The most recent incursion of BritLit (and that name has to change, or be modified, as will become apparent) was into the centre and north of Namibia. NETA, the Namibian English Teachers’ Association, was holding its first ever conference in Oshakati, in the North, and later there was a workshop held in the capital, Windhoek. The northern conference was a remarkable affair and teachers travelled extraordinary distances to get to it. With no public transport services many teachers drove for 12 hours or more to get to the event at the University of Namibia’s northern campus. In fact, 20 teachers made it from the remote Caprivi area, nearly 18 hours away by car. With that thirst for information, networking, training and other kinds of support we had to deliver something worthwhile.
The conference was themed around literature in the language learning classroom, and the invited speakers were Fitch O’Connell (British Council, Portugal and BritLit manager), Prof Mbongeni Malaba (University of Kwazulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg Campus , South Africa), Lemn Sissay (Performance poet extraordinaire, UK) and Joaquim Rafael (ANELTA, Reggae teacher, Luanda, Angola). It was quite an extraordinary event altogether – uplifting and challenging at the same time.
The BritLit events (there were two) concentrated on the power of story telling within the overall structure of the materials, handing over responsibility when possible to the students. The materials concentrated on were already available on-line, except that a challenge was thrown out to the teachers to suggest stories from that region as the basis for future kits, with the invitation to start a new chapter in the project where the texts are sourced from different regions and cultures from all over the world. You can now see why BritLit seems an inadequate description. Delegates were also handed part of Lesley Beakes’ novel, ‘The Song of Be’, which is set in Namibia, with the request that new ideas be generated.
In Windhoek another group of teachers, mainly from the area around the capital, met at the British Council facilities to listen first to Professor Malaba talk about a story by the Zimbabwean writer, Charles Mungoshi. Fitch then introduced the group to a new kit, not yet published, based on the South African writer Beverley Naidoo‘s acclaimed book, ‘Journey to Jo’burg’ and used this as the basis for a workshop. Again the invitation to suggest new writers from sub Saharan Africa was given and accepted.
We could be entering a brand new phase of the project. More about this soon.
Isabel Lage
isabel.lage@gmail.com
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