Sibylle Ganz-Koechlin CAS African Affairs and Intercultural Communication University of Basel 2013-2014

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Contents Introduction

1. Children’s literature in Africa – a brief history………………… 4

1.a. Post mid-eighties: Production, Distribution and Genres of Children’s Books……….5

2. The availability of and the access to books for children 6

2.a. Reading habits or a “reading culture”………………… ……. 6

2.b. The presence of books versus the presence of stories – A take on children’s stories (not necessarily books) in Mali.. 7

3. The role of language……………………………………………… 8

4. Sincerity, humility and moderation: values transmitted……….. 9

5. Bringing African voices to children’s literature…………………. 10

6. Conclusion…………………………………………………………. 12

7. Acknowledgements ……………………………………………….. 13

Annexe

References

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Exploring the cultural impact of „foreign“ popular books / stories on children and young people in Africa (focus on Tanzania with a short excursion to Mali1) Introduction On a working trip to Northern Tanzania in 2011 I was invited to a private secondary school sponsored by a German church, where I was shown the new library. This con-tained pristine chemistry books from a well-known German publisher – in German. There was also some Shakespeare, a few penguin pocket classics, various textbooks and - yes: three Enid Blyton books from the “Famous Five”-series, one of them in German, all donated. No books in Swahili. I was quite preoccupied by what I had seen, yet my Tanzanian teacher colleagues did not seem to share my concern, for them the library was above all a working space and a “work in progress” in itself, where they would get a wider variety of books, even in their own language, in good time. A few years later I came across Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s famous speech “The danger of a single story”2: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate ap-ples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to. ... What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books. These are the underlying issues for this paper. Central questions

• How do teachers in Tanzania perceive these issues (foreign popular books and thus foreign values? What are the values conveyed in these mainstream books and are they in conflict with local values?)

• Does “something need to be done” e.g. would it make sense to phrase some recommendations on reading matters in schools (syllabus, curriculum) – and if so, what would they be?

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1Mali because of researcher and linguist Mohomodou Houssouba, PhD, who kindly shared his 2!Chimamanda!Adichie:!The danger of a single story” http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript; 00.43 – 00.58; 01.32-02.01 !

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In order to get to the central questions, some others have to be answered or consid-ered first, as the following will show. Method

• Research on the current state of affairs concerning children’s literature/ litera-ture for young people in Africa, (mainly conducted on the internet) as well as research into the language issue (African versus colonial languages) and its influence on the production of books for children.

• Formal questionnaire submitted to eight of my teacher colleagues in Tanzania; • Interview with Mohomodou Houssouba (see above).

1. Children’s literature in Africa – a brief history (up to 1985) !Apparently children’s literature as a genre had been given “little or no attention” in scholarly work on African literature, according to an article by Osayimwense Osa from 1985 3, starting with the statement that there is no consensus as to what chil-dren’s literature actually is, apart from the fact of the uniqueness of the audience that it addresses. There is a mention of the “goals sought after through study of literature” – from “developing literary appreciation to …deeply humanistic goals such as investi-gating human values.” Osa goes on to deplore the practice of reading abridged and simplified versions of adult fiction, and claims that the children and the books are done a disservice, drain-ing the essentials of a work of art. Historically, the “aim of teachers and missionaries was to Europeanize African children, not to provide literature related to their needs and interests,” its appropriateness for African readers was never considered. In 1959 the United Nations proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which stated that children should be given an education that promotes their general culture. “For young children, literature transmits their cultural values best”, says Osa. More attention was given to the subject from the 60s onwards, as the need for a “carefully written body of literature for African children” was recognized as African countries gained political independence from colonial powers and “nationalism ex-pressed itself in various spheres of African life.” The recurrent themes of children’s books were adventure stories, local life stories and historical fiction. In Nigeria, the stories were often “didactic”, acting as warning to children to beware them from bad or “immoral” behaviour4. The art of illustrating chil-dren’s books was impeded by the lack of illustrators, the high cost of colour printing and the poor access to good quality printing equipment. Dissatisfaction with the study and criticism of children’s literature is still prevalent in 1985, and little information is to be had about authors of children’s literature, as many of them write for children only occasionally and there is no canon of written African children’s literature, a fact that is also deplored. Osa is convinced that the writing and production of children’s literature in Africa will enrich the world’s children’s literature immensely in times to come. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!3!Osayimwense Osa: The rise of African children’s literature in The reading teacher , April 1985, Vol 38 N 8 pp 750-754 http://www.jstor.org/stable/20198921 .

4!e.g. the “Samankwe”-series by Cyprian Ekwensi !

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1.a. Post mid-eighties: Production, Distribution and Genres of Children’s Books According to P.Osazee Fayose5 the “golden age of book publishing for children in Af-rican countries” was between 1970 and 1990 – the UNESCO International Book Year in 1975 providing a boost to publishing in Africa. From 1985 onwards an increasing number of events such as conferences and book fairs are organized and attended by writers, educators and publishers to debate the issue of children’s books.6 Traore and others state that around 1998, with the support of the Kenyan government and NGOs such as DFID and CODE, the publishing of textbooks as well as storybooks for children in Kiswahili, the lingua franca of the East Coast of Africa, grew immensely. In Tanzania the book trade seems to be a bit less dynamic, but the Children’s book project7 CBP, launched in 1991, is a successful model, combining teacher training, book sector training, producing books and educating illustrators as well as presenting an annual award recognizing excellence in young adult fiction from African countries. The CBP has so far produced 303 new titles and distributed them across the country. Some publishers are producing readers in Kiswahili/ English, which are now available on the Internet on the site of the African Books Collective Association8 - (access to books and the availability of books see chapter two). Aiello states in her article (see below) that while the “ first generation of African wri-ters” (meaning the first post-colonial generation) - mostly rather educators than writ-ers, given the paucity of book sales no living was to be made- often recorded collec-tions of oral literature, thus enabling children to relate to stories which they were used to listening to; whereas contemporary writers are now creating narrative fiction for children in Kiswahili, frequently set in a realistic context such as school and family, and even thriller and detective stories reminiscent of the “Famous Five” series, where children are the clever detectives (e.g. “ Safari ya Prospa” – Prospa’s journey by E.Lema). The “philosophy” behind the writing of these more recent children’s books of all gen-res is that the “writer should try to get as close as possible to children’s experience and world view”9 – in short, great efforts are being made in Tanzania to create Kis-wahili (and English) storybooks which are attractive to children and thus help to promote their literacy in Kiswahili. Other initiatives such as the Ghanaian „Golden Baobab“ show that the issue of books for children is today being widely discussed in Eastern and Western Africa, even if the above mentioned Golden Baobab focuses on books written in English, this being the language of education from first grade on in Ghana. Whatever the language, another question is how to bring the books and the children together – which in turn raises the questions of the availability of and the access to books, as well as reading habits.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!5!„Not only books for Africa but a reading culture too“ Keynote address at the 29th IBBY Congress Cape Town SA, September 2004 6 Flavia Aiello Traore (University of Calabria) 2010: Children’s literature in Africa languages:Swahili books for children in Kenya and Tanzania 7 http://www.cbp.or.tz/ 8!http://www.africanbookscollective.com/!9!(Hanak 2001:58) quoted in F.Aiello Traore

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2. The availability of and the access to books for children It is generally acknowledged that the availability of books is not sufficient to meet the actual demand. This is stated by concerned educators, librarians and linguists in many articles on the subject. For textbooks however, which are more widely availa-ble, as it is possible for publishers to print in higher numbers and to achieve adequate sales. Otherwise the cost of books, the lack of public libraries (and book shops for those who could afford them), are the main factors that prevent many children from gaining access to books. Another obstacle are reading habits or an actual reading culture, which are not ingrained in society as yet, but remain work in progress, some-times for the same reasons as mentioned above (sparse production and distribution of books), but not exclusively. 2.a. Reading habits or a “reading culture” Currently we are witnessing the transition of numerous African societies “from tradi-tional to urban”10 – a fact that will certainly influence many traditions like the telling and producing of stories for children and young adults. “Most African societies by any standard cannot be said to be reading societies. In many homes, the present children are the first generation of readers”.11 “…reading is not a typically African recreation. Music, yes; dancing, yes; talking, yes -lots of talking. But reading, no… Reading has always struck us Africans as a strange-ly solitary business. It makes us uneasy. When Africans visit great European cities like Paris and London, we notice how people on trains take books out of their bags and retreat into solitary worlds. Each time a book comes out it is like a big sign held up: Leave me alone, I am reading, says the sign. What I am reading is more interest-ing than you could possibly be.”….Africa is a continent where people share. Reading a book by yourself is not sharing. It is like eating or drinking alone. It is not our way. We find it a bit crazy.”12

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!10!Mohomodou Houssouba, PhD!11!„Not only books for Africa but a reading culture too“ Keynote address presented by P.Osazee Fayose at the 29th IBBY Con-gress Cape Town SA, September 2004 !12!J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello; Secker & Warburg, London 2003: 40

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These two quotes on reading habits throughout Africa mirror some of what I saw dur-ing my work and travel in Eastern Africa: like Coetzee says, I did not encounter peo-ple reading while waiting for a bus or generally in public spaces, and in most of the homes I visited any books were textbooks (naturally, as the owners of the homes were teachers) or bibles. Apart from the availability of books I often put this down to the lack of time for reading or lack of general leisure time, as there is always so much more to do if you have to light a fire before making your tea – or if you simply don’t have sufficient light in your house to read after dark; I too often got the impression that reading is “not a typically African recreation”. However, my colleagues from Tanzania do not necessarily corroborate these views and opinions. “My father gave me the books from his stock of storybooks”, “we had a collection of books in our mini-library shelf in the kitchen and I also exchanged books with my friends at school”, both quotes from the interviews showing the presence of books in the everyday lives of these teachers as children. Two out of eight interview partners mention “Mabala the farmer” as the first story they remember - to me the remarkable fact is that they read the story themselves, in Eng-lish, implying that they must have had a certain amount of lessons in English to be able to do that, and already have reached a certain age. Six teachers specifically state that they used “the (school) library” regularly for borrowing books that contained stories, which shows that there are (school) libraries that provide reading matter apart from textbooks, in Swahili as well as in English. 2.b. The presence of books versus the presence of stories - A take on chil-dren’s stories (not necessarily books!) in Mali13 … It would be very wrong to mistake the difficulties of publishing books for children, the dearth of public libraries, bookshops and “readers in public” i.e. the perceived ab-sence of books – for the absence of stories. Quite the opposite: there is a huge wealth of stories told to African children. Grandfathers, mothers, elder sisters, Kiswa-hili and English teachers are listed as narrators by my Tanzanian colleagues. I was interested to find out if there are big differences in the issues surrounding chil-dren’s books (e.g. production and publishing) and the telling of stories to children be-tween English and French speaking former colonial states, so I talked to Mohomodou Houssouba, PhD, author and linguist, in Basel: In Mali (as in Eastern Africa) the tradition of telling stories to children (and adults) is a very old and for centuries mainly an oral one, hence the saying “un africain qui meurt est une bibliothèque qui brûle” (an African who dies is like a library burning). Storytell-ing sessions took place outside of school, people gathering - always in the evenings, as storytelling during daytime is taboo - at a central place in villages to listen to sto-ries, which sometimes even continued over an entire week. The storyteller, a role taken on by various people, was a person treated with due respect. Due to the profound changes in society and to the present disruptive political situa-tion in Mali this tradition no longer exists. Earlier, the radio had taken over the role of the live storytellers, turning many into megastars before the arrival of television in the early 80s, when foreign telenovelas started to take over. Efforts were made to collect stories in Songhai and other local languages for publish-ing, but also for recording on tape or cassettes, today on digital media. Oral recor-dings (of which I have not found evidence in Tanzania) are a very valuable source not only for the contents of stories, but also for their preservation as well as the un-derstanding and mastery of spoken local languages.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!13 This information was gained during an interview with Mohomodou Houssouba, PhD, author, linguist and researcher

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As in other African countries, state-run publishing houses in Mali encountered difficul-ties in the 90s; French publishers sometimes helped out, but access to books for children in general remained very limited; while there was a sufficient number of text-books at schools, there was little variety. What kinds of books were favoured was of-ten dependent on the respective regimes. Dr Houssouba goes on to say that the role and importance of stories for children and young adults in Mali is manifold: As part of the “package of coming of age”, initiation processes, transmitters of values, practising the use of language – in short, they are a mainstay of the social training of children. Many tales feature the same heroes or main characters: the clever spider (along the coast) which is the quick, outwitting hare inland, incarnating values and vir-tues such as courage, honesty, endurance, hope or self-denial in the “classic” ver-sions, can be the tales of Zama Sanda and the likes of him today, again transmitting behavioural codes and “showing young people the ropes”. … and in Tanzania Among the favoured stories in Tanzania tales with or about animals “with human traits” are mentioned in the questionnaires, namely “Kalulu the Hare”, “The tortoise goes on a journey” and the “Tortoise and the Bird’s Sky Feast”, constructed in the manner of classical fables with a lesson to be learned. Apart from that, worldwide classics such as “Sinbad the sailor” (arguably from the Arabian Nights collection, some sources claim other origins) get two mentions, as well as stories about “ghouls”. 3. The role of language “As long as African countries continue to educate the continent’s future leaders pri-marily through foreign languages, they will remain dependent. Education for libera-tion and self-reliance must begin with the use of languages that do not impede the acquisition of knowledge. This is the challenge of the 21st century.”14 In Tanzania, the language question- namely Kiswahili as the lingua franca (not ne-cessarily the mother tongue, which can be any number of local languages) versus English as the former colonial language, and how to handle it - is a crucial issue in education but also in politics and in dealing with the past: which is the most appropri-ate language of instruction (education) for which age group? Writers, scholars, edu-cators and the general public all have a view on language policy, ranging from “de-colonising the minds” and the opinion quoted above (emphasized by the fact that Kiswahili has a long pre-colonial tradition of writing), to describing English as the cur-rent “language of power”, education in African languages as “limiting and ghettoising” preventing access to power, “linking English to status, mobility, power and wealth”.15 Currently, children are taught in Kiswahili in primary school up to Standard Seven, with a few lessons of English each week. If they go on to secondary school after 7 years of primary, English becomes the language of instruction. There is of course also the economic context of publishing books in certain lan-guages and the incentive to do so (what will sell). But the language issue is also a crucial part of people’s identities and identifications - the question of who they are. How important is our mother tongue to us, how important to others?

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!14!Roy-Campbell (2001:197) in „The Languages of Africa and the Diaspora“, multilingual matters, 2009:64!15!Haidee Kruger, Perspectives; Vol.17, No 1, March 2009

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Are we capable of expressing our innermost thoughts and feelings in a foreign lan-guage – or is it not so that a foreign language per se also communicates foreign val-ues, values which we are not familiar with and might not share? Are certain moral codes bound to a certain way of expressing them? Which language group currently holds the power in our environment, what is the lan-guage of those who have influence? Teachers work at the source of these debates and therefore need to be clear on where they stand, not only in their personal opinions, but also in their professions, as conveyers of the subjects and inherent values the curricula ask them to convey. One of the interview16 questions was “What is the importance of the mother tongue?”, to which answers vary from “it helps to understand (a story)” to page-long quotes of the British educational philosopher P.B. Ballard, ending with …”training in the use of the mother tongue – the tongue in which a child thinks and dreams – becomes the first essential of shoaling (sic) and the finest instrument of human culture.” One teacher simply states that “we could have one language for all countries”, while an-other mentions that the “mother tongue helps to communicate with relatives so as to exclude intruders from secret issues.” The interviewed teachers do not attach particular “cultural” value(s) to the mother tongue apart from identification with certain societies or tribes; they argue mainly from the educational point of view, emphasizing the need for inclusion in and access to education: As one interviewee states: “The mother tongue is mastered by both teachers and students and thus helps to provide access to education and personal development to a greater number of people.” 4. Sincerity, humility and moderation: values transmitted If stories told to children were sometimes used as explicit transmitters of values, does the same apply to stories these children read on their own, or were the young rea-ders able to detect values transmitted in passing? For my Tanzanian colleagues, the answer is clear: stories are specifically meant to convey values and not meant to be “merely for entertainment”. The values mentioned are solidarity, truth, cooperation, tolerance, honesty, not stealing, respect, peace and personal integrity, which one participant describes as “universal values”, whereas two others list “national identity, good manner, respect for and readiness to work, civic re-sponsibility and obligation, tradition and worship”… “ respect for elders, sincerity, humility and moderation” as specifically African values, a distinction that was not made in the question (Did you feel that the stories you read/heard transmitted certain values? If so, what were they?). For those who also read foreign children’s books (five out of eight), it is equally clear that foreign books transmit different values than the local ones, even if the values are not all listed separately, but under denominators such as “different cultural settings”, “from different socio-cultural and religious beliefs”, “different ways of life portrayed”. One person mentions “Arab culture e.g. dressing” – going against the assumption that children in Northern Tanzania are per se familiar with “Arab dressing” because of the number of girls with headscarves seen at schools and Muslim Zanzibar being a part of the country. No mention is made of any kind of influence the values that are perceived as foreign could have, no conflictive emotions or opinions are voiced.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!16!For full questionnaire/interview see annexe

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Much more opinionated response is forthcoming in the statement and subsequent question … 5. „Bringing African voices to children’s literature: African stories told by Afri-cans for African children“ ... please comment this mission statement from the IBBY17 homepage. Apart from the comments made by the teachers, which I will get to shortly, this is a pertinent issue at the moment, promoted by several actors as shown not only by the aforementioned “Golden Baobab” initiative, but by prominent others, such as the StAAF18, which „is producing anthologies of stories for children from birth to teens to enjoy in their own languages. Stories old and new are in the process of being collec-ted, written, rewritten, translated and illustrated for a range of modern – day African children in rural and urban settings.

Promoting a sense of common African identity : The spirit of the African Renais-sance promotes efforts to nurture a sense of common identity across the continent. This starts in childhood. African children need opportunities to experience the stories of Africa, past and present in written form, like generations of children in Europe and elsewhere have done. Children from many different countries in the North have grown up on anthologies like Grimm’s Fairy Tales. They have thus shared the same heritage, but in their own languages. Till now, no such common written anthologies have existed for Africa, the ‘cradle of humanity’.

When parents, teachers and children have access to books that they can read with each other in a familiar language, we will begin to build a sense of common African identity and literate communities.

The core value to be promoted here is the “sense of common identity”, an African identity - as opposed to a European one. The StAAF does not state what exactly a specifically African value is, the project’s main object is gathering stories and making them accessible, focussing on language (the stories are to be published in the five of-ficial languages of the African Union: Arabic, French, English, Kiswahili and Portu-guese) and on promoting literacy apart from textbooks. The question of the “African values” is in my opinion a problematic one: it immediate-ly raises another question: Who gets to define what “African” is? In all the articles and initiatives I came across there is no answer forthcoming as to the prerogative of the definition of “Afri-can”, which can be quite confusing, but is, of course, part of the nature of the issue and debate. The “Children’s Book Project for Tanzania”19 does not state any requirements as to the contents of the books they promote. Under the heading “Core Values” they list values they adhere to as an organization, such as transparency and accountability, children’s rights and non-discrimination, values shared by their Canadian partner or-ganisation.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!17!The International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) is a non-profit organization which represents an international network of people from all over the world who are committed to bringing books and children together!18!Stories across Africa project : www.acalan.org (academy of African languages) 19!http://www.cbp.or.tz/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=80&Itemid=485

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Other initiatives are more vocal on the value front. According to these, it is not lan-guage but content and context of stories which are the conveyors of values20:

• African children need books that match their realities. • “I, like generations of Africans, grew up and continue to grow up without ac-

cess to books that represent our own stories, cultures and realities. – This ex-perience demonstrated to me the power of stories to shape who we are. Reading about characters that look and live like you and your family grounds you in who you are and gives you permission to take pride in your culture and where you are from. I dreamed of having my own apartment in River Heights USA, Nancy Drew’s hometown. ”21

• “Is there something wrong with me that a whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?”22

This last statement brings us back to the opening remarks and the actual impulse for this paper: I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Foreign stories that “by their very nature” of portraying foreign lives and circum-stances make African children feel inadequate, out of place in their own environ-ments, because they cannot find mirrors of their own lives, see their own environ-ments, and they thus deduce that their circumstances are not worthy of being written about. This is a deplorable state; and one all concerned writers, educators, parents and of course the young readers themselves would like to end; the terrible irony being that many initiatives that want to incite young people to read can result in the opposite by making the young readers feel uncomfortable. It was therefore interesting to note that my Tanzanian colleagues state that African stories told by Africans are important, to guide children in their conduct in society, to educate them in fundamental norms and values of society, to bring confidence and role models to children, that Africans should claim ownership for their own stories and how they are told, that African children learn who they are from African voices; but nobody mentions any negative consequences of this not being the case, no “…or

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!20!Golden Baobab www.goldenbaobab.org 21!Deborah Ahenkorah, founder of the Golden Baobab 22!Junot Diaz as quoted by Deborah Ahenkorah

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else”, no teacher makes a case for exclusively African voices or for the dangers “of a single story”. Asked what kind of stories they think their students would like to read of they had the choice, the reply is fiction, novels, love stories, funny books and books about heroic deeds; which is not totally congruent with the texts or kinds of stories the teachers would include in a syllabus. Here they emphasise the importance of narratives about the society they live in, ethics, a discussion of current ideas, but also encourage his-toric and modern tales of African heroes and history – but the love story gets a men-tion in this category too. I was unfortunately unable to get hold of the current syllabus for English language and literature, which has undergone quite significant changes in the past years. The Ministry of Education has recognised the importance of training for the implementation of this new syllabus, and the courses are on-going at the mo-ment. I did get hold of the syllabus for English in teacher training for secondary schools, this reading list clearly favours African authors (the titles mostly originally written in English), published between 1962 – 2006 and covering a wide range of texts (for full list see annexe) – this fact is relevant in so far as it shows what the teachers were taught in their vocational training. Conclusion I found my interview partners remarkably pragmatic when it comes to concrete rec-ommendations for the syllabus – nobody suggests radical changes of the reading in classrooms; pragmatic also in the sense that they are not judgemental, do not take the rigid moral and didactic stances that are sometimes present in textbooks I’ve come across in Tanzania or Kenya. None of the teachers “condemns” literature that does not originate in Africa. They did not experience the feeling of inadequacy or out-of-place-ness that the foreign chil-dren’s books provoked in Ms Adichie (as mentioned at the beginning of this paper), even if the teachers do emphasize the importance of books depicting the daily envi-ronment of the pupils (which makes a case for African books by African authors for the sake of authenticity?). Personally I favour the image of books as mirrors and windows: Books in which chil-dren can see themselves, read about their own experiences, hear their own names and mentally taste the food they are reading about. Just as necessary as the mirrors are windows, which open onto the world and let children see how other people live, what their realities are and how treacle tarts taste different to vitumbua. So, in the next teacher training session, we will talk about reading matters: what are the texts that we like and why, what works well in classes with elder or younger chil-dren in secondary school, where and how can teachers and students access books or texts easily; what the syllabus prescribes and how to deal with that – and mainly, we will talk about how inspiring and enriching reading can be, how important it is not only to know “one’s own”, but also to acknowledge others.

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Acknowledgements and Thanks First and foremost my heartfelt thanks to my Tanzanian teacher colleagues and friends, who took the time and effort to answer my interview questions with such care and insight even under often challenging technical circumstances. To my fellow students Anne-Christine, Barbara, Michelle and Halima, Silvia, Ursula, Jürg and Paul – for the intense, thought-provoking and lively discussions and all the laughter shared – you were the great gain of this course! Thanks to Dres. Pascal Schmid and Prof. Elisio Macamo for the rich contents and smooth organisation of this course - and for your patience and serenity! To Dr. Mohomodou Houssouba for the very generous sharing of his vast knowledge and his time, as well as for the delicious tea freshly imported from Mali. Big cheers to my sister Lucy Koechlin for arm-wrestling me into this course, for providing the odd bed & breakfast and for hosting the much-appreciated farewell-party. My sister Monica Koechlin gets the medal for most efficient proof-reading under con-siderable pressure and very little time (and still having the strength to argue certain points) – mercibien! To Benjamin Ganz, my son and graphic designer, for designing the cover picture. And last but not least to my long-suffering husband Matthias Ganz, for letting me bend his ear on all things African, didactical and methodological – and for slapping this paper into format! (If, after all of that, you were expecting at least a thesis – prepare to be disappointed). Bern, 26 June 2014

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Annexe

1. Interview questions Name (optional)_________________ Interview on popular books/stories for children and young people in Africa

1. What is the first story you remember?

Who told or read it to you?

In what language?

2. What kind of stories did you enjoy as a child?

3. How did you access them? (Were they told by someone, did you read them

yourself, and if so, where did the books come from? Library for instance?)

4. Did you feel that the stories you read/heard transmitted certain values? And if so, what were they?

5. Did you read foreign children’s books? If so, do you think these stories conveyed different values than the local ones?

6. Which sort of texts/stories in general do you think your students would like to read if they had free choice and access?

7. How do you feel about language? What is the importance of the mother tongue?

8. „Bringing African voices to children’s literature: African stories told by Afri-cans for African children”: please comment this mission statement from the IBBY* homepage (– is this important to you?)

9. Which points concerning texts (or what kind of stories) do you think should be considered in a syllabus?

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* International Board on Books for Young People

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References Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story” http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript; 00.43 – 00.58; 01.32-02.01

Osayimwense Osa: The rise of African children’s literature in The reading teacher , April 1985, Vol 38 N 8 pp 750-754 http://www.jstor.org/stable/20198921 .

„Not only books for Africa but a reading culture too“ Keynote address at the 29th IBBY Congress Cape Town SA, September 2004 Flavia Aiello Traore (University of Calabria) 2010: Children’s literature in Africa languages:Swahili books for children in Kenya and Tanzania http://www.cbp.or.tz/ http://www.africanbookscollective.com/ (Hanak 2001:58) quoted in F.Aiello Traore J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello; Secker & Warburg, London 2003: 40 Roy-Campbell (2001:197) in „The Languages of Africa and the Diaspora“, multilingual matters, 2009:64 Haidee Kruger, Perspectives; Vol.17, No 1, March 2009 IBBY The International Board on Books for Young People Stories across Africa project : www.acalan.org (academy of African languages) http://www.cbp.or.tz/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=80&Itemid=485 Golden Baobab www.goldenbaobab.org !

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