For five years in the 1970s I lived and worked in Africa in both
Botswana and Ghana. I also traveled throughout Western, Eastern, and
Southern Africa. From that experience, I gathered these impressions of
the culture of the storytelling in Africa.
Story in Africa is
sacred (thus my capitalization), and Story is interwoven in the daily
fabric of life. Story is not just words in Africa. Story is told through
baskets, fabric, dance, ritual, and relationship. A slight gesture of a
body might reveal entire Story Worlds. I experienced an enormous depth
and subtly in communication in every country I visited. Quite ordinary
interactions became extraordinary. I recall a woman in the Accra market
in Ghana breaking into a spontaneous dance with me as part of our Story
Time together.
Initially, I taught English as a Second Language
(ESL) and Literature in Secondary Schools through Peace Corps. My
Botswana students made beautiful drawings to go with stories they wrote
to include in the school newspaper. They drew Story with ease and
confidence because this was part of their early training at home.
I
chose storytelling as a teaching tool to clarify plot lines and bridge
cultural divides. The curriculum I taught was a mix of English classics
such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer combined with marvelous African
books like China Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" and "The Beautiful Ones
Are Not Yet Born."
I prepared students for two sets of
examinations that pretty much determined their futures: "O" Levels, or
Ordinary Levels (roughly the equivalent of late middle school in the
USA) and "A" Levels or Advanced Levels (roughly the equivalent of a high
school diploma or even first year of community college in the USA). My
students did rather well.
In Botswana one of the books we studied
was "Lambs Tales from Shakespeare." I set my students the task of
writing scripts for each of these tales and acting them out. When one
does this kind of analysis, the commonality between classic European
literature and World Story comes into sharper relief.
I went to
Botswana on my own after my Peace Corps tour ended in secondary schools
and became involved in three village projects, each involving story as a
powerful tool.
With the villagers in Gabane I set up Tshwaragano
Craft Center, became Puppetry Consultant for a Popular Culture Team, and
wrote stories and lesson plans for a literacy curriculum. Through
working on these projects I learned Story is the life force that moves
brain, heart, and limbs forward. I became Puppetry Consultant simply
because I picked up a puppet in the back of a pick-up truck, started
wiggling its arms around and giving it a voice and lines to speak. In
the Popular Theater work we built on the Brazilian educator Paulo
Freire's Critical Theory.
Community Development workers
brainstormed critical issues and then we built stories around these,
performed in drama, dance, song, and puppetry. We stopped at the high
point of the action to ask the audience: "What would you do now?" these
discussions led to common work projects in the village. We did something
similar in the literacy curriculum we designed and had illustrated.
I
was so impressed by the results I'd seen in the other two projects that
I started using puppetry performances at Tshwaragano to work out
critical incidents and stimulate discussion of tricky situations any new
venture encounters, like "Whose turn is it to sweep the floor today?"
I
love Africa and her stories. I feel Africa is truly the Mother of
humankind, and certainly archeological findings bear this out. In Africa
I felt embraced by that Mothering energy.
Never in my life have I
been so enfolded, nurtured, watched over, looked after, cared for...and
just flat out enjoyed for being who I am. Africa is a continent, not a
country, of course, but I felt this no matter where I went.
Stories
ease difficult and painful situations. In Botswana I remember
storytelling told around a campfire under a sky full of piercing stars a
night our truck broke down in the bush between Francestown and Maun.
In
Ghana I remember stories told in crammed to the brim Mammy Wagons that
might plunge us into an accident around the next corner. But, in either
of these situations if we would have come into danger, we would have
faced it as friends, not as strangers, and this would have been through
the power and grace of story.
Story is the thread of celebration
and the thread of knowing. During Peace Corps training I went to a
village no outsiders had ever lived in. We were mutually curious about
one another and expressed this through Story. I collected their stories
and they created stories and song commemorating my visit.
Stories
in any language and culture are worth telling to our children and
passing on. Africa has a strong oral history, of course, and you could
probably speak to the impact of technology on her oral history
tradition.
Because, by definition Story requires time, and time
together, as well as the willingness to pass on a tradition and use our
imagination. It's good to have stories of your family and your people to
provide a sense of continuity between generations...a thread of time
and life moving across place.
I have a shelf filled with books
from and about Africa. Prominent among them are books of African
folktales, which carry wisdom from the ancestors into the modern day.
There's
a wide discrepancy between popular stories told about Africa ("It's
dark, exotic, and war torn") and the stories I took home after I lived
and worked in Africa for five years. I am troubled by the popular
perception in the USA of Africa as this place (only) of
war-poverty-famine-tribal strife-AIDS crisis. Granted African nations
and the African continent have huge difficulties and problems to
continue resolving, but to balance all that I so want people to
understand the warm beating heart of Africa which for me felt like the
essence of being human...not primitive at all, but highly civilized and
humane.
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