REGIONAL NEWS

Tracy man a key part of west Africa’s ag evolution

Fifty years ago next month, Kerry Johnson embarked on a journey that would result in his lifelong relationship with the countries of west Africa.

Now, Johnson will apply his experience as a teacher with the Peace Corps and as information technology manager with Tracy Unified School District to help farmers in Benin use modern communications to advance agriculture, not just for production of food, but as a career for the country’s young people and a cornerstone of the regional economy.

Johnson got his introduction to Africa as a 22-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in February 1965, shortly after his graduation from Chapman University in Orange. He was assigned to work in Guinea on Africa’s west coast, where he taught photography at a fine arts college. He took the oath as a Peace Corps member on May 9, 1965.

“When I first went in, Africa was just becoming independent,” he said. “The biggest problem they had that the Peace Corps could respond to was the lack of what here we would think of as an educated middle class. The teachers, technical people, they didn’t have enough of those kinds of people.”

Johnson’s experience in Guinea was cut short in 1966 after Kwame Nkruma, the president of Ghana, was overthrown in a military coup. In the aftermath, Ahmed Sekou Toure, the president of Guinea, cut ties with western countries. Johnson was among the Peace Corps volunteers placed under house arrest in Conakry, Guinea’s capital, for three weeks until the U.S. government could fly them out.

Johnson then served in Niger with a United Nations project that made movies designed to increase literacy. Throughout his stay in west Africa, Johnson had opportunities to get to know state leaders, including the president of Niger.

“We made lots and lots of movies, and that meant that I got to travel a lot with film crews all over the place,” he said. “It was a really fun and interesting time.”

In 1968, Johnson returned to California and established a career in information technology with the Plasencia Unified School District. He came to Tracy in 1996 and was Tracy Unified’s information technology manager, a role he held until his retirement in 2007.

In 2010, the Peace Corps beckoned again.

“A job came up in Guinea where I had been, where I taught and where I had been arrested,” Johnson said.

But the country was run by the military, and even though elections had been held, there had been no noticeable change in leadership.

“We found out that the United States embassy would not let us go to the cities where our jobs were,” he said.

By the end of 2010, Johnson had found a Peace Corps job in Senegal, and for nine months he taught a Junior Achievement course designed to give young people the tools to become entrepreneurs. He signed up for another tour so he could train new Peace Corps volunteers on the Junior Achievement curriculum.

“That meant I had to travel all over the country,” he said. “I found that I really loved the country of Senegal. It has a rich history with many ethnic groups and many cultures.”

In 2013, he returned with the Peace Corps to the Republic of Benin, a country of 10 million people on Nigeria’s western border. This time, he would head up the information technology department of an organization focused on agricultural education.

Songhai Centre in Porto Novo, on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea, educates 1,000 to 1,200 students at a time on its main campus. The center’s director, the Dominican priest Godfrey Nzamujo, who is originally from Nigeria and has doctorate degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and Irvine, founded the center in 1985.

Nzamujo and the Dominican Order of the Catholic Church saw that west Africa had yet to meet its potential to feed the region. Johnson noted that farming in the region had declined in the past 30 years. Songhai Centre is out to change cultural views of farming and represent agriculture as a vital part of a modern economy.

The center’s goals include education on how to maximize production, market farm products, and teach the challenges of food safety, transportation and storage. The organization has also emerged as a major agricultural producer.

“I immediately recognized, this is the best thing I ever saw in west Africa,” Johnson said. “What they’re doing here is exactly what west Africa needs.”

Ultimately, Songhai aims to bring young people, who have left rural areas for big-city opportunities, back to the farm.

Johnson’s role is key to the communications and educational component of Songhai Centre. He helped design a network that will connect 80 computers in 15 buildings on the Songhai campus, using up to 5 miles of fiber-optic cable, 30-plus switches and five servers.

Two shipping containers full of that equipment — which were stranded in Long Beach earlier this year during that port’s longshoremen’s strike — were expected to arrive at Cotonou, Benin’s capital and major port city, earlier this week. After about 3½ months back in Tracy, Johnson returns to Benin next week to set up the network.

His son, Ian, who works with the city of Oceanside’s IT department, will also travel to Benin this summer to help set up the system.

“Why does Father Godfrey want to do all of this? He recognizes … for organizations to keep up to date on changing technologies and techniques in farming and agriculture, they need communications and access to resources that give them ideas about what’s going on,” Johnson said.

“One of the things that he wants to have with improved technology is to establish modern communications and then interconnection of people that have similar interests and needs.”

Source: goldenstatenewspapers.com

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to top button
Close