The Value of Children’s Literature for Twenty-first Century Africa

[Someone recently asked me for a copy of this article, originally published in Today in Africa magazine, February 2005. I thought others might be interested in the motivation behind my work reading with African children.]

“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. ” Jesus used stories to make his point--The Good Samaritan, the Lost Sheep, The Prodigal Son. The story of the Good Samaritan takes six verses in Luke chapter ten. Six verses. And yet you can never look at strangers in quite the same way as you did before you heard it. Story has power.

Think of the role of traditional story telling in African culture. Stories are the way we pass on our values, our thinking about relationships and what is important in life, what kind of behavior is, or is not, acceptable. But story telling is declining in modern Africa. What will we give our children in its place? Television? Will we let their values be formed by MTV, cartoons and American shows with ‘attitude’? Providing our children with good books gives them an opportunity to see that the world has more to offer that the consumer goods and self-serving behaviors they see on the screen.

African children need stories about children like them—children who live in the townships, children going to school with a mixture of culture groups, children caught between the traditional world of their grandparents and modern urban Africa. A story about an adopted Canadian child will show a North American setting, and the value of being chosen and loved may well be missed by an African AIDS orphan in an adopted home.

Not all books for African children should be problem stories about the loss of dignity under apartheid or families torn apart by HIV disease. African children need stories that reflect the joy of the created world around them or that help them to laugh at life and the silly things people do.

Stories ask “what if.” They allow a child to get inside someone else’s skin. What if I lived in Soweto and my best friend had HIV disease? What if I lived in KwaZuluNatal and couldn’t go to school because I didn’t have a uniform? What if I lived in Zimbabwe and my family had a chance to own a piece of land? Or what if I lived in Zimbabwe and my family was being kicked off the land where we had lived for generations?

Story lets us see the world as other people see it. The point-of-view of a white child whose family farm is being broken up for settlement is completely different from the point-of-view of a black child whose family is getting their own land for the first time. What if these two children knew each other? What if they became friends and each had to deal with the pain and joys of the other’s life? That would make a good story.

Stories allow the child to ask ‘what if I did something I have been told not to do?’ In a story, a child can consider the consequences of stealing, of disrespecting elders, of putting his own desires ahead of God’s law. The story characters are stand-ins for the child himself, making bad decisions, taking risks, failing and growing. The reader learns through the story character’s mistakes without engaging in risky behavior himself. But be warned: Agenda driven stories with built-in moral lessons don’t ring true. Children see right through them as adult lies designed to manipulate them. The most effective stories wrestle seriously with questions and allow the child to discover truth rather than have the right answer handed to him.

Even when a story is made up—fiction—it can be true in other ways. My own novel, The Wooden Ox, is a made-up story about a family kidnapped by rebels during the Mozambican civil war of the 1980s. But everything in it happened to someone during those years, and the principle that God can be trusted even when you are tempted to doubt is true in the real world. Reading such stories aloud and talking about them as a group is a way of discussing issues without accusing anyone and making them feel defensive.

Not all books are fiction. There are stories of the lives of great men and women; there are stories of how the nations came to be; there are stories of how things work, both in nature and mechanics. These are called non-fiction. A lover of books is a lover of learning. The earlier we expose children to good books, the greater will be their love of learning. Laurence Darmani, author of four volumes of Stories from Africa, points out that children become readers when they see that the important adults in their lives, whether parents or others, value reading.

The development of African children’s literature has practical values. African children are growing up in a modern world where those who can’t read will be left behind. Reading is a skill that takes practice. The more you read, the more comfortable reading becomes and the better able you are to take on advanced study and jobs that require facility with written words and instructions. More interesting books that children want to read can result in better reading skills and greater success in confronting the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Democracy depends on informed citizens who can read the newspapers comfortably, getting multiple sides to issues and forming opinions about events that are happening outside their local community. Reading habits are formed in childhood. A strong literature for children will help to shape a strong democracy.

Good readers learn to use language effectively. Words communicate ideas that are much bigger than the letters on a page. The Nelson Mandelas and Martin Luther King, Juniors of the next generation--those who know how to make us see possibilities with the words they choose--will impact the way others think and feel, and change our world.

Books don’t require batteries or expensive equipment. Once children acquire the basic skills of reading, they don’t need the presence of a teacher for learning to go on. Books can bring learning to the most remote location.

Public libraries are a good way of sharing limited resources. Reading rooms can be effective if lending books is not practical in the local culture. The first children’s reading room in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, had 40,000 uses it’s first year.

Why spend our limited resources on books for children? Childhood is the time when character and habits are formed. Now is the time to create readers who will be life-long learners. The stories that are planted in their minds in the early years will shape the way they think of themselves and their world for a lifetime. They will bare fruit in time to come. “Train a child in the way he should go,” King Solomon said, “and when he is old he will not turn from it. ” When we invest in good books for children, we invest in the future of our communities.