impression of contemporary Africa.  In all three, there are dry landscapes with fires continually burning; few and stark trees (no rain forests); jagged or hump-backed hills; poor or sick children; and people whose strengths battle eloquently against the predominant starkness of their lot.  There are no giraffes loping across screens lit by golden sunsets.

We were told Obafemi Lasode, the director of Sango, could not attend the Festival because he was in Hollywood.  Sango is one of the few films to emerge from Nigeria in recent years.  Sad to say, Sango is both the most ambitious and probably the weakest of the five films I saw.  I have always gazed with special interest, in museums and homes, at the numerous incarnations of the legendary Yoruba king-turned orisha, he of the double axe.  Long ago, I also read a play about Sango, Oba Ko So ("The King is Not Dead").  So I was looking forward to this new incarnation.

Sango is a dramatized chronicle with narrative voice-over. To me, the acting of Sango's principals has a woodenness that gives much of the film the feeling of a combined costume epic a la Chaka Zulu and a school pageant.  This weakness is caused in large part by stilted dialogue.  The Film Center's press kit states, "the oral traditions, unique pacing, and non-linear style of African story-telling defy genres [and] challenge the norms of subjectivity."  However, since the Festival films I had previously seen obey many of these same conventions of African film narrative, and manage, in different ways and measures, to be touching and gripping, my expectations had been conditioned before I saw Sango.

My criticism seems a poor return for the hospitality I enjoyed in Yorubaland, so I am glad to turn to Sango's virtues.  The film gives a clear account of the hero's life and conveys a plausible interpretation of this stern, violent, superhuman figure.  This story of political intrigue and violent usurpation will forcibly echo for Nigerian RPCVs the careers of powerful men from Akintola to Abacha.  Many of the actors are striking-looking, and the secondary characters, such as priests and royal wives and advisors, are played with vigor and authenticity.  Set in Oyo and Nupe (Sango's maternal village), the film gives glimpses of rain forest and savanna and of markets, rituals, and other parts of Yoruba life.  Proverbs and thrilling traditional music, including both drumming and song and chant, light up large parts of Sango.

Other films these days have infinitely more firepower than these from Africa, but few or none offer their depth of feeling and humanity.  Watching them, you'll be thrillingly reconnected with the streets and markets of Lagos and other towns and villages, with Nigerian politics and music, and even with the rituals and celebrations you were lucky enough to attend.  You may find, as I did, that these films bring to renewed life your photographs and memories.  Thus, the old PCV, the old observer, may become an insider once again. Seeing new films from Africa is an excellent idea.
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