The Nation Newspaper

Tag: storytelling

  • Obasanjo calls for revival of storytelling

    Obasanjo calls for revival of storytelling

    • Donates books to Ogun schools

    Former President Olusegun Obasanjo yesterday urged parents and community leaders to rekindle the culture of storytelling to enable children imbibe good moral standard.
    He spoke at his 80th birthday celebration in Ibogun village, Ogun State, which began with story – telling to entertain pupils.
    Obasanjo donated 12 story books, written by him, on tortoise to some public and private schools.
    The ceremony tagged: “Story Time with Baba”, featured reading of folklores, fables and drama presentations by pupils drawn from Baptist Day School, Ewupe; Baptist Primary School, Ibogun; Beryl Chrysolite School and Olusegun Obasanjo Academy Centre all in Ifo Local Government Area.
    The ex-President noted that the second part of the tortoise story would be out soon to “further tell more stories about the tortoise”.
    According to him, the book was to “revive the old story-telling culture of our days, which is full of lessons to learn”.
    The occasion also witnessed the celebration by Ibogun men and women, who presented gift items to the celebrator.
    The birth programme being organised by the Centre For Human Security arm of the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL), as part of activities marking his 80th birthday anniversary comes up this Sunday.
    The chairman of the celebration planning committee and Director of the Centre for Human Security of the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL), Prof. Peter Okebukola, described the former President as a great writer and author.
    Obasanjo recalled that while growing up in the community, his parents and other community leaders gathered young children at night to give them riddles and tell them fables.
    “In our growing up days, our parents require us to solve the riddles so as to make us think deeply and sharpen our wits while they told us stories to inculcate moral values into us.
    “Most of the stories revolved round animals, particularly, tortoise, and will normally end with lessons to build character by pointing us to what to do and what not to do.
    “We have grown up with those moral values and they served as foundations upon which we built our lives and conducted ourselves wherever we went,” he said.
    He lamented that such practice had been jettisoned by parents and thereby robbed children of a good platform to imbibe good character.

  • If History, why not Storytelling? 

    If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” – Rudyard Kipling, from The Collected Works

    This quotation strikes at the heart of the debate, which I consider quite emotion-laden, among Nigerians as to the absence of History in our educational curriculum and all the problems it portends for the nation – its people and its history and by implication its past, present and future.

    The quotation is quite insightful as it succinctly shows that the problems associated with the teaching and learning of History in our curriculum may just be with the way History has been taught all these years and that something very radical has to be done about this. It is time we looked at the way History is taught rather than the consequences of the absence of the subject from our educational curriculum.

    Three major problems have been identified by the champions of education about the demise of History in Nigeria: First is shortage of teachers to teach the subject; complaints by students that History is not taught in an interesting way; and, the fact that educators are yet to come to terms with what really is the purpose of History. Does knowing our history truly “help us understand our present and prepare us for the future so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past?”

    I will address these issues immediately.

    Firstly, there is no shortage of teachers of History. Only time has made this subject unattractive to so many teachers and students alike. Time has caught up with History and made it seem a tad too dated for those who will teach it and those who want to learn it.

    Secondly, History the way it is today – locked up in text books as unassailable facts – cannot be taught in any interesting way. Facts, as attractive as they may seem on the surface, can also be boring. We have to make facts appealing by adding stories to them.

    Thirdly, Educators have not been able to define the true purpose of History. From all that has been articulated so far, the only argument to support the teaching of a subject no student seems interested in is that, “History helps us understand our present and prepare us for the future so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.” That sounds quite lofty, but if you ponder more on this you will discover that it is highly faulty. Does History really make us not to err or repeat the mistakes of the past? I don’t think so because the world seems not to have learnt from any past event. We are not less close to a World War III today because we have learnt any lessons from the first and second World Wars. So, if people learn at all, it’s not likely that past events are a guide and as reliable as we may wish to ascribe to the efficacy and importance of past events.

    Most of what had hitherto been locked up in History textbooks is now readily available to students on the Internet through powerful search engines like Google and Bing. If you can get information on the go, why rely on a textbook that is not up to date? Why do you need a teacher to help you pore over dated history textbooks, when you can access a whole library of historical information and facts on the go?

    Then comes the issue of the reliability of the History being taught in schools today compared to how much knowledge has exploded. Most of what we regard as History the way it is presented in traditional textbooks is simply a compendium of regurgitated facts, which most times do not hold out well when subjected to logic and scientific inquiry. Take the history of the founding of the Niger River. Whose history was it that Mungo Park found River Niger? That is the history of the Colonialist. Certainly that is not what holds as truth to a young Nigerian living in the 21st Century because when subjected to scientific inquiry this discovery by Mungo Park would be impossible for a stranger who relied solely on the local natives to get to the bank of River Niger.

    Another major problem with the teaching and learning of History is the decreasing emphasis we find with the teaching and learning of the Humanities worldwide.

    With the increasing importance of technology, attention is continuously shifted to the teaching of Computer Science and other science subjects that would provide the much needed answers to the problems bedevilling mankind.

    We are at a crucial stage of human existence to get worried about how the use of technology, and not the Humanities, can effectively be used to tackle the problems of Climate Change, Terrorism and the harmful impact of Globalisation.

    Science is once again cool. At his last State of the Union address, Obama spoke about a moon-shot attempt at dealing with Cancer with USD1 Billion. No sooner he made this announcement than he unveiled an initiative to use USD4 billion to support the teaching of Computer Science in every school in America.

    As emphasis is shifting to subjects like coding, so is the need to redirect teachers and students to what is important to learn and away from what is seemingly irrelevant and dated.

    All these initiatives tend to give the humanities a bad rap.

    However, before History, there was Storytelling

    There is an implicit superiority of Storytelling over History. Storytelling is not History even though there could be elements of historical facts in the telling or sharing of a story.

    History requires that an account of event is presented as factual and as such facts can only be facts to the person rendering them. That a matter is factual is subject to the opinion of those who hold such matter as factual. A writer of History merely presents his own version of facts. And most of those presenting the history of the world today are mostly men – most of the world’s history have been written predominantly by men.

    For expediency, storytelling does not require as much training to teach as any of the specialised subjects in the Humanities. Everyone tells stories even though a lot of us may not realize it. We all listened to stories as children through oral tradition. We mostly have in us what it takes to tell stories because in a sense, we all listened to stories as children and we still get excited when we hear good stories.

    Good stories still have the power to command our attention. Facts and statistics are no longer as convincing as a good story.

    Stories will never go out of fashion. With the use of technology, Internet and Social Media, storytelling is experiencing a resurgence. Rather than become stale to students, storytelling can in fact draw them into learning the Humanities once again.

    Stories will always be with us. The reason we will always come back to stories is more of science than art. Our brains are wired for stories. That is what makes it so appealing and have continued to enchant mankind.

    How do we get to tell stories in our classrooms?

    Use multiple platforms. The Internet gives us an immense opportunity to use stories in place of History. If a subject is presented in multiple ways it has a way of drawing in students. This is also in line with the Theory of Multiple Intelligences as propounded by Howard Gardner. To teach today is to use multimedia platforms. A story can be a poem, it can be dramatised and even shot as a three minutes YouTube video.

    Take the case of the Nigerian Civil War. Students can be encouraged to visit the public library and dig up information about the role the founding fathers played during the Civil War and based on what their research turns up, they can dramatise it or render them as poem or digitally tell the story with new media like YouTube. This is the kind of learning that would excite any teacher and any student today.

    If we are looking to teaching students how Mary Slessor abolished the killing of twins, we would bore students with those facts in no time. But if the teaching of the works of Mary Slessor were to be presented as stories and effectively delivered using multiple platforms, students will be captivated and drawn into the story. That is when teaching and learning can be considered to have taken place.

    The best way to teach a subject like History is to get students to inquire and think critically about what is being presented before them rather than teaching history as facts.

     

    • Akhigbe is the Founder of both www.storried.com, an online storytelling platform

     

  • Museums should be our source of storytelling, says Keith Shiri

    ARTISTIC Director of AFRIFF and international film curator, Keith Shiri, while contributing to the session stated that value should always be put first in film production.

    “I have been watching films for the past 20 years and I have seen over 800 films this year. And we put value first and enjoy them.

    “We don’t invest in the ideas of museums; which is about our history. The museum is a point of reference for us and such places should be invested in as they tell stories of our heritages,” he said.

    Before the commencement of the 5th Africa International Film Festival, Shiri was reported to have expressed the resolve of the organisers to use the festival as a platform to rewrite the history of film making on the continent.

  • Sustaining storytelling culture

    Sustaining storytelling culture

    At the close of activities marking the reign of Port Harcourt as UNESCO World Book Capital 2014 last month, the task of finding a balance between the written and oral forms of the African story was the highpoint of Oladipo Agboluaje’s drama piece, Obele and the Storyteller. It was performed at the Atlantic Hall of Hotel Presidential, Port Harcourt Rivers State capital, reports Assistant Editor (Arts) OZOLUA UHAKHEME. 

    The influence of written word over oral tradition in Africa and the dwindling capacity to sustain the storytelling tradition are among the challenges of Obele and the Storyteller and other story tellers.  Also of concern is how can Africans transit from the oral tradition to the written word and be able to master the new one and challenge European narratives about her.

    How can they find a balance between the written and oral forms of the African story? How can the effect of the dominant, negative narrative of the westerner be countered for the true African story to emerge in its purity to ennoble the African heritage? How to tell the continent’s story to mask the lie and untruth of the European narrative? Who will bell the cat?

    Again, this is the dilemma Obele and his succeeding lines of storytellers faced before the turn of the century.

    But, it is the story of the book on Africa as narrated by Obele and the Storyteller at the closing ceremony of UNESCO Port Harcourt World Book Capital 2014 in the Rivers State capital recently. It was a production of Bikiya Graham-Douglas-led Betta Universal Arts

    Foundation, written by Oladipo Agboluaje and directed by Israel Eboh.

    One wrong turn and Obele’s story grows wings in a completely different direction that negates the virtues of the clan and upturns common lore. In a post-haste manner that Africans seek commercial gains at the expense of commonsense and morality and why they sold their own kith and kin into slavery centuries back, Obele’s story finds a ready hand that documents it in a book, but the logic has been corrupted. Rather than uphold the values that the oral tale spells out, a corrupted version is woven to make Obele a liar. Armed with this twisted tale that is at variance with Obele’s, the white man arrives just after the Berlin Conference of 1884 where the European powers shared out the continent among themselves, and begins to draw arbitrary boundaries that separate a people that once lived as one.

    When they protest, the white man holds up Obele’s book, as fact and oracle for his self-appointed mandate of adjudicating for the people and the land and carving them up into convenient portions for his selfish use.

    Even Obele’s protest to the contrary falls on deaf ears; her own people feel betrayed and blame her for their woes. They drive her out of town for betraying her heritage and selling out. And so Obele embarks on the journey of recovering her story so it could be written in the light in which she told it originally. But this proves an arduous task, as she wanders from one civilization to another, from one country to another to find the man who upturned her tale for a wrong one to emerge.

    When she finds him at last close to a university town, things take a different dimension. The fraudster of historical patrimony had grown rich on his subversion of the African story. How to retrieve Obele’s tale and restore it to its original form? This becomes a hard task; the fraudster would not oblige her. But her encounter with a student who is determined to write a counter-narrative to the ones the likes of Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) and Joyce Carry (Mr. Johnson) had written about Africans revives her spirit; she sees a chance to restore her tale and dignity. Conrad and Carry had written these tales to suite and sustain European bias against the continent still unable to write about herself.

    But things soon change with the education the colonial government introduces that educates the first young crop of Africans who soon catch up with the lies and false narratives of the west against Africa. They also begin conscious revisionist efforts to rewrite accurately both the historical and fictional accounts of their beloved continent that had been so maligned and marginalized by dominant western narratives.

    This is the crux of Obele and the Storyteller, the conscious, accurate retelling of the African story by her sons and daughters. And the story is told from back to front from the past unto modern times, especially the fictional tales, which are, in a sense, the old oral tales retold with modern, European tongues of the written texts, for a wider audience and education of the entire world.

    Obele and the Storyteller is a fascinating performance that reenacts a continent’s battered tale and retelling aright by her own children, who use the modern, written tool of the white man. It’s a dance drama also, which greatly endeared it to its audience, with its energetic dances and moving songs and use of folk narrative elements like animals that communicate with humans and all. Obele is Africa’s story of encounter with the west and the emergence book and how African storytellers have since appropriated the book to tell the continent’s tales to a world audience the correct way.

  • Troupe stages drama storytelling competition

    Troupe stages drama storytelling competition

    The National Troupe of Nigeria (NTN) will host the second edition of the yearly dramatised storytelling competition for schools in Lagos and Abuja in the last week of May and first week of June. The competition, which is opened to primary and secondary schools in Lagos and Abuja, will begin with the preliminaries and elimination stages.

    The maiden edition of the dramatised storytelling competition, which is held in line with the National Troupe’s objectives of providing a platform for the discovery and showcasing of talent from primary and secondary schools in Lagos.

    Also, the competition is being organised to celebrate Nigeria’s 100 years of existence. But specifically, the coordinator of the dramatised storytelling competition and Director of Drama of the National Troupe, Ms Josephine Igberaese said the programme would hold this year to complement the January 18, 1980 resolutions on storytelling adopted by the conference on folklore held under the auspices of the Centre for Nigeria cultural Studies, the Federal Ministry of Culture and United Nations Educational Scientific Cultural Organisation(UNESCO) to encourage the preservation and promotion of Nigeria folklore. “Since the storytelling is the science of the survival of old beliefs and customs in modern times, and the study of ancient observances and customs, the notions, beliefs, traditions, superstitions and prejudices of the common people-this therefore is the task ahead of those intellectual gathering of students from schools to examine how the dictates of storytelling could be effectively utilised to achieve national integration through this carefully selected sub-theme’’ Igberaese said.

    Artistic Director and Chief Executive Officer of the National Troupe Mr Martin Adaji said the competition aims at ensuring meaningful communication of all aspects of storytelling. Adaji said it is designed to explore how storytelling could be utilised to correct inadequacies of the youth especially in the age of technological advancement. ‘’I am sure with technology where with just a dash on the Internet you can get all information you need, people will ask why story telling. But the facts are that our brains become more active when we tell stories. Whether it is a novel, a movie or simply something one of our friends is explaining to us, because they come in words and sounds, which are often by improvisation or embellishment. Since it is 100 years of Nigeria existence as a nation, the chosen theme cannot be anything but the unification or the act of bringing together the diverse and at times conflicting educational, social, political, economic, religious, ethnic and cultural element in our society into one single whole’’ Adaji said.

    He expressed optimism that the programme would in the long run achieve its intended aim which is to ‘re-organise and restructure our youth’s mindset to ward off destructive and insidious influences brought about by films, songs, magazines and telecommunication gadgets all of which becloud their young minds’’. Adaji said: “It is for this reason that we have initiated this project as a way of helping to bring back our fading storytelling tradition”.