Jocelyne Josiah: a lifetime of international public service and development work
Shortly after Jocelyne Josiah’s student application for entry to the University of Guyana (UG) was rejected, supposedly based on her qualifications and teaching experiences, she was accepted at the University of Waterloo (UofW) in Ontario, Canada.
The polyglot, communications specialist and international public servant, who is now 75, subsequently graduated from UofW with a bachelor’s degree in modern languages, with first class honours and won herself a scholarship from the university to complete her master’s degree.
After leaving the Bishops’ High School (BHS) with, as she put it, “barely enough qualifications to find work,” Josiah, who was born in Nabaclis, East Coast Demerara, but grew up in Kitty and Campbellville, began to teach art and music at East Ruimveldt Secondary School in 1966. She subsequently taught temporarily at other schools.
At BHS, where she was from 1959 to 1966, she told Stabroek Weekend, she was more interested in extracurricular activities than academics. She had successfully written art at the General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level, music up to Grade Four and was in the BHS choir. “It was only when I left school I realised I had to dig up because I had to do something with my life,” she said. “There was quite a lot I was able to give.”
Acting teachers were being encouraged to become trained teachers, but Josiah was not interested in teaching as a career. “I applied to UG to do a bachelor’s degree but UG didn’t accept me. Either my grades weren’t good enough for them, or they didn’t consider my practical experience sufficient. I decided there was nothing in Guyana for me.”
She joined one of her sisters in New York with the expectation that she would work nights and study during the day to see herself through university. “When my sister saw my excitement, she said, ‘New York is not the place for you’,” she recalled.
With her sister’s advice her brother, who lived in Toronto, Canada took her over there with him.
That year she was accepted at UofW to pursue a modern languages degree majoring in French and Spanish. She had a few role models from the BHS who had done languages and had returned home with a layer of sophistication after spending a year in France, around the time she was teaching at East Ruimveldt Secondary.
“From the time I got to Waterloo, I said I wanted to graduate with an honour’s degree and I want to spend my junior year in France,” she said.
She spent her junior year at the University of Dijon in France. After completing her bachelor’s degree, the
UofW offered her an assistantship and a scholarship to do her master’s degree.
To do modern languages she had to study Latin. “I was not interested in any Latin at Bishops. I played around in Viola Burnham’s class. When I got to Waterloo and had to do Latin, it was hell. I stuck through it, got a pass mark and moved on,” she recalled.
For her master’s thesis she chose the French West Indian woman as the subject. The UofW had no advisor for her subject and she consulted with a Professor Fred Case of the University of Toronto, who was related to the then Guyanese chief education officer with the same name.
To complete her thesis, she spent some time in Martinique, then went to Togo in West Africa.
After Waterloo she joined the staff of Barber-Scotia College in Concord, North Carolina, USA, where she taught French and Spanish for two years.
“At that time, everyone was into Black Power,” she recalled. “Teaching at Barber College, I got the impression students weren’t serious and conscious enough of who they were and what Black Power really meant. The college was down the road from Kannapolis, the seat of the Grand Dragon, a white supremacy organisation. There were white teachers teaching on the campus and students burnt crosses on the campus’ lawns. I tried to get the students to be a bit more conscious about themselves and their future. With the authorities’ permission, we invited Afrocentric historian/author Yosef BenJochannan, who lectured at street corners in New York on Black history, to the college campus.
“He was one of the first people I heard speak about Cheikh Anta Diop, a physicist from Senegal, who said the ancient Egyptians were Africans and Black. Ben-Jochanan’s lecture changed the perspective of a lot of students who had only seen themselves as children of slaves and fighting in the system.”
International experience
Not feeling fulfilled in North Carolina, Josiah returned to Canada. She found employment in development education with the Cross Cultural Learner’s Centre, University of Western Ontario.
“My role with others was to educate Canadian groups and individuals about what the New International Economic Order (NIEO) meant, so Canadians understood they were not giving charity to the developing countries and that developing countries were asking for what they duly deserved. It was that time when the Arabs were developing their cartels [that] the NIEO came into being,” she related.
As part of her duties, Josiah was sent to the United Nations General Assembly to meet the delegations’ leaders from Third World countries on their position on the NIEO. From those meetings she developed an interest in the concept of development.
She wanted to assist in the development of the Caribbean and in 1976, she secured a job as the research and conference officer in the Caribbean Community Secretariat in Georgetown.
“It was a good learning experience. At Caricom there was a lot of language and things to learn in economics, health and developmental areas. I began to feel inadequate and I thought I needed to get more deeply into this,” she said.
She left in 1978 to obtain a post graduate diploma in development studies, which was conducted in French, from the Graduate Institute of Development Studies, University of Geneva. “That was my launch into international work.”
During her studies she had a temporary job with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). While still at UNITAR and in her final year at the university she saw three vacancies advertised for UNESCO on the notice board. She applied for all three and secured one as a publications assistant at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France from August 1981.
One of the main areas she worked on was UNESCO’s annual publication ‘Study Abroad’, a reference tool for students and academics. It featured scholarships and programmes offered globally at undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate institutions, academic seminars and fellowships. She also wrote the bulletin for the book development department at UNESCO. She soon got tired of research and she told her superiors she wanted to get into development and active field work.
Development communication
By 1984 she started working in the Development Division of UNESCO. “Life became more exciting. I got to be part of the international programme for the development of communication.”
Josiah had more interactions with government representatives, heads of institutions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from around the world. She listened to their needs, helped them to formulate responses and sought funding to assist them in carrying their programmes forward. “In the communication fields, I found radio and television attractive.”
As she had no journalistic background, Josiah applied to Radio Netherlands Training Centre in Hilversum, the Netherlands to complete a course in television production. “That helped a lot.”
Josiah pioneered the introduction of UNESCO television co-productions among developing countries. “It was a way of bringing television stations and production companies to work together across developing countries to come up with a common product.”
One of the productions, Crossing Over was done by Banyan Productions of Trinidad and Tobago (TT) and the National Film and Television Institute of Ghana. “We took a team from TT to Ghana to work with the Ghanaians on their highlife music. A team from Ghana went to TT. They all visited the other’s countries for the first time. They looked at calypso and highlife music, brought them together and showed the similarities and the