“Stars of the World”: Yoruba Worker-Students in Britain

Abstract

When Yoruba students arrived in Britain in the first half of the 1960s, they envisaged a short, temporary stay in London before returning to Nigeria to join the ranks of the national elite. They came from a newly independent Nigeria with one aim in mind: to continue their education in the country by which they had been colonized for over half a century. What they were to experience was a Britain gradually slipping into economic decline, which afforded them little of the welcome they might have expected, and relegated them to the position of a black immigrant proletariat. As their stay became protracted, daily difficulties accumulated, frustrating their goal of gaining their qualifications and returning home. For members of the Cherubim and Seraphim it was their church that both helped them survive their problems and maintain a sense of their own professional identity and future.

When you come to England, you lock up your identity. In the work you do, and the way you live, you could be anybody. You must be prepared to take any job and sink to any depths—as long as you know what you are aiming at, and you don’t let yourself lose sight of it. (Elder Oguntulu)

Students and professional people! You are the Stars of the World! (Sermon 1969)