Category: Literacy

South Africa’s Puku Foundation: Children’s Books To Save Languages

Endangered Languages and the ‘Hegemony of English’

Delegates to the ‘Rising Africa’ IPA seminar in Nairobi will hear about the work of Puku, a foundation rushing to generate children’s literature in some of the continent’s dying languages.

There are only four people left alive who speak the N/uu language in South Africa, and they’re members of one family. The matriarch is Ouma Katrina, 86 years old. Her daughter is Lena du Plessis. Her granddaughter is Claudia Snyman. And little N/aungkusi Snyman is Ouma Katrina’s great-granddaughter.

You meet them in a 10-minute video we’re embedding below in this story. And in it, you’ll also hear from Elinor Sisulu, executive director of South Africa’s Puku Children’s Literature Foundation.

Sisulu will speak at the  International Publishers Association‘s (IPA)  “Africa Rising” seminar in Nairobi, hosted by the  Kenya Publishers Association. Read More

Literary Freedom Project

INTERVIEW with MITCHELL S. JACKSON

According to the literary critic, poet, professor Stephanie Burt, in the 2011 book titled Memoir: An Introduction, the scholar G. Thomas Couser argues that “we go to the genre not so much for detail or style as for “wisdom and self-knowledge,” for what the main character, who is always the author, has learned, which is, of course, true.” However, I would like to also add that the structural design within memoir, the scaffolding of narrative, the ways in which presentation matters or should matter, is what’s most important for an effective memoir, especially memoirs that waver between suffering and redemption. I don’t know if suffering is necessary for redemption, but in order to have been redeemed one most have done something to create a need for redemption, and the way in which that story is told can have a huge impact on the reader. Read More