National 8 (Spotlight Weekly)

70 Years Of Outstanding Service

By Barbara Hewitt

The British Council (BC) as a global organisation is 70 years young this month and as anniversaries are a time to celebrate our past with our friends, I hope you won’t mind if I take this opportunity to share with you some of our achievements in the world over the last 70 years.

When Gordon Brown the British, Chancellor of the Exchequer, delivered our annual lecture in July this year, he described the British Council as a ‘huge asset’ and I quote.

‘This year celebrates an exceptionally successful 70 years of an institution which has played and continues to play – such an important part in British society and in Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world’

Yet that reputation has not been easily won. Our history over the last 70 years has sometimes been stormy and we have had to develop an ability to adapt to new challenges, as geo-political priorities have changed and we have had to move quickly to provide UK expertise and partnerships precisely where they are needed.

I’ll tell you something about that history/

We were set up by the British government in 1934, 5 years before the second world war and my predecessors worked tirelessly during those pre war years to counter the propaganda of the Axis powers by discussing the ideas of freedom and democracy in societies which were leaning towards fascism or communism. Our first overseas office was established in Cairo in 1938.

In the brief window between the end of the war and the raising of the Iron Curtain, the British Council opened up new operations across the world, running libraries, cultural events and lecture tours, organising numerous exchanges between professionals and teaching English. But the politics of Eastern Europe also forced our withdrawal from several countries during those post war years.

There is a moving account in the autobiography of the writer Edwin Muir, of how he kept the British Council work alive at Charles University in Prague up to 1948, until the presence of police spies at lectures made it impossible to continue.

The 1956 Suez crisis in Egypt and political troubles in Cyprus disrupted our work in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Greece and Cyprus.

There is a story though, of how during Suez, in 1956, the Egyptian sequestrators, who were tasked with closing us down, instead kept the British Council going for 2 years, exactly on the lines that its staff would have done, because they felt, cultural links should not be severed at a time when political and military conflict was taking place.

At the end of the 1950s the British government set up the department for Technical Cooperation and this brought about significant changes in the way we worked overseas and at home. We now took on an increasing share of responsibility for education and student training programmes in Africa and Asia.

The British Council in Nepal was born out of this programme. In 1959 we established the library and technical cooperation programmes followed that resulted in thousands of Nepali scholars studying in the UK for masters degrees and professional training.

The 70s witnessed our expansion again into the oil-rich countries of the Gulf and demand for our English language teaching services was overwhelming.

This demand spread rapidly across Southern Europe and South East Asia and has continued to grow to this day. Last year, we taught English to over 500,000 people, in our 126 Teaching Centres, which of course include Nepal.

In the dying years of apartheid, the British Council worked with opposition groups and civil society organisations in education and ELT at a time when parties such as the ANC refused to speak to the British Embassy.

Today, South Africa’s Education Minister, Kader Asmal, speaks of how that pre-1994 engagement laid the foundations for today’s partnership of two-way flows of specialists.

After the fall of communism, we moved quickly again to work on reform and the English language in eastern and central Europe.

Today, Britain’s diplomacy is reaping the rewards of the friendships built in those early years as democracy was built up.

And in more recent years we have responded quickly and imaginatively to the electronic revolution.

We now have one and a half million unique visitor sessions to our websites around the world every month.

And if you visit our library here, you will see that our 5,000 members are increasingly turning to our websites and databases for their studies.

The infamous September 11, brought renewed international attention to the importance of building understanding across countries and cultures. And people have recognised anew, the importance of organisations such as the British Council, building the necessary bridges of understanding and trust.

We have given priority to a new project – Connecting Futures – which brings together people from the UK with predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa. To date, 27,000 young people have been involved in this project.

An example of how we have been building bridges took place in Iran earlier this year. Our work there has been taking place against a backdrop of part of Iranian society wanting greater contact with us, but serious constraints being imposed by fundamentalists who see what we are doing as a threat to the revolution that followed the overthrow of the Shah, 25 years ago.

Shakespeare has a way of talking to people across history and cultures and we asked the Dundee Repertory Company to stage a production of the Winters Tale in Tehran.

Staging the first foreign theatrical production in Iran for a quarter of a century took enormous courage and an ability to engage in dialogue about cultural difference without making fundamental compromises.

In the production a scarf held between the 2 lovers took the place of physical contact which would not have been permitted on stage in Iran. This solution was found after lengthy discussion between the producer and the mullahs who checked the production for suitability for an Iranian audience.

As I look back on our history and my own 18 years in the organisation, I feel that it is this capacity to facilitate people-to-people contact that has allowed us to weather the political storms of the last 70 years.

Mahatma Ghandi once said:

‘I do not want my doors to be walled and my windows stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to blow freely about my house. But I do not want to be blown off my feet by any’

To me, the value of the British Council lies in the fact that it is part of the gentle breeze of cultures.

Unlike propaganda, it does not blow so hard as to slam the windows or force the owner to shutter the doors. It blows freely because people of other nations welcome it. Because the spirit which stirs it has exchange and mutuality at its heart.

And it is that spirit that will enable us to weather the storms of the next 70 years and maintain and build new friendships both here in Nepal and around the world.

(Excerpts of a speech made by Barbara Hewitt, the Director of British Council, Kathmandu on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Council)