The Seychelles National Youth Service (NYS): Fragments, Thoughts and Reflections on an Experiment in Democratic Education

Abstract

Reflections on the early years of the Seychelles National Youth Service (NYS) and its aspirations and practices.

Ensemble nou pou lutte contre l’injustice

NYS pas tolere parazit

Discipline pou toujours

Hypocrite nou pas tolere

NYS leaders of tomorrow

—Some NYS slogans in Kreol and English

Note: When working for the NYS in 1981, the author was then called Simon Henderson. He took on the surname Murray in 1990 when he became a professional actor. It has stayed with him in all his academic and writing work.

In my context this is the story of an attempt to create a radical system of secondary education in Seychelles based on principles of participatory democracy and a heuristic pedagogy whereby mental and manual learning—head and hand—were equally valorized and practiced. In the late autumn of 1980 I was interviewed—more of a free-ranging conversation really—in a London café by Olivier Le Brun for an as-yet-undefined post within the Seychelles National Youth Service (NYS) and I began work as ‘advisor’ in January 1981. As I shall explain in more detail throughout this chapter the NYS was a state-financed and organized program of education open to all fifteen- to seventeen-year-old young people across the country (Image 27.1: Simon Henderson, 1981). This short chapter attempts to identify the principles and practices that guided the NYS in its very early years of imagining and planning. This is a historical ‘snapshot’—some fragments of time—rather than an overarching account covering the seventeen years of the NYS’ existence. I am writing and reflecting on my own lived experience of the NYS while drawing upon the stories of other key players in the project during its development and early years of existence.

Image 27.1

Work and Health project, NYS. (Image: Simon Murray (Henderson) 1981)

Seychelles: Political and Historical Context

The Republic of Seychelles is an archipelago of 115 islands in the Indian Ocean, some 2000 kilometers off the East African coast and over 3000 from Sri Lanka. Its largest island is Mahé, where most of the population (98,400) live and where the first NYS village was established at Port Launay in 1980. Seychelles bears the yoke of double colonization, first settled by the French in 1770 and then transferred to the British in 1814. Culturally, socially and politically, Seychelles remains a complex ethnic weave of African, Asian and European influences. The country gained independence in 1976 and for a year was led by wealthy ‘playboy’ businessman, James Mancham, until he was deposed by France-Albert René, leader of the Seychelles People’s Progressive Front. In conjunction with other key players, it was René and his government that imagined the NYS and gave birth to the project in 1980.

The NYS: Seeds, Hopes, Plans and Practices

From 1977 René’s government was committed to transforming the country’s key social and economic institutions with a view to removing, or severely modulating, the inequalities and oppressions—class, gender, age, education, skin color and urban/rural poverty—which had become inherent under colonial rule. For René, such a huge investment (financially and politically) in a radical education system accompanied other changes in the social, environmental and economic fabric of the country: welfare and health systems, regulatory structures around the development of tourism in ecologically and environmentally prized areas, expansion of and support for the fishing industry and infrastructural developments in and between the islands. One sensed then—and indeed now—that the NYS was the ‘jewel in the crown’ of these radical policies, partly for international prestige, but more importantly, perhaps, a recognition that profound social change had to be a middle and long-term project beginning with the country’s youth and their thinking, dispositions, attitudes and behaviors.

The journey, of course, was never straightforward. From the beginning, there were countervailing anti-democratic forces which included privileged social groups who wanted to maintain a conventionally limited and elitist educational system. In this context, ‘privilege’ was rooted and performed through class, gender and the pernicious complexities of color and race. In addition, many parents were concerned about the residential nature of the NYS project which they feared would remove their daughters from domestic tasks at home and loosen control over their sexual behavior. When the NYS was officially launched, the compulsory nature of the project provoked opposition in many quarters as it was perceived as a kind of military service. It was in the context of these force fields that the government applied to UNESCO for technical aid and between August 1979 and May 1980 UNESCO consultant, Olivier Le Brun, started work with René, undertaking practical research on how these transformations could be thought of and made concrete. In particular, his brief was to consider how the NYS might contribute to this transformation process. Le Brun was also a member of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at Sussex University (UK) and with key researcher, Robin Murray, they together composed and wrote what was to become the defining map for the development of the NYS. For René and his government to draw upon the support of European minds in the form of Le Brun, Murray and occasionally other members of the IDS team at Sussex raises interesting questions of why a country having thrown off the yoke of colonialism should turn back to the West/Global North for advice and radical thinking in the fields of education and youth development. There are doubtless various answers to this question, but one lay in the reputation and respect with which Le Brun, Murray and the IDS were held for progressive and radical thinking, far removed perhaps from the typical United Nations consultants with dispositions informed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Nonetheless, when a significant influx of European and North American teachers were later recruited—with differing expectations and political thinking—the question reappeared and remained a very pertinent one.

Le Brun and Murray’s ‘map’ entitled The Seychelles National Youth Service: The Seed of a New Society (henceforth The Seed) was never an absolute blueprint but attempted to blend creative debate with concrete proposals for the curriculum and the structure(s) of village life for the first intake of pupils (800+) who would be living on the Port Launay site from February 1981. The Seed ran to seventy-two pages with the first twenty-one devoted to an economic, political and cultural analysis of Seychelles and the remainder, a wide-ranging but detailed set of proposals, for the lived reality of the NYS and Seychellois education as a whole. During his consultancy period, and the writing of The Seed with Murray, Le Brun engaged in many preparatory meetings and reflection with the embryonic NYS Advisory Board (chaired by President René). Apart from its internal purpose and structure, the broader success of the NYS was also to depend on changes to the country’s overall education system, and to this end the two existing elite high schools—Seychelles College and Regina Mundi—were to be phased out. With the blessing of René, a para-military structure and ethos for the NYS (common in a number of newly independent ex-colonies in Africa) were officially rejected in favor of one which articulated the pedagogical principles identified in this chapter. There were, however, forces within the government orientated toward a more para-military (and disciplinary) pedagogy, but for the early years, at least, both the author and other players cited in this chapter felt that these influences were largely in a minority. Further research might reveal the different consequences and behaviors endowed by the NYS project compared to other newly independent countries following basic literacy and numeracy programs alongside and within the training of young political cadres for national (or nationalist) leadership.

From the outset, the aims and purpose of the NYS were ambitious and complex. Framing the whole project was the unequivocal political mission to transform the country into a socialist society and, within this, young people were to have an explicit and leading role. However, the NYS—note the implications of the word ‘service’ in the name—was never to have been a didactic and top-down model of education where students (fifteen to seventeen years) would be drilled into passive obedience to an abstract or dogmatic set of principles. The NYS was to be a prefigurative form for a new society of equal and democratic relationships across every sphere of social life—in work, in the domestic domain, in learning, in relationships and in leisure. In The Seed Le Brun and Murray propose that the project would be based in a village or camp ‘where the children would have the opportunity to discover new ways of learning, working and playing together’ (Le Brun & Murray, 1980, p. 20).

The NYS: The Growth of a Practice

In August and September 1980, a three-week pilot project—or ‘experimental holiday camp’—tested out some of the precepts, ideas and practices with almost 500 young Seychellois volunteers and undertook initial training with older animateurs who had already been selected to work on the Port Launay site when it opened its gates to 820 young people the following February. Le Brun and Murray’s The Seed framed the discourses, conversations and practical activities of the event. Without cost to the participants, each week offered a range of ‘prefigurative’ activities for the young people which included the building of a miniature model village, production of three issues of an embryonic NYS newspaper (Vilaz Lazenes) led by Frances Murray and rehearsals for a village ‘parliament’ which might function on a regular basis when the whole village was properly up and running. Le Brun captures the spirit of the event like this:

The camp was a spectacular major “happening”. A line of photographers were to be seen pointing their cameras at comrades who were filming a group staging a play about pollution control, egged on by an orchestra which was also accompanying a folk group that performed dancing games in which nearly everyone joined … before plunging into the sea, which was thronged with young explorers on yachts. … This experimental camp planted the roots of the democratic organizing spirit on which the NYS prided itself. (Le Brun, 2020)

The NYS formally opened six months later—by this time it was to be a voluntary project for potential students—with an eclectic band of teachers who had been recruited from Europe (UK and Belgium), Sri Lanka, Guinea-Conakry, Mauritius, Canada (largely from French-speaking Quebec) and, of course, Seychelles itself. As noted above, this disparate group came inevitably with different levels of training, experience and commitment to the Socialist ideals of the NYS and its heuristic approaches to learning and teaching. From my memory and perspective, it would be overly simplistic to calibrate these attitudes according to the teachers’ countries of origin. At the time—and in hindsight—these differing perspectives (sometimes pleasingly disparate, sometimes negative and dysfunctional, occasionally toxic) might have been productively resolved if there had been more preparation, training and induction time for the teachers before they became immersed in their daily duties. Relatedly, there were inevitable tensions from time to time between the Murray-Le Brun participatory democratic ethos and the children’s own aspirations on the one hand and the government’s Socialist trajectory on the other. Growing and practicing the seeds of a new society was never going to be uncomplicated or straightforward!

The boys and girls were housed in eighteen separate but paired ‘clusters’ (forty-eight in each) (Image 27.2: Olivier Le Brun, 1981), while classroom teaching was to take place in a study center with sixteen classrooms. The curriculum was to be delivered through a modular system of courses known as ‘blocks’, each one blending education with production and theory with practice. Alongside these seven ‘blocks’—Health, Animal Husbandry, Fishing, Culture, Crops, Information and Construction/Technology (Image 27.3: Hubert Murray, 1981)—Maths, English and French were taught as core curriculum. Le Brun provides some examples of how theory was integrated into practice:

In physics, optics was taught from photography, and acoustics in the context of the radio station; in biology, theoretical knowledge was built up through the volunteers’ experience of agricultural activities (including animal husbandry and fishing) and of cooking and healthcare practice. (Le Brun, 2020)

It seems important at this juncture to reiterate that the ambitious goal of the NYS was to remove hierarchies of knowledge and learning, to challenge fundamentally the belief that some children only need technical/vocational education while others deserve more exalted and valorized ‘academic’ modes of learning. This was to be a pedagogic model that defied the notion that high-quality education could only be delivered through cognitive modes of learning and teaching; rather by melding head and hand, the NYS would enable all students to celebrate and achieve their full potential in either mental or manual labor—or both. Furthermore, the NYS was to confront the very binary that divides effective teaching and learning between thinking and doing. To put it rather crudely, you think more creatively and expansively through a combination of thought and action, and your actions will always be more productive when they are combined with reflection, reasoning and cognition.

Image 27.2

Discussing a project in a cluster, Port Launay NYS Village. (Image: Olivier Le Brun, 1981)

Image 27.3

A work crew of students and animateurs (youth leaders) prepare to raise a roof truss in a classroom. (Image: Hubert Murray, 1981)

Phil Sutcliffe, a journalist from Newcastle upon Tyne, worked with students in the Information Block to produce several editions of a village newspaper every year. The whole process was entirely democratic, as Sutcliffe wryly recalls:

Some wonderful drawings and portraits were made and all the potential articles (by the students) were read out loud to the whole gathering. Nothing was rejected and there was no criticism. It was not a very discriminating democracy! (Sutcliffe, 2020)

Apart from the challenges of productively integrating theory and practice in or around the classroom, the teachers—individually and collectively—were charged with developing modes of assessment and discipline which somehow articulated the utopian ethos of a democratic and Socialist system of education. No small task under any circumstances and one that often generated differing perspectives and solutions. An overriding challenge for all the teachers was how to encourage and enable the students to become active agents in their own learning rather than passive recipients of given information and knowledge. Teachers, Jay Derrick and Gay Lee, drew upon the writings of Paulo Freire and his critique of what he aptly called the ‘banking’ system of education. Freire writes:

Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is a spectator, not re-creator. (Freire, 1975, p. 49)

Of course, those teachers who were disposed to follow Freire-type pedagogies often ran up against pressures of time, space and the sheer numbers of young people in any one class. Moreover, the NYS was taking in students much habituated to the ‘banking’ model upon which their primary education had been based.

Reflecting on the first three years of the NYS I recall a prevailing sense of an energetic laboratory—or melting pot—of ideas, experimentation, frustrations, disagreements and multiple small achievements. In the thick of it, both students and their teachers were endeavoring to invent new ways of learning to be in the world, of relating to each other and of making discoveries about themselves and the material circumstances in which they existed. In retrospect, we were racing to achieve many of the democratic and egalitarian practices outlined by Le Brun and Murray in The Seed. Our sights were set high, but, of course, many of us were naive in our expectations as to what could be achieved in a relatively short period of time. Nonetheless, in the context of internal and external challenges—the attempted coup in 1981, for example—achievements in relation to the NYS’ foundational aims were considerable. Perhaps the biggest challenge was to help grow that sense of individual and collective self-confidence among the students—a precondition for genuine agency and democratic control of daily life. Here, it was hoped, would be behaviors, pedagogies and attitudes in stark contrast to the largely didactic, ‘banking’ system of education, so excoriated by Paulo Freire: teaching to be found in both Seychellois primary education and the two existing sixth-form institutions, Regina Mundi and Seychelles College.

Forty-two years on from Le Brun and Murray’s map and the practices, ethos and playful dispositions advanced in their writing and—in the early years at least—by René’s government I particularly discern an accent on ‘discovery’, ‘playing’ and ‘together’ (Image 27.4: Olivier Le Brun, 1981). Pedagogically and politically, each of these terms offers a glimpse of the force fields which might drive and shape the emerging NYS. The pedagogy was to be resolutely heuristic—learning through doing: thinking and reflection always in active conversation with practice, whether this be in animal husbandry, making culture, producing a village newspaper, designing and building spaces or in farming. Within their time at the NYS, students were to begin living democratic and imaginatively respectful lives which would become the practices—tools for living—that they would carry into adult life and the world beyond the NYS village. Even from this brief overview, it is clear that for the NYS project, democracy and democratic processes were never simply procedural matters of electing student representatives onto various committees at different levels of village life. Such structures would be put into place, but the democratic heft was to be embedded in daily practice, to run across, down and through every aspect of the student experience—a rooted behavioral disposition to govern human relationships: ‘new ways of learning, working and playing together’ (ibid.).

I end with the reflections of teacher and trained nurse, Gay Lee, who worked in the Health Block, particularly around issues of sex education:

I saw success in things like the almost complete absence of teenage pregnancies and the positive changes in the relationships between the girls and the boys. I remember seeing a male student who right at the end of his NYS time had to go straight home to look after his mother who had become very ill. He and the rest of the family and neighborhood were really surprised and pleased that he could do the ‘female’ work of caring, housework and cooking. (Lee, 2020)

Lee ended a conversation with me in 2020 with remarks which suggest that Le Brun and Murray’s utopian imaginings for the NYS were not entirely misplaced:

I felt that NYS was a great social leveller—sons and daughters of the ministers mingling with the very poorest students. I think most people from whatever background were fairly happy there. The very poor students I think had it best. (Lee, 2020)

Image 27.4

Friendship at the end of the first year, Port Launay NYS Village. (Image: Olivier Le Brun, 1981)

Postscript

It is beyond the experience and knowledge of the author to offer a continuing account of the NYS from the mid-1980s into the 1990s. Clearly there were policy divisions within the government as to the direction the NYS should take and in 1998 it ended after seventeen years of operation. However, as Le Brun notes:

A second youth village was opened in February 1982 at Cape Ternay, also on the island of Mahé, and a third on the island of Sainte Anne. The three villages were to bring together almost all young people aged fifteen to seventeen. Together with the staff, they represented ten percent of the country’s working-age population between fifteen and sixty-four. (Le Brun, 2020)