Strangers and sojourners: who were Miss V and Miss W?

Abstract

This piece concerns a largely forgotten ethnographic experiment conducted under the auspices of the United National Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and its Tensions Affecting International Understanding Project. In the early 1950s, with UNESCO's backing, two young African teachers spent a short time living and working in a small English town. What follows is an attempt to locate them. That is to say, it sets out variously to establish who Miss V and Miss W might have been and to examine the situation in which they found themselves. The hope was that children from a monocultural background in rural England brought into contact with African teachers would have many of their prejudices dispelled. To some extent, in its own terms, the project was successful but the resulting book rendered the women anonymous and voiceless and exoticzed them in the process. Thus the piece attempts, largely using the means of textual inference, to reconstruct what can be known of their experiences, and speculates on the effect(s) that participation in the experiment might have had on them. It thus gives again both voice and identity to Miss V and Miss W, so that, like Sojourner Truth, they can come up again.