Windows and mirrors



Chang'ombe Primary School, Children's Book Project Burt Award Readings
Christine Earnshaw (courtesy CODE)

In previous posts I’ve referred to the importance of people having and hearing stories that are their own – that reflect their realities and relate their lives – rather than having others tell stories about them.

Mkama Mwijarubi and Asungushe Kayombo are Tanzanian authors who are filling a gap in the availability of such stories. Both have recently written novels for young people, novels written in English that have locally-relevant settings and characters.

The need for English language books for young adults may not seem obvious, but in many Anglophone African countries, students start school using local languages but switch to English in later elementary or early high school. This shift to a new language is made more challenging if interesting reading material isn’t easily available. (Think about what you wanted to read at that age.) Young people need stories that engage them, and characters and settings they can relate to, where they can see themselves and their preoccupations reflected. Non-fiction alone, or fiction set in England or North America, just aren’t sufficient.

Asungushe Kayombo’s book, The Best is Yet to Come, is the story of Daima, a young woman who escapes her strict home in order to achieve her dream of attending secondary school. This isn’t a sugar-coated tale, though. Daima makes her way through complex relationships and sometimes disturbing situations, experiencing the powerlessness of a child in an adult world but also the power of perseverance and of friendship.

Mkama Mwijarubi’s novel, Treeland: the Land of Laughter, creates a fantasy land, Treeland, “where trees grow and people laugh.” Treeland’s King Majabe and his daughter, Princess Zuri, must come to grips with a changing world as well as with each other. Treeland is told simply, but its characters and the challenges they face are intricate. The novel brings insights into what it means to respect tradition yet still find a new path.

Mwijarubi and Kayombo have been able to publish their young adult fiction with the help of some African organizations and a Canadian program that supports local book publishing. Mwijaribui, Kayombo and several other writers in Tanzania, Ghana, Ethiopia and Kenya are recipients of Burt Awards for African Literature. The Burt Award is sponsored by CODE, a Canadian non-profit organisation that promotes children’s learning by supporting book publishing, libraries and teacher training in Africa and the Caribbean. The Award is named for and funded by Bill Burt, a Canadian who noticed a lack of engaging books for young people while travelling with CODE to Africa in 2007. He and CODE created the Burt Award to support local authors and publishers to produce and distribute English-language books that are meaningful to young readers in Africa and that can get them enthusiastic about reading.

Local partners – the Children’s Book Project for Tanzania, the Ghana Book Trust, CODE-Ethiopia and the National Book Development Council of Kenya – manage the Awards. In Tanzania, the Children’s Book Project, which received a UNESCO International Literacy Award in 2007 for its local language publishing work, published Mwijarubi and Kayombo’s books.

To be considered for Burt Awards, authors submit manuscripts that are dramatic, humorous or suspenseful, have strong characters, and deal with the social challenges that young people face. A 6-member jury of experts in literature, linguistics and publishing selects the winning stories. With the Awards, everybody benefits: authors receive cash prizes and a publishing contract, CODE and its partners distribute several thousand copies of each book to schools and libraries, and the publishers sell the books commercially.

The International Board for Books for Youth (IBBY)-Canada, which promotes access to children’s books in Canada and internationally, also supports the Burt Award by contributing jurors and co-facilitating writing workshops for authors. Says Scott Walter, CODE's Executive Director, of the partnership, "Our two organizations share a common belief in the power of reading to transform people's lives. We know that children need windows into other worlds and mirrors that reflect their own experience. We recognize the importance of offering children access to engaging, high quality, locally written books and share an understanding of the continuum of writers and illustrators, publishers, libraries, book distributors and teachers in getting stories told -- and books produced and connected with their readers."

The Best is Yet To Come is the first novel for Asungushe Kayombo, a health professional with degrees in medicine and public health. Treeland: the Land of Laughter is the second children’s book by Mkama Mwijarubi, who has a diploma in journalism and a business degree.

Additional Burt Award winners are listed at http://www.codecan.org/get-involved/burt-award. More information on CODE can be found at http://www.codecan.org/. CODE is looking into making the books available in Canada – which would be welcome for those of us interested in accessing engaging African stories in other parts of the world.

"Let the lion speak"

I know, it's been a long time since I said I'd be back soon.... But here I am, with lots of ideas and more posts in the works.

First, I just have to tell you about Maya Wegerif. I learned about her poetry thanks to an article by Chambi Chachage on “The Dar es Salaam Renaissance” in Pambazuka News (see my Nov. 21 post for an overview of Pambazuka News). Chachage writes about the cultural movement taking place in Dar that’s giving rise to a new social consciousness, and Wegerif is one of the artists profiled.

Maya the Poet is from South Africa, and has lived in Tanzania and the United States. Her poetry is amazing – clever and profound. She writes about political, social, feminist, technological and personal issues. You can find her poems and spoken word performances at her website (and the earlier http://mayawegerif.blogspot.com/) and on YouTube.

I couldn’t resist posting her TEDxDar performance of “Who Tells Our Stories.” It gets right at the heart of one of this blog’s themes -- understanding how we choose to perceive “Africa” and “Africans” and why we need to think critically about who writes and tells Africa’s stories. And, borrowing from Maya the Poet's much more convincing words -- hear the lion speak.



(You can find the words to the poem at http://mayawegerif.blogspot.com/).

Reversals

Photo: Tidal Basin, Washington, DC  Credit: Destination DC

When I think about the world and how we view and deal with its problems, I often think about two people I got to know through my work a few years ago.

One is Mohamed Halfani. He’s a Tanzanian who was at the University of Dar es Salaam before moving to leadership roles with global organisations, most recently the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UN-HABITAT) in Nairobi. The other is Joyce Malombe. She’s a Kenyan formerly at the University of Nairobi who's worked at the World Bank and other international, academic and philanthropic organisations.

I admire these two for several reasons, but I want to mention in particular their contributions as visiting scholars at the Washington, DC-based Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars. They were part of an International Working Group at the Centre’s Comparative Urban Studies Project in the late 1990s. Their innovative task was to examine and help local leaders solve the serious urban problems facing Washington, DC.

So often the way the world works is that experts from northern, developed countries arrive to analyse and solve the issues facing developing countries. It doesn’t usually work the other way around – but it could. You see, both Joyce Malombe and Mohamed Halfani are internationally-recognised experts on urban development, each with many years of experience analysing cities, identifying solutions, and advising national governments and international organisations.

In Washington, DC, Mohamed Halfani looked at an aspect of urban governance which had been neglected: the role of civic organisations and their relationship to the elected city government and federal administration. Halfani found that vibrant community and neighbourhood associations had achieved a great deal, especially compared to inefficient and mismanaged local governments. But he also found their potential was constrained by prohibitions on political advocacy, financial dependency on governments, and other factors.

Joyce Malombe examined poverty in Washington, DC and the federal, local government and non-profit programs to address it. She found that these programs were insufficient and mainly designed to deal with short-term problems rather than the complex causes that kept people in poverty. She also noted a lack of community involvement in policies and programs, and a history of power struggles between levels of government, exacerbated by a context of racial and social tensions, that inhibited addressing poverty.

Malombe's and Halfani's analyses gave a fresh perspective on Washington's persistent problems, perhaps one that could only have come from their experience with developing country cities. (Halfani’s paper, "Local Dynamism and the Governance of Washington, D.C.: A Study on the Scope of Civil Society-State Engagement" and Malombe’s paper, "State and Local Approaches to Poverty in Washington, D.C." are available at www.wilsoncenter.org.)