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ZIBF: Indaba rising again!

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THIS year’s Harare edition of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair (ZIBF) ran from October 22 to 27.
As usual, the ZIBF kicked off with the Indaba – a conference which brings together scholars, authors and publishers to thrash out the theme chosen for the year with a view to enhancing the book world and its service to the community.
This year’s theme was, ‘The Book: Creating the Future’.
Last year, I wrote that the Indaba would rise again.
Indeed this year’s Indaba was markedly different from last year’s which was marred by papers which were off topic poorly conceived and lacking profound analysis.
In this article, however, I am going to focus on one Roseline Torai Kumvekera, a lecturer at Nyadire Teachers College, who carved her own space with distinction by re-defining reading.
Hers was the opening presentation and correctly so!
‘Writing for ECD: Try me, I can read’ was the title of her paper.
All children can read before they can decipher the alphabet, she clarified.
Reading, then, is not decoding meaning from letters but deriving meaning from the reality presented.
It, therefore, is not correct to keep children away from the book world because they cannot yet decipher the alphabet.
At whatever age, children can read; they will derive meaning from pictures and will grow from reading those wordless books.
When a ‘pre-reader’ picks up a book, he/she reads the story told by the pictures.
Kumvekera highlighted that where you have both text and pictures, there actually are two books, the book apparent in the pictures and the reality they present as well as the story told by the text.
These are not always the same.
This is a critical point which illustrates the injustice we sometimes do to children in the selection of books.
For example, when an African child opens a book and it says: Father, mother, and the picture of mother and father is white as in the Sunrise Readers, the child is forced to read at least three books.
The story and meaning of a white mother and father which can never represent his/her mother or father is the first book.
The second book is the story of his/her own mother and father as well as the joys and comfort associated with it, but which is being pushed into the background, and yet is the most relevant to the child.
The third book is what the text is saying which the child is not much involved with because it is not about him/her or his/her reality.
In the end, the child can be labelled a slow reader when in fact he/she is just disensconcing because of the meaninglessness — too much dissonance.
I was privy to a classic example of such disensconcement.
Charles, a nephew of mine, was in Grade 5 and perennially the school reports said he could not read.
This was unbelievable.
I lived with Charles and his mother, and in my interactions, Charles was a normal boy.
He did not seem impaired in any way in his intellectual capacities.
I was puzzled.
One Saturday, I was sorting out some books on the verandah.
Charles, who was playing next to me, picked one of the books from the liberation struggle titled, Zimbabwe is my Country and read it through like he had rehearsed it a thousand times.
He read it without a hitch.
I was astonished, but then I understood.
The Tom and Jerry he was reading at the former white school his mother insisted he should attend switched him off.
A few years later, I had an opportunity to raise Charles’s case with Paulo Freire, the renowned liberation educationist from Brazil when I was in the US pursuing my doctoral studies.
Freire’s response underlined an even more fundamental dimension.
“When people are in bondage, they cannot be at peace with that which celebrates their bondage, but when they liberate themselves and the discourse is about themselves, when they come into their own, they can be at peace,” said Freire.
Charles was not at peace reading about his erstwhile colonisers.
He could not, he would not and he did not connect and they labelled him illiterate, but Charles was literate about who he was.
In the end, we are culpable.
We give children books that cost them so much psychological energy, they cannot be at peace.
The moment children open books, something begins to happen in them.
They can feel at peace, they can feel joyful, excited or they can be upset, consternated or sad.
In the case of the Sunrise Readers, which have been popularised in our urban schools mostly, an African child feels sad and disheartened deep inside because the main actors are white, the rich are white and the poor are Africans.
Therefore, the actual book they read when they open the Sunrise Readers reads thus:
“The most important people are white
Africans are not important
It is the whites who are leaders
The Africans follow
It is better to be white
It is unfortunate to be African.”
Kumvekera’s paper asks these fundamental questions: How can children dream of the future they want for themselves, communities and the nation when they are not at the centre of what they read and when what they read is not in their language?
How can they dream of a future in which they are the main actors, the drivers, the heroes when they read books which alienate them?
Indeed, how can they sing their song in a strange land?
Kumvekera also decried that parents and schools deny children books about fables, folklore, fantasy and myths as a waste of time, preferring what is cut and dried, so called scientific as that which guarantees them a bright future and yet this is precisely what children love.
How wrong we are!

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