Children's photo books

FAVL friend Teresa Jolly Holt sends us to... Sandra Pinkney

Sandra Pinkney received her CDA in Early Childhood Development from Washington, and went on to become the owner and director of a daycare in Poughkeepsie, New York. She is also actively involved in the organizations, which aim to help the development and enrichment of young children, including the New York Association of Early Childhood, and the National Black Child Development Institute.

Myles Pinkney is a free-lance photographer who has collaborated on works with his wife as well as celebrated children's author, Nikki Grimes. Myles graduated from Marist College with a BA in communications, however he has been studying photography since he was a child.

Photography exhibit... if you happen to be in Paris?

Interesting portraits in black and white by Philippe Guionie

“Le tirailleur et les trois fleuves, regards croisés”

Ce projet intitulé « le tirailleur et les trois fleuves, regards croisés » propose un regard contemporain et artistique sur la mémoire méconnue et oubliée des anciens combattants africains. Il est le prolongement du projet “le tirailleur et les trois fleuves” réalisé par Philippe Guionie.

Sénégal, Niger et Congo étaient les trois grands fleuves de l’ex-Empire colonial français. Trois chemins de pénétration et d’influence française que le tirailleur africain a emprunté dans son parcours d’homme et de soldat. Aujourd’hui, il s’agit de reprendre ces trois itinérances africaines pour poser un regard artistique et mémoriel sur ce patrimoine humain méconnu. Pour quelques années encore, ces tirailleurs sont encore nos contemporains. Dépositaire d’une mémoire unique et originale de la francophonie, ils sont devenus des témoins privilégiés des relations entre la France et l’Afrique.Cette valorisation d’un patrimoine humain prend une acuité particulière, à l’heure où se manifeste la nécessité d’ancrer l’immigration dans la mémoire collective et de lui rendre sa juste place dans une perspective d’histoire commune et partagée

Le photographe Philippe Guionie réalise une série photographique depuis plus de dix ans en France et en Afrique en associant le portrait N&B et des enregistrements sonores. En 2006, il publie un premier ouvrage sur ce thème, « Anciens combattants africains » aux éditions Les Imaginayres.

What is the idea of FAVL?

Someone suggested to me that FAVL needs to "get out there" more in terms of networking and messaging. I know we have some regular blog readers, and that even more people casually come across the site, so I thought I would begin regular reflections on what FAVL means, to me, and where we hope to be going over the next decades.

As the last word of the previous sentence suggests, I have always taken a long-term approach to FAVL, and constantly repeat my mantra: we are not a ribbon-cutting organization, we are there to clean up after the party.

I just got off the phone with Lucas Aligire, our coordinator in Bolgatanga area, Ghana. We chatted about each of the libraries. He mentioned that Sumbrungu had received a shipment of science books from Tanya Driechel, a former volunteer. The Gowrie-Kunkua library had also received a nice donation of books, from the Ghana Library Board and from five prominent local residents (who each donated 10-20 books). So this is precisely what FAVL means to me: the institutionalization of a regular network of "friends of" these small village libraries, both international and local. How does the institutionalization happen? Primarily, I think, by making sure that each librarian has a librarian. The primary function of the librarian, in my view, is to assure the continuity of the library as an enduring entity. That is FAVL's role, too: to ensure that each library is there 30 years from now, and is enmeshed in an ever-widening circle of friends and institutions that will nurture the library. A library has to take root for it to grow. The roots of a library are the relationships that each library creates. These relationships are with international volunteers, with local residents, with young and adult readers, with government library and literacy entities, etc. Gradually, and only occasionally, people who have leadership skills, time, and abilities, will take each library to a next level, and if they are cognizant of the fragility of libraries as social institutions, they will also be thinking 30 years ahead.

At the heart of the long-term perspective then is an optimism that the world, and more specifically these small villages, will be around 30 years from now, and people will be reading. Of course, life could go in either direction. Villages and libraries can be swept away by the tsunamis of wars and riots. Alternatively, cell phones could just become so fundamentally fascinating and cheap that no one needs to borrow a book or seek out a quiet special place dedicated to reading. I just don't think either of those are likely to happen in the small villages where FAVL operates.

A nice essay by John Ryle, from Granta , in 2005

Introduction: The Many Voices of Africa

Kwani? is a literary and political magazine published in Nairobi. (The name means ‘So What?’ in Sheng.) Although most of the contents of Kwani? are in English, the magazine includes pieces where Sheng gets one of its earliest outings as a literary language. In the same spirit, the editor of Kwani?, Binyavanga Wainaina, has celebrated the visual art of matatus, intricately customized vehicles whose paintwork is startling enough to cause a traffic accident. ‘Brash, garish public transport vehicles,’ he calls them, ‘so irritating to every Kenyan except those who own one, or work for one‘. On the streets of Nairobi the turnboys hang from the doors of matatus, half-cut on miraa (the stimulant leaf favoured by Somalis, grown in central Kenya), calling out destinations at the stopping points and cramming passengers into the vehicle until the wheels splay outward and the transmission hangs a few inches from the ground. Herds of these matatus careen around Nairobi with cool disregard for other road users. It is hard not to be struck by them, or be struck down while trying to make out the intricate typography of the slogans that bedeck them: HARD TARGET, SWEET BABY, HAPPINESS, SLANDER, DOWN WITH HOMEBOYS, TOLERANCE OF LADIES, DESTINATION. And, seeming to confirm the upbeat conclusion of the Commission for Africa, NO CONDITION PERMANENT. Another Kenyan commentator, Joyce Nyairo, compares the traffic in Nairobi to music. Matatus, she says, are jazz.

Read more...

In Sierra Leone, by Michael Jackson

Many years ago I was terribly impressed by a book Paths Toward a Clearing by the anthropologist Michael Jackson. I just picked up his interesting short book chock-full of vignettes and anecdotes, centered on Jackson's recent stay in Sierra Leone while he "ghost-authored" the autobiography of S.B. Marah, a very prominent political figure and friend. I knew very little about politics and the war, so everything was quite interesting. Jackson writes at a nice clip, though the seemingly regular asides about how a particular feature of life in Sierra Leone illustrated/deepened a sentence here or there from Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition was disconcerting. Surely she is not the source of all insights into the human condition? Was it deliberate, to refer to her enough times to be noted by the reader? Part of the strategy of this otherwise aimless reflection? Don't get me wrong, the book is fascinating and a great read for someone not knowledgeable about Sierra Leone.

There is a nice meditation on what young men want, when they leave their villages and commit awful atrocities. Power, of course, but what kind of power? "...A vast array of imperatives, any one of which an individual may consider vital to his very existence-- manhood, wealth, work, education, status, strength, renown-- though it eludes his grasp." (p. 147)

Another interesting point is asking why the young soldiers dressed up. "Because no laws or rules applied to them; it was to show that they could do anything," is the answer proffered by a young friend.

I liked S.B. Marah's observation on p. 165: "In some countries you see photographs of all the past leaders, whether good or bad, but in other countries, as soon as a new leader comes along, they drop all the photographs and things associated with the former leader. That, I feel, is not good."

[French] Elisee rapport de Dakar

Nous sommes mardi soir, 25 Novembre 2008, il est 16 heures nous débarquons à l’aéroport Léopold Sedar Senghor de Dakar Koura Donkoui et moi tous deux représentants de FAVL. Nous empruntons un taxi. 20 minutes plus tard nous voici a l’Hôtel du Plateau. Une chambre nous y a été réservée par Michael Kevane, Directeur de FAVL. Que Dakar est beau ! Quand je pense a la canicule et au temps poussiéreux de Ouagadougou.

Sitôt débarbouillés nous voici dans en reconnaissance dans les rues de Dakar. Notre repère : un guide imprimé que tient Michael

L’objectif du voyage est double. Pour moi, c’est une mission de documentation aux archives de Dakar et ce, dans l’optique de la préparation d’un scénario pour la réalisation d’une bande dessinée sur Dim Delobsom, premier cadre voltaïque de la période coloniale. Donkoui quant a lui est charge de rencontrer les structures œuvrant dans la lecture publique notamment les bibliothèques associatives de la ville. Objectif : s’imprégner de leurs réalités ; faire un partage d’expériences ; toute chose qui seront utiles pour la continuité et la pérennité de l’œuvre de FAVL.

Mais le soir, changement de programme. Compte tenu des conditions strictes de l’accès aux archives de Dakar, Michael qui a réussi à s’introduire a jugé bon pour moi de patienter deux jours. Donc il est convenu que j’accompagne Donkoui dans les différentes courses.

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To a student thinking of volunteering in Tanzania

I wrote the following...

Most of your time in Chalula will be very quiet. At daybreak donkeys bray and roosters ... well, make noise. You and your host family wake, wash up, drink tea, and then you would head off to the library, spending much of the time helping children reading, organizing activities. Life in a village without electricity is very slow. Plenty of time for walks, naps, conversation, and your own reading (preferably novels set in Tanzania or East Africa, or Africa-related non-fiction). The nicest part about an extended stay is to gradually get to know a few people well, and spend time chatting about life in a village.

In Burkina Faso and Ghana we usually arrange for a volunteer to have a young woman (if volunteer is female) live with the volunteer for the stay. She helps with cooking, everyday chores (surprising how many things need to be learned, like how to wash pots and pans when there is no running water), and companionship, and safety. I am sure that could be arranged in Chalula. We pay a modest stipend to the person, so it is a desirable "job" (and the work is usually much less than they do at their own homes, and they get a chance to practice English, etc.).

The danger spot in a village stay, is precisely illness. When you arrive, we strongly encourage you to take the time to figure out and visit various local health clinics. You should definitely bring a mosquito net. A cell phone is an inexpensive help, because you can quickly call the librarians, or your family, and get advice and comfort. After receiving a call at 2am several summers ago from two volunteers in the Ghana libraries, one with a bad fever, I also encourage you to make sure you have a couple thermometers and aspirin. "My fever feels very hot," was not a helpful medical symptom in the Ghana case. ;-)

Contes Du Pays Des Moose: Burkina Faso

My colleague Nina Tanti is translating another colleague's book, Stories of the Moose country, by Alain Sissao. It is a collection of folktales that Alain collected over the 1980s and 1990s. Curiously, many of them are reminiscent of folktales I've read that were collected in northern Sudan. Lots of arbitrary killing of animal, ogres, chiefs, women and children. The hyena is the figure of ridicule, the hare of cleverness. I'm sure there is a deep logic to it all! I enjoyed Alain's crisp rendering of the tales: for an advanced French reader (though hardly fluent) who is also very comfortable with Burkinabè French style, it is a pleasure to read. Nina's translations should bring the book to a wider audience.

Good holiday news! Grant to make two village libraries more relevant and accessible to girls

We're very excited about this small grant provided by the New Field Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation. The funds will be used to establish special reading corners that will be targeted at girls in primary and secondary school, print four “microbooks” featured themes relating to the lives of girls in villages, build two latrines in each library, one for girls and one for boys, hire two female reading coaches in each library to tutor children, and build two outdoor reading circles in each library.

Details
FAVL will supplement its standard library model in five specific ways:
1. Provide a larger number of books oriented toward girls (featuring girls as central characters and/or written by female authors) and have them displayed in a special “corner” area with girl-oriented mural designs. Currently FAVL provides a generous selection of children’s books and novels for young adults that are available in bookstores in Ouagadougou. Most reading material is in French, the language of instruction, and there is limited reading material available in Dioula, the “national language” spoken in much of southwestern Burkina Faso. There are titles available that features themes for young and adolescent girls; the recent bande dessinee (BD) Aya, by Marguerite Abouet, comes to mind. FAVL would purchase 40 such books for each library, build a special display bookcase using local carpenters, paint a corner of the library with appropriate murals, provide the corner with a large woven mat (made locally) and cushions (made locally).
2. Publish twenty-five copies of four micro-books oriented around the activities of girls in the village of Dimikuy and Boni. In Spring 2008, FAVL piloted a new model for volunteer activities in the libraries of Burkina Faso involving the creation of micro-books for children in French and national languages. Our pilot project was carried out with funding from the Santa Clara Rotary Club. Chelsea Rangel, a student at the University of Montana. Chelsea worked with village librarians, teachers, and students to conceive of and take photographs for three children’s books in French and Dioula. FAVL volunteers did the graphic design and layout. The books were printed in San Jose in a small print run of 100 copies each. The books were distributed to FAVL libraries and other educational entities in southwestern Burkina Faso. With funding from the new Field Foundation, FAVL volunteers who will be in Burkina Faso in summer 2009 would produce and publish four books with themes related to girls and women, and print 25 copies of each for distribution to FAVL libraries. If there is further demand for the books, a larger print run can be made.
3. Firmly establish a variety of reading programs for children by staffing for one year two female “reading coaches” in each library who will work during after-school hours and who will promote and conduct outreach activities in the villages. Currently, FAVL only has funding for one librarian for each village library. Village librarians are typically women who have completed some secondary schooling and have remained in the village. They often have very little experience with reading programs, and have limited time to sustain reading programs that are initiated by volunteers who spend time in the libraries. Greater funding would permit each library to hire two reading coaches who would spend 2-3 hours per day helping younger children read, by giving one-on-one reading help and by holding story hours and other fun activities for primary school students. Female reading coaches would serve as positive role models for girls in these rural villages, who in many cases withdraw early from primary and secondary school in order to marry and work in agriculture.
4. Build two latrines (one for girls and one for boys) for use by library patrons. A variety of sources (for example, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/23/international/africa/23ethiopia.html?pagewanted=all) suggest that providing separate latrine facilities is an important practical and symbolic step towards ensuring that educational facilities are “girl friendly.” FAVL would build two latrines for each library, designating one as the girl’s and other as the boy’s latrines. This would be very unusual for Burkina Faso villages, and will be sure to generate interesting discussions regarding “equal treatment” of the genders.
5. Build “reading circles” for use by girls and boys to read outside and play children’s games. Children reading in libraries very often want to enjoy their books outside of the building, whose interior can often reach uncomfortable temperatures (buildings are made of mud bricks and roofs are tin). FAVL has tried to build a “reading circle” outside of every library, involving a circular bench shaded by a traditional straw shelter (a “summer hat” as they are known in Ghana, or a “hangar” as they are known in Burkina Faso. These areas are quickly dominated by children, since the libraries typically stock large games in these areas (mankala, for example). These games are played by both girls and boys. Our current funding level for the new libraries is limited, and with the grant from New Field Foundation we would be able to build two reading circles for the outside of each library. Note that these reading circles are often sites where community members hold meetings outside of library hours.

The Story of a Library: Research and Development in an African Village

New [gated] article by Kate Parry — 2009

Background: Although education in Africa is expanding, little is being done to support learners’ literacy outside the school. Rural people have little access to books and so cannot develop their reading skills.

Purpose of Study: The project described here has both an educational and a research purpose: to complement formal schooling by making reading material available to students and others, and to document the development of new literacy practices by investigating and recording readers’ preferences.

Setting: The site is near the trading center of Kitengesa in Masaka District in Uganda. It is a rural area where most people depend on subsistence farming and the sale of food and cash crops. Many have been to school, however, and basic literacy is widespread.

Go to link to article...

Bryn Mawr College student, alumna establish Baobab Prize to encourage African literature for young readers

November 3, 2008

Deborah Ahenkorah '10

As a child, Deborah Ahenkorah ’10 was a voracious reader; she practically wore out her library card. But despite the fact that she was born and educated through secondary school in the West African nation of Ghana, she had little opportunity to read the work of African authors until she took a course in African literature here at Bryn Mawr.

Young readers’ lack of access to African literature is a problem, Ahenkorah explains: “Without access to books by and about Africans, young people grow up not knowing much about the diverse cultures of their vast continent. And especially when all they read is Western literature, they have very little reason to feel proud of their national identities and continental heritage.”

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[French] News from Koura Donkoui in Bereba

Je t'informe par la meme occassion que j'ai pu rencontré la famille ALLIOT qui a fait un don de livres important à la bibliothèque de BEREBA dont le depouillement n'est pas encore fait.Les premiers cartons que nous avons vu contiennent les romans policiers SAS et autres très lus des agents. Ils ont trouvé que la bibliothèque constitue une continuité de leurs objectivité c'està dire un don ou un appui qui ,permet à des gens de s'instruire,de réussir, et sortir de la pauvreté.

FAVL friend Shane Auerbach writes:

I really like your list of West African novels on Amazon. I think that you should consider adding Massa Makan Diabate from Mali to that list. Like L'etrange destin de Wangrin, Diabate's novels are an incredible bookmark in Malian history. The humor in his novels is unbeatable, and it's also fascinating to consider his development as a writer, given his family's tradition as a family of griots (Described well in an biography of Diabate written by Cherif Cheick Keita). Although he wrote several Sunjata fasas, for me his most important work is his trilogy of novels:

Le Lieutenant de Kouta
Le Coiffeur de Kouta
Le Boucher de Kouta

They're all based in Kita, Mali. I think all of them merit being on your list. If you had to pick one, however, I would probably stick with the first, Le Lieutenant.

Anyway, keep up the good, and important, work that you do.

[French] Obama will not go to Ouagadougou

From Patrice Nganang for Africultures:

Il irait plutôt au Caire. Voilà la conclusion d'une enquête préemptive publiée dans le New York Times,'A la recherche du lieu idéal pour tenir un discours'. (1) C'est que le prochain président américain a besoin d'un lieu symbolique pour tenir ce discours paradigmatique sur l'Islam que tout le monde - y compris les terroristes parait-il - attend, et dont depuis au moins ses propos du 18 mars 2008 sur la race, chacun le sait capable. Un discours donc, qui serait aussi vrai que sensible, et qui en des mots plus intelligents que le binarisme brutal de Bush, résumerait la complexité du contentieux qui oppose l'Occident à la religion musulmane qui fut celle de son père, et le dépasserait. Il n'est pas besoin de lire cette enquête-là jusqu'au bout pour se rendre compte que, si les stratèges d'Obama, qui ont cet art si subtil de toujours tâter le terrain avant de prendre une décision, ont d'emblée effacé la capitale du Burkina Faso de leur liste, parce que pas suffisamment'high profile', en un tour du destin, et surtout de toutes les capitales de pays islamiques du monde (Ramallah, Jakarta, Bagdad, Téhéran, Amman, etc., etc.), ils seront revenus sur un pays africain. L'Afrique, ah, ce continent qui tétument insiste pour rappeler sa présence à l'Amérique, même quand celle-ci dit et veut parler d'autre chose ! Ce continent qui attend l'arrivée sur son sol de ce fils qu'il sait sien, mais surtout qui attend une fondamentale redéfinition des relations des États-Unis avec elle.

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End of a library... birth of a muscle room?

While in Senegal, Donkoui and Elisee, FAVL Burkina coordinators, visited a number of libraries around Dakar. One depressing visit was to a community library started by a youth association. The library was no more, just empty shelves, and the association had switched to promoting a weight room. What would Arnold Schwarzenegger say? Room for both, one would hope!

Goree Island, Senegal

It was my second time on the island (previously a short trip accompanied by noted Africanist historian Sara Berry... who could ask for better company?). This time, about ten days ago, was an ever greater pleasure, accompanying our FAVL coordinators Koura Donkoui and Saré Elisee. It was their first time on a motored boat (as opposed to a canoe), and we were all agog at the giant container ships in Dakar Port. We were gaga over the neat and clean and friendly Goree Island was- just beautiful. La vie tranquille was a refrain heard a lot. Everywhere there were little displays of art for sale, especially what they called recyclage, using recucled materials tp make collages and sculptures. The visit to the "slave house" was an especially good learning moment, as on the boat ride over we had read the sceptical Lonely Planet guide, so when we got to the museum we appreciated both the slave trade history and the economics of slave trade tourism!

John Abdul Kargbo seems to be the "library guy" in Sierra Leone

From his article, "Promoting Reading In Schools In Sierra Leone":

Not withstanding school libraries in Sierra Leone are not given much recognition as the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST)has no clear-cut policies on these institutions. Their development depends on the enthusiasm of head teachers and the quality of service rendered by the few existing school libraries depends on the type of school the library is serving. In primary schools the provisions of libraries are inadequate as compared to those in secondary schools where the level of organization is dependent on who is sponsoring the school. For example old well established mission schools like the Sierra Leone Grammar School, the Anne Walsh Memorial Secondary School for Girls and Saint Edwards Secondary School in Freetown, and a few government maintained schools like the Government Secondary School in Bo, have better collections than the majority of schools in the country, especially those that started as self-help schools. These schools have poor library collections because of the uncertainty of funding. Old Students Associations fund some schools and in turn have good collections. A few private schools, especially those run by internationals such as Lebanese International School has good collections. The majority of government supported schools offer the poorest quality of education especially those run on commercial enterprises. These hardly have libraries and pupils of these schools have to rely on the services of the Sierra Leone Library Board (SLLB) and other libraries like the British Council and the United States Information Services (USIS),where available. Some of the few existing school libraries are fast disappearing making way for classrooms because of increased intake.

Most schools lack qualified staff to run their libraries because of the non-availability of funds to pay professional librarians. The trend has been to employ library assistants who in most cases are school leavers with or without West African Secondary School Certificate of Education (WASSCE). Some schools put the library under the charge of a teacher.

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Like mushrooms? I keep coming across library support organizations

This one is called People United for Libraries in Africa

2008 marks PULA’s 5-year anniversary as an organization devoted to providing libraries and books to needful communities in Africa. Since its inception in 2003, PULA has, with your generous support…

… donated funds for the construction of a library for Malawi Children’s Village (an AIDS orphanage) to serve both the orphanage and the surrounding community. In addition, PULA shipped 3,000 pounds of books to the library and provided funding for librarian training. Since its completion, the MCV Library has been designated “best library in the region” and has been awarded several computer study stations by the American Embassy in Malawi.

‪ …partnered with Murumba Uganda to build a community library in Butiru, Uganda, and secured a $5,000 grant for the purchase of new library books, most of them with African storylines and themes.

‪ …worked in cooperation with the Children’s Centre at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka to set up primary school libraries throughout the area. Over twenty schools now participate in this ongoing program and receive African children’s literature, textbooks, and educational books, courtesy of PULA.

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Great interview with Chinua Achebe

"Where one thing stands, another thing stands beside it." I love that proverb... Achebe interprets: There are no absolutes.

Devil on the Cross - Ngugi

On the plane to and from Senegal I had the pleasure of reading Devil on the Cross, by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. It is an excellent "experimental" and polemical novel, supposedly written on toilet paper while in prison. "Searing" is the adjective I see a lot on websites, and it does move through an indictment of Kenyan capitalism at brutal speed. Sometimes a little overbearing, and the contemporary reader wishes that the "laying it on thick" were a bit more subtle or ironic. Here's a neat article from a Ghanaian newspaper.












Here's a video clip of Ngugi:

Bibliothèque Lecture Développement in Senegal

FAVL regional coordinator in Burkina Faso, Koura Donkoui, visited the offices of this very similar library and reading promotion support organization in Senegal.

According to their website:
Bibliothèque Lecture Développement est une association sénégalaise fondée par des professionnels du livre, des sociologues et des pédagogues. Elle veut promouvoir la culture et l’éducation en mettant des bibliothèques à la disposition des populations et en facilitant l'accès aux TICs.

“Twenty Challenge” program in Kitengesa Library, Uganda

Kate Parry writes:

Dan Ahimbisibwe, the Kitengesa librarian, has just sent a report on the first month of the library’s “Twenty Challenge” program, which was in October. Nineteen secondary school students signed up for the “Challenge,” which meant that they undertook to try and read twenty books in the course of the month. They were promised a certificate and a small prize if they succeeded. Five of them didn’t make it, two because they were sent away for school fees, and one because she was ill, but of the fourteen who did make it, four read over forty books, one more than thirty, and five more than twenty! So it seems that they were really enjoying all this reading. Their English teacher also says he sees an improvement in their English, so now I’m planning a research project to try and quantify this improvement.

Another Peace Corps volunteer in Niankorodougou

And his parents are running a blog, that has some great pictures of elephants, and a nice shot of PCV Brian in front of the village library.

Isn't WWW weird annals 1: Are you going to relocate to Dohoun, Burkina Faso?

Then according to this site, there's a library there that your kids can use... ;-)

"Global Libraries"... FAVL mentioned in paper by Cody Yantis, LIS600 Global Libraries I.S.

Found on the Internet, here!

While FAVL, like IFLA, addresses human rights on an international level, it does so without the massive organizational support that IFLA garners, being, rather, a non-profit, grass roots community organization, started by a business professor from Santa Clara University. a brief but worthwhile aside, it is insightful to point out that the grass roots example of FAVL gestures at another element of Globalization to which Global Libraries must provide alternative. This is the idea of top-down versus bottom-up approaches. Returning to Prahalad, he shows that in business, as in libraries, for initiatives and ventures to succeed globally, one must begin at the bottom, rather than at the top, for the “trickle down” ideas of the past—whether they are applied to business ventures or information initiatives—have been proven to only benefit the elite at the top.¹⁶ One can see evidence of this idea even in the difference between IFLA’s approach—authoring a Resolution and publishing texts on information science—and FAVL’s approach—actually going into communities and constructing, managing, and supporting community libraries. This is not to say that IFLA’s efforts are in vain—quite the contrary—but it does illustrate the importance of approaching Global Libraries issues from the bottom-up, rather that the top-down, to avoid similar issues, inequalities, and oppressions that have arisen from the top-down ventures by corporations and multi-national organizations (which have shown the significant shortcomings—to put it lightly—of Globalization in the realm of human rights and general equality on a global scale).

An article in a Montreal student newspaper!

dimanche 9 décembre 2007 — Version imprimable

par Pascal Dessureault

Tous n’ont pas la chance d’avoir des grandes bibliothèques comportant des centaines de milliers de documents de toutes sortes comme c’est le cas dans les pays plus riches. Heureusement, grâce à un organisme appelé Friends of African Village Libraries (FAVL), certaines régions rurales des pays les plus pauvres d’Afrique ont la chance d’avoir accès à une bibliothèque communautaire. FAVL existe surtout grâce aux dons d’argent. Ceux-ci sont utilisés pour la construction de bibliothèques (souvent à partir de la remise à neuf de bâtiments locaux), pour l’achat de livres, pour l’embauche d’un bibliothécaire, pour l’installation de panneaux solaires dans le but d’éclairer les salles de lecture, etc.

Ces bibliothèques comportent environ 2000 ouvrages en anglais, en français, en arabe et dans la langue locale. Jusqu’à maintenant, 9 bibliothèques ont été ouvertes et supportées par FAVL au Burkina Faso (5), au Ghana (2), en Tanzanie (1) et en Ouganda (1).

L’initiative de cet organisme est bénéfique pour de nombreux enfants qui autrement n’auraient pas (ou peu) accès aux livres. En effet, peu de livres convenables sont offerts dans les écoles. Non seulement ces bibliothèques favorisent-elles la lecture, elles informent aussi la population sur différents sujets la touchant, tels les maladies ou l’environnement.

Pour avoir plus de renseignements et peut-être même faire un don, je vous invite à visiter le site suivant : www.favl.org.

Teachers for East African Alumni

... is one of the organizations that collaborates with FAVL -- chiefly, recently, by donating the eGranary to the
Kitengesa Community Library in Uganda. It maintains a website which has now become a terrific resource for information about education in East Africa at http://www.tea-a.org/.. Please check it out. The sender is TEAA's Chair/President, Brooks Goddard. Thanks Brooks!

Memoirs for popular reading

Had a nice chat this evening with Senegalese professor Babacar Fall, who was kind enough to give me a copy of a book he had published, Dialogue Avec Abdoulaye Ly, which is a transcription of a series of interviews done by Fall and some of his students, as part of an oral history project. Just had time tonite to read the introduction and skim through the contents... very nice job all around. Fall and I chatted about how much in demand memoirs are by the reading African public. I wish there were more of them. Oddly, last night in the hotel I could not sleep so I was watching Havana, with Robert Redford. Dreadful movie. But it got me thinking about what had happened to Fulgencio Batista, the dictator who fled Dec. 31, 1959. Turns out he went to Spain and wrote his memoirs! I love the title of one: To Rule is to Foresee. Hmmm. He surely must have been aware of how the title would "play"? Was it a work of self-criticism?

In Dakar but analyzing data from Ouagadougou

Hopefully in the coming days I'll have something interesting to blog about, but so far it has been a working trip to Africa: I spent a lot of time holed up in the hotel analyzing data from the November reading test that my Ouagalais colleagues Alain Sissao and Felix Compaore sent me. So I would be able to see how the three reading groups that were in FAVL's summer reading program fared over the summer, except... I forgot the crucial file that listed who was in each program! Well, I will get it soon enough, and meanwhile there are other things to analyze. Here, for example, are two graphs that show indices that aggregate various scores on various components of the reading test, for male and female students in grade level CM2 (about 5th grade). As can be seen, boys performed slightly better than girls. Everybody performed very poorly on the reading comprehension (multiple choice) tests; the teachers themselves were surprised.

Off to Dakar for 10 days

My posting may be a little slower. I am going to work in the Senegal National Archives on my biography of Dim Delobsom, the first important indigenous colonial civil servant of Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso). If you have never working in an archival setting, I strongly suggest a reading of A.S. Byatt's Possession.

While in Dakar I will meet Sare Elisee and Koura Donkoui, two of FAVL's Burkina Faso coordinators. We will do some training after the Archives close at 5pm (yes, I would stay in there all night if I could). We will also visit some community libraries in Dakar.

Somalia collapsed, but byproduct is a great publisher

This is pretty amazing:

SOMALI BOOK FAIR
Bandhigga Buugta Soomaaliyeed
STOCKHOLM, KIST TRAFF
25th-26th October,2008

Jointly Arranged by

Scansom Publishers, SSUF, Somali Publishers and Writers Association

WELCOME, SOO DHAWAAD

Saturday 25th October, 2008

Opening and welcoming statement by: SSUF Chairman: Ahmed Hassan

Opening speeches and introduction Scansom Publishers: Mohammed SH. Hassan The enocuragement of minority languages by the Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs ( Kulturradet).

Keenadid Mohamoud who currently teaches Somali at Goteborg University will illuminate us about the newly started Somali course programe. The initiative has been widely welcomed by the Somali community in the Diaspora.

Stockholm Stad Bibliotek Rinkeby & Tensta Libraries – Karin Sohlgren

Bashir Osman: Somali Teachers Association in Sweden.

Book Tour & Lunch

The Somali Publishing Industry in the Diaspora, Mohammed SH. Hassan, Scansom which is the leading Somali Publishing house in the Diaspora. The Company has published and distributes as well over 170 different titles of Somali books covering a wide range of issues and topics.

Karin Sohlgren: A librarian at Rinkeby Public Library and consultant to the Swedish Agency of School Development. Karin is in charge of finding good and relevant books for pre-school children. Karin will share her experiences with us and will give as well the information of the Somali resources and material collections in Rinkeby and Tensta Public Libraries.

Axmad Farah “Idaaja” and his publications: A leading Somali Cultural Historian, Author and a former member of Somali language Commission board. Wrote and published over 10 titles of Somali books covering a wide range of issues and topics. Currently lives in Nairobi

Khalid A. Gul and his Publications: A leading Somali writer, Poet and cultural Historian living in Denmark. He has written and published over 13-15 different titles of Somali books covering a wide range of issues.

Bashir Amaan ( The Principal of Al-Azhar Islamic school in Stockholm. The challenges and the opportunities of running private schools in Sweden )

Abdiaziz Xildhibaan living in UK Is one of the promising Somali writers of the future. So far the author has published 5 excellent books. The Author will share his elaborate His publications.

Axmad Farah Idaaja and his diverse Publications, including the just released play Dabkuu Shiday Darwiishkii

Said Shire living in UK has just published a new book about business ( Furaha Ganacsiga). It is one of the rare publications about such an important subject. The book is a new release in 2008

Abdifatah A. Abubakar (The author lives in Italy) and His Publications include Asaaska Suugaanta Soomaaliyeed, which is a very difficult subject and the author has written it in a very simple and clear method. Currently his 2nd book is under publication ( The Somali Trees), and hopefully should be ready during the book fair event.

Abdullahi Diiriye Carralle ( The author currently lives in Denmark) is one of the pioneers Who substantially contributed in developing and translating the structure of Somali poetry (iisaanka Maansada) in the mid 70`s. The Author has laid a solid foundation for For this difficult subject. His first book was published in the early 70`s. An updated and Revised Version of the authors research was again published in Sweden 2003 which is still so far probably the only published book about this subject. The Author will share his experiences with us during the event.

Abdi Bashir & Yusuf Hassan ( from Sweden) will present their respective publications, We shall listen as well a poem conducted by Abdi Bashir.

Books honored at African Studies Association meetings

RISE OF THE GOLDEN COBRA

A young scribe with revenge on his mind. A pharaoh’s war for the honor of Egypt.

During a picnic overlooking the Nile, 14-year-old scribe Nebi spots the riders first. Led by the treacherous Count Nimlot, the raiding party slaughters Nebi’s master, the region’s head of police. Although wounded, Nebi escapes, the only living witness that the pharaoh’s northern territory is no longer secure.

Nebi is quickly catapulted into events that will change history. Set in 728 B.C., RISE OF THE GOLDEN COBRA surrounds the actual reign of Pharaoh Piankhy, the brilliant and compassionate leader whose astonishing campaign united Ancient Egypt.

IKENNA GOES TO NIGERIA

British-born Ikenna explores Lagos, Onitsha, and Abuja and gets to meet his mom's relatives when he visits Nigeria. (Grades K-3)

[francais] Commentaire sur les camps de lecture d'été et tests

Notre collegue SARE Elisée fait des observations:

Durant le test de lecture effectué dans les différentes écoles primaires des villages abritants les bibliothèques il est ressorti que le niveau général de lecture des élèves évolue en dents de scie. Il a été en effet constaté qu’une catégorie élèves à un niveau de lecture vraiment bas (médiocre), c’est a dire que ceux-ci n’arrivent même pas a déchiffrer correctement les mots élémentaires et confondent quelque fois des syllabes. Donc ils n’ont pas pu répondre aux questions qui leurs ont été posées. Ceux-ci, dans l’ensemble ont refermé leurs textes les ont mis a coter, sans savoir que les réponses aux questions qu’on leur pose se trouvent dans les textes qu’ils viennent de lire. Une seconde catégorie d’élèves (la majorités) ont un niveau passable mais ne comprennent pas toujours ce qu’ils lisent ; ils se contentent plutôt de déchiffrer les mots sans vraiment en connaître les sens. Le mot « embonpoint » a causé de sérieux problèmes de lecture a ces élèves. Une troisième catégorie lisaient plutôt bien et répondaient assez bien aux questions a eux posées. Cette catégorie se composait en grande parties des élèves ayant participés au programme de lecture d’été.

Je me suis par la suite entretenu avec les deux instituteurs qui nous ont suivi durant toute la tournée dans les 5 villages, à savoir monsieur Sanogo et monsieur Zomba. Pour ceux-ci, une telle initiative est la bien venue. D’un point de vue pédagogique c’est intéressant a plusieurs titre : ce genre de tests facilite l’évaluation d’une classe et permet a travers le plan de la Gestion Axée sur les Résultats (GAR) de définir des stratégies d’amélioration de la lecture. Pour ma part, le test de lecture montre a quel point les bibliothèques de villages de FAVL sont déterminants dans l’amélioration du niveau de lecture des élèves dans cette région, vue que les meilleurs lecteurs de ce test fréquentent pour la plupart, régulièrement les bibliothèques et ont activement pris part au camp de lecture. Donc des initiatives telles que le camp doivent êtres promues. Cela contribuera à mon avis, à améliorer sensiblement les résultats scolaires des élèves. Car la lecture est une discipline (discipline instrument) dont l’élève se sert pour comprendre les autres matières. Donc la maîtrise de la lecture (en plus du fait qu’elle est un bon passe-temps) a nécessairement un impacte positif sur les résultats scolaire d’un eleve.

From Peace Corps volunteer Meghan Coughlin

Just received the library report for Niankorodougou for the month of October. The number of library visits and books borrowed has continued to go up with the opening of the school year. In the report, Moussa wrote that he is "tormented" every day by the need for more reading space for library visitors. I am currently working on getting an outside covered area built for this purpose. This past week we held an official library opening with community leaders/officials. More information about the opening ceremony and library activities will be updated on the blog shortly.

More details at her blog, all4nianko.

5 seconds in a school in Burkina Faso

The reading test team took this on a cell phone I presume... we're almost at my dream, where we have a web cam in each library and I can see how hard the librarians are working... of course, electricity has to come first? Cell phones may be affordable to us pretty soon though. Just think how much more reading will happen if the librarians are monitored....? Foucault, anyone?

Ingse Skattum, in a short article on teaching in Bamankan in Mali

The government of Mali has made desultory attempts over the years to teach primary schooling in Bamanankan [Bambara], the main national language. (Instruction has been and continues to be largely in French.) Skattum in a 2006 article in Mande Studies notes that one problem is:

Bambara and other national languages remain essentially oral languages, and the pupils do not see, so to speak, any printed Bambara that would permit them to internalise its spelling.

This simple fact is so stunning in the light of a Malian government policy to have about 2,000 schools teach the first years in Bambara, knowing full-well that there was no reading material for the students to read in Bambara!

Sukie, by the way, proudly spelled "bib" and "run" on her Etch-a-Sketch this morning. She "sounded them out." It is so much more interesting to be thinking of literacy issues in developing countries when you run your own experimental literacy lab at home ;-)

Le Siecle des Sauterelles

While attending the African Studies Association meetings I spent a little time finishing Malika Mokeddem's decent novel published in 1992. I think really it doesn't work as a novel; sorry to be blunt for those of you who maybe loved it. It opens with a searing image of a desert rape and murder. But then seems to turn more into an adventure/existential/love story... The tone and "voice" was not developed. Great introduction to the Algerian desert and ending days of French colonialism...

From an interview with Obi Nwakanma

What were the major factors that inspired you into writing?

It was simply, principally, the great allure and romance of the spoken word. There was a magic to it all. There was even the chivalry; our great loves; the young, beautiful women – our peers of course – to whom we addressed great love letters; and long agonized poems declaring love in bold, exaggerated verse. They were mostly the beautiful girls from the Holy Rosary School – the Girls Secondary School in Umuahia. But of course, one absorbed the nature of words from reading. I remember quite clearly, when I was in primary four, and my mother was reading Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, Ngugi’s Weep Not Child, and Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God. And that was when I read her copy of those books. I was moved by the landscape of Weep Not Child, and Njoroge’s experience within it. As children, we would go to the beautiful Umuahia Divisional Library, which had a fine children’s section in those days, and opened on Saturdays from 9 am to 3:00 pm, and we encountered books, and such things. It was a healthy place to be. That absorption with books, indirectly inspired my own efforts, and in many ways, it was always, not a philosophical question, but a simple attraction to utterance for its own sake. I wrote to amuse my friends and myself. In some ways, occasionally, to impress the beautiful maiden of one’s dream of that season, with what one felt was the important, even sometimes, blinding genius of one’s utterance.

The full interview is on this fine blog EverythinLiterature by Sumaila Isah of Kaduna's New Nigerian Newspapers.

[francais] site web Le Club des rats de biblio-net

Plein de critiques de livres en francais. Formidable!

[non-Africa posting] Literary songsmithing

It is true that I am at the annual African Studies Association meetings (manning a table for another project I work on, UnderstandingSudan), but on the flight out here I listened to a band that was one of the top 2008 on emusic, Neutral Milk Hotel. The album seems to have come out long ago though... (update: I just read the very interesting story of singer Jeff Mangum on Wikipedia). The song Holland, 1945 in particular caught my ear... after two listenings, I was pretty sure it was Anne Frank, and of course you have to be endeared to someone who can craft such an amazing song about Anne Frank... Here are the opening lyrics:

The only girl I've ever loved
Was born with roses in her eyes
But then they buried her alive
One evening, 1945
With just her sister at her side
And only weeks before the guns
All came and rained on everyone
Now she's a little boy in Spain
Playing pianos filled with flames
On empty rings around the sun
All sing to say my dream has come

And here is an acoustic version. It is much better in the recorded version.

Getting American schoolchildren involved to help reading in Africa

FAVL friend Lola Galla writes:

I had a pretty successful visit to St. John's School in Ottsville, Pennsylvania, this past Monday. I was invited by the prinicpal to be a guest speaker to meet with students K through 8th grades about my visit to Chalula because the school is planning on having a fundraiser for Chalula in the coming year. The students were well prepared and greeted me with maps of land forms and interesting facts about Tanzania which they displayed in the classrooms. One door even had written "KARIBU", meaning "Welcome" in Swahili. I brought some items from out trip like kangas, jewelry, coffee, etc. and shared some of my Photographs. I taught some Swahili greetings and animals names.

You can buy some of Lola's photos with proceeds going to FAVL at her store: www.lolaoppd.etsy.com

Unfair, and from NY Times but further evidence of importance of reading

From Maureen Dowd:

Here’s Palin defending herself on the contention that she got confused about Africa:

“My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.”

Ouch. What she should have said, and would have if she were a good reader, was this:

I am very concerned about the atrocities in Darfur. Those atrocities led my state and myself as governor to confront the issue of divesting the Alaska Permanent Fund from stocks related to Darfur and Sudan. I think it is a tragedy that so many corrupt African dictatorships are ruining the lives of their citizens.

That's what Laura Bush, a *very* good reader, by all accounts, would have said.

If you know French speaking undergraduates... please share

More on Thomas Sankara's speeches

I continue to read the speeches of Thomas Sankara, revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso from 1983-87. An interesting speech he gave in 1984 was at the inaugural session of the People's Revolutionary Courts. He argued that bourgeois justice was a sham, because it favored those in power. For example,

In a society such as ours, here the population is 95 percent illiterate and held in obscurantism and ignorance by the ruling classes, bourgeois law , defying all common sense, dares assert that "ignorance of the law is no excuse."

The alternative? Some kind of informal and educational people's justice. he does not in the speech explain how this justice is to get by without written rules, nor how such written rules would once again quickly become the mechanism by which the powerful evaded the law. Sankara was a broad-brush thinker, operating in a small country; he seemed to think that the twenty of them who were in charge could basically make all the decisions about everything. For them, Burkina was like a medium-sized city. A firm hand could easily "master" order and justice. His rhetoric of people's justice I take to be basically rhetoric. If it were not rhetoric, he would at least have devoted some thought to what it would mean to have "people" judging complex cases. Did he think a tailor could investigate the complex financial transactions of a bank? Sankara was silent on these matters.

Libraries do really simple things to encourage reading and literacy

It occurred to me the other day, that the libraries FAVL supports are not doing some of those simple things. I know why not: in the village environments where FAVL operates, even very basic literacy functionality is not part of local common-sense. None of the librarians, nor any parents, have ever seen the simple literacy-encouraging techniques that well-developed school systems are so adept at: making posters, drawings, plays, "projects", puppet theater, etc. So one of our goals for 2009 is to foster more of that spirit in the libraries. So we'll go out and hire a literacy consultant to work out and implement a program, right? Wrong. Money we have, for that? No Yoda, no money. So we'll do it ourselves. And one place to start is by "edicting." So here's my thought for the memo to the librarians. Starting January 2009, every month of the year is a theme month. Your job is to program activities in the month that will tie into that theme, especially for children and new literates, as a way of encouraging literacy. You have no budget for this (that is why it is an edict). An unfunded mandate! And we expect results.

January - Politics month. Who are political leaders? What are different systems of government? Question and answer session with mayor.
February - The World Geography month. Learn about different countries of the world. Map quizzes. Color maps.
March - Artist month - Learn about drawing and painting. Art competitions. Learn about artists of the country and the world.
April- Masks month. Draw and make masks. Learn the meaning of masks of different ethnic groups.
May - Agriculture month. Do activities relating to seeds and crops. Drawings of crops. naming crops. celebrating rare crops. Spelling bee for names of crops.
June - Summer reading month - Learn what are good books to read in the summer on your own. share best books.
July - Break for rainy season
August - Break for rainy season
September - think of something!
October - think of something!
November - think of something!
December - think of something!

So now someone has to come up with a librarian "packet" to help the librarians organize each months activities, and think of the materials they might need, and ask what could be done with a $10 budget per library per month.

Well, this is just my thought of the day. Now to consult with FAVL board members, regional coordinators, and librarians themselves. Let's see if it is an idea with legs. it sure walks a long way in our libraries here in San Jose. But, honestly, this would be a experience revolution in village sin Burkina Faso.

A good source for African children's literature

Is at the University of Florida Africana collection website:

The purpose of this web page is to introduce scholars interested in African children's literature to a variety of material that is available for research in this area. I hope that what I have gathered here will serve as a useful starting point to anyone else interested in studying or doing research in African children's literature.

Teaching reading to kindergartners

Kindergartners are guided to learn how to read, through repetition and positive feedback, and by using time-tested strategies such as rhyming songs, alphabet exercises, phonetics lessons (The P says "pah"), sight words, and simple books that contain a small vocabulary of short words with good illustrations ("Hop on Pop" by Dr. Seuss). Schools in rural Burkina Faso have none of that, and most teachers have little training in how to deliver these strategies. An important component of rural village libraries is to have librarians who are trained and who can train others in these strategies. This seems to me to be an essential medium-term focus for library support organizations like FAVL. But with present resources, we can barely scratch the surface.

Calling all "friends"

What books are great for kids in African villages to read? A question that we all wonder about. Theresa Jolly Holt wrote in with some new suggestions:

Akimbo & the Elephants $4.99 paperback Alexander McCall Smith
Akimbo & the Lions $4.99 paperback Alexander McCall Smith
Akimbo & the Snake $4.99 paperback Alexander McCall Smith
Beatrice’s Goat @Uganda (USA) 7.99 P 9780689869907 McBrier

Coincidentally this morning I was thinking about a great book to share with young adults in Ghana and other English-speaking countries (and even in Burkina, where there are some English readers)... and it is Dreams from My Father, by, guess who? Barack Obama.

So go support your local used bookstore owner, or go garage-saling this weekend, and send some of these books off to the libraries in Ghana:

Sumbrungu Community Library

c/o CESRUD

Box 267
Bolgatanga GHANA

More Sankara speaks... about reading?

Continuing my reading (previous post) of the collected speeches of Thomas Sankara, today I read the famous 1983 "Speech of Political Orientation" (Discours d'orientation politique) that intellectual Burkinabè still know of today, 25 years later. Supposedly, the speech was written by Valère Somé, whom I happened to meet this summer, ever so briefly! Well, mostly I overhead him "discoursing" in the hallway while I was coding survey responses... I didn;t get up to wander over and engage. How's that for revealing where I stand? My PhD mentors (and still much admired) Michael Watts and Pranab Bardhan will be shuddering if they ever read my callousness. Well, young revolutionaries never really inspired me. Almost always provoked a yawn more than an accelerated heartbeat. Hmm, have to re-examine my Durruti fixation in the light of that comment.

Anyway, and apropos of this blog, the interesting part in the speech is the emphasis placed on self-education and moral reform through reading. The young intellectuals of the revolution wanted everyone to be like themselves, reading and debating exciting works. They had absorbed a lot of Marxist-inspired readings, and it shows clearly in the speech. All that reading finally got turned into writing that mattered.

The more I think about it the more the speech reflects a certain kind of modernization ideology, where bringing material prosperity relies on transformation of the self. You have to want to work hard, honestly, and together for realization of the dream. Reading lots of books will help you do that. So then the interesting question is: Is that right? How much truth might there be in the whole "changing values" hypothesis? There are some development economists who work on this, and I'll try to come back to their work in another post, after I get a chance to see whether any of them mention reading itself as a way that certain values are brought into play.

I'll write more on the speech proper demain.

How fast can Elliot read when he wants to?

He read The Battle of the Labyrinth in about five hours. 381 pages of pure fun, apparently.

A great blog and a link to John Ryle

An excellent blog called Scarlett Lion, by a photographer in Uganda. She has a link to this article which I had not read before.

Tropical baroque, African reality and the work of Ryszard Kapuściński
by JOHN RYLE
Ryszard Kapuściński, The Shadow of the Sun, translated by Klara Glowczewska, 336pp, Penguin, 2001

Ron Kassimir on Yoweri Museveni, president of Uganda

From the article:
Reading Museveni: Structure, Agency and Pedagogy in Ugandan Politics, Ronald Kassimir, Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 33, No. 2/3, Special Issue: French-Speaking Central Africa: Political Dynamics of Identities and Representations (1999), pp. 649-673

Anyone the least bit familiar with Museveni's writings and speeches knows that here is a soldier that reads, and reads....

Why the dot-dot-dot? Like Monty Python and the Holy Grail in the blood-thirsty rabbit's Cave of Caerbannog"? Argh, I can't access JSTOR from home... Have to wait until tomorrow to find out what he reads. But the imagination is so fertile. Poetry? No. The Bible? Yes, but that's not what Kassimir has in mind I'm sure. Veterinary tracts on cattle ranching? No again. Danielle Steel? Hard to imagine. What does such a person actually read, and how does it change him?

Foiled by the New York Times, again

What does reading do? This time a really interesting article, because by someone who actually knows what they are doing, though a little uncritical... An extract:

How to Read Like a President

... I just finished five years of work on Jackson and his White House years, and I found that the reconstruction of his literary interests, from youth to old age, illuminated much about the arrangement of his intellectual furniture. His heroic sense of possibility? He loved Jane Porter’s novel “The Scottish Chiefs.” His thunderous rhetorical habit of posing a question and then answering it? He grew up memorizing the Westminster Shorter Catechism of the Presbyterian Church. His provincial obsession with manners, bearing and etiquette? He was a fan of Lord Chesterfield’s letters. His reflexive characterization of enemies like Henry Clay as “Judases” and his dependence on imagery from the Old Testament? He cherished the Bible and his late wife’s copy of Isaac Watts’s translation of the Psalms. His shrewd political sense? He was an unlikely admirer of the French philosopher Fénelon’s “Telemachus,” a kind of Machiavellian guide to ruling wisely.

You can tell a lot about a president — or a presidential candidate — by what he reads, or says he reads. We know the iconic examples: George Washington and his rules of civility, Thomas Jefferson and the thinkers of the French and Scottish Enlightenments, Lincoln and the Bible and Shakespeare. Though a generation apart, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt both loved Alfred Thayer Mahan’s “Influence of Sea Power Upon History” and savored the imperial poems of Kipling. Together such works created a kind of Anglo-American ethos in their minds — an ethos Franklin Roosevelt would make concrete during World War II, when he and Winston Churchill quoted Edward Lear’s nonsense rhymes to each other as they fought Hitler and Japan. Full article here....

Another speech by Thom Sank

Sankara was a big reader, and largely self-taught. His second major speech was the radio address given on August 4, 1983 when his comrade Blaise Compaoré (who was to kill him, in 1987) freed him from arrest (the internal dynamics of the Voltaic army were very complicated!). For all the lament over Sankara's death in 1987 a the hands of Compaore, it should not be forgotten that he helped do the same thing to his former colleague, Colonel Gabriel Somé Yoryam, who was killed on August 9, 1983.

Anyway, back to the speech. My favorite line is about the traitors and betrayers of the nation, leaders of a "submissive and groveling regime"... imagine hearing this as a fifteen year old in Ouagadougou at night: "You know these individuals, because they fraudulently worked their way into the history of our people." The rest of the speech simply says that they are in power and will not do anything rash.

Two weeks later Sankara gave a news conference. The first part focuses on the personality of Sankara, that is, questioners try to ask whether he is in charge, whether this is what he wanted, and Sankara modestly denies much responsibility. He tries to blame the troubles of the past 9 months on Somé Yoryan. H then goes on to affirm a revolutionary character to the new military regime. He dichotomizes: either one is a revolutionary, or a counterrevolutionary to be battled.

A month later on October 2, 1983, Sankara gives the famous "Discours d'Orientation Politique", supposedly largely written by Valère Somé. The speech is thrity pages long... must have taken a couple hours to read. More on that later.

Nice-looking South African children's books....

Courtesy of the International Reading Association blog, an entry from last year:

Masifunde Sonke: Let Us Read Together

South Africa Partners, a nonprofit organization based in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Eastern Cape, South Africa, has launched a book project called Masifunde Sonke (Let Us Read Together), which features 25 South African children’s books. For each book sold in the United States, one is donated to an under–resourced school in South Africa. For more information, visit the South Africa Partners or Masifunde Sonke websites.

Talking on a misty morning provokes profound reflections

Got up early this morning to give a talk about FAVL at the Sunnyvale-Sunrise Rotary Club. I like breakfast, so not problem! A warm and gracious audience, asking good questions about our efforts to produce local books and the summer reading program. After, as I was driving out of the parking lot of the Sunken Gardens golf club, where the Rotary meets, I saw through the mist a group of six Japanese women golfing (well, I presumed, given the location, time of day, etc.) Just the previous night I finally finished a wonderful novel, The Sound of the Mountain,by Yasunari Kawabata. It is a delightfully slow meditation on aging and family, and the the main character, the elderly (for the time) Shingo, notices the natural world in a way that I only aspire to. There is nothing "particularly" Japanese about the novel; it is a universal story, though there is plenty of Japanese culture in it. So the profound reflection? I love getting older (I'm in my forties). I know I'm going to regret saying that in thirty years. But the ability to make ever more connections in my head, with my past life as a person, is a really nice feeling. "Sweet," as the kids say.

Can someone help me with my hands?

Hey, this is a shout-out to Susan Stonecypher and her former colleagues and friends in the Volusia County school system... Susan gave a founding donation for the Gowrie-Kunkua Community Library in Ghana, FAVl's third in Ghana. It opened earlier this year, and in July I visited, and had a chance to chat with the library committee members. I gave my video camera to Darius Asanga, Sumbrungu librarian. His first time with a video camera. So get your Dramamine out. Kathryn Ranney, an SCU student, did a fantastic volunteer job editing the video, with her usual skill. Anyway, you get a little glimpse of the library. After my visit, though, we did some more work on the building (I wasn't that happy!). Everything seems to be going very well.

The sound on the video is not great, so turn it up a little loud. And you see my hand gestures? I'm not Vice-Presidential material yet. I need the clenched fist with the thumb thing that Clinton would do, I think.