Nation: She Had No Idea

From the moment of its inception, the U.S. Peace Corps, for all its laudable aims, was bound to run into trouble sooner or later. As it turned out, that trouble came sooner: last week, just 20 days after the first Peace Corps volunteers arrived in Ibadan. Nigeria, a raucous ruckus was raised by a postcard written by a girl from Foxboro, Mass.

The girl was Margery Jane Michelmore, 23, a magna cum laude graduate of Smith College (1960), who had gone to Nigeria with 36 other Peace Corps pioneers to teach. Although she had undergone seven weeks’ training at Harvard to prepare for her new life, Margery was shocked when she first saw Ibadan, a city of many slums and open sewers in the upland jungles of Nigeria. While still brushing up on her Nigerian history at a University College of Ibadan indoctrination course, she wrote to a friend, Robert V. Storer at Cambridge, and crammed 150 vivid words onto a 5½-inch by 3½-inch postcard, giving her impressions of Ibadan life.

The Revelation. “Dear Bobbo,” Margery wrote, “Don’t be furious about getting a card. I promise a letter next time. I wanted you to see the incredible and fascinating city we were in. With all the training we had we really were not prepared for the squalor and absolutely primitive living conditions rampant both in the city and the bush. We had no idea what ‘underdeveloped’ meant.

“It really is a revelation and [after] we got over the initial horrified shock, a very rewarding experience. Everyone except us lives in the streets, cooks in the streets, sells in the streets, and even goes to the bathroom in the streets . . .”

On her way to the post office, Margery dropped the postcard—and it was picked up by a person or persons unknown. The postcard’s text was mimeographed and passed around the school, and one Dapo Falase, a campus radical and president of the Student Union, called a rally to denounce the Peace Corpsmen as “agents of American imperialism” and “members of America’s international spy ring.” Margery Michelmore offered her resignation to the corps, her apologies to the students of the college for her “thoughtless postcard.” Then she flew out of Nigeria.

Encouraging Signs. In Washington. Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver took the incident more or less philosophically. The language of the student protests, said Shriver, was “familiar rhetoric. It is not surprising that certain groups are working by mind and mimeograph to destroy the Peace Corps.” As for Margery Michelmore, who at week’s end was in Puerto Rico to discuss her Peace Corps future with U.S. officials, Shriver said that “she has not resigned, and we hope she won’t.”

The Peace Corps can expect more such fusses as it tries to aid the world’s under developed lands. But even the case of Margery Michelmore contained encouraging signs. Whatever her indiscretion, Margery wrote without malice, reporting only what she had seen—and plenty of Nigerians realized it. Commented Columnist Tai Solarin in the Lagos Daily Times: “If she was out to ridicule the country, she would be intelligent enough to protect her stings with an envelope. But what she did was a jotting down on a postcard of what she saw. She was sure she was not discovering something new, and not a single Nigerian who knew this part of Nigeria would suggest that she was sending home a made-up story.”