There is a whole mystical world in the minds of children that gradually gets lost as we age. Or at least that was the lesson I drew from a school called Thorn Tree in Rongai, on the outskirts of Nairobi as you head towards the majestic Ngong Hills in Kajiado County, many, many years ago.
We had just finished working on a storybooks project. The laid-out dummies looked great. We had come up with reels upon acres of brightly coloured page-spreads. The illustrations had been meticulously executed, following editorial briefs revised many times in a dozen editorial conferences. One afternoon, we proudly laid the dummy pages on a large table in the middle of the production studio and asked everyone – we had invited people from all departments – to come and comment on our work.
Everyone was pleased. Someone even remarked how funny and attractive the pictures were. A quick round of voting enabled us to come up with the best-presented pages, which we were advised to use for a pilot study to see how children in various schools would react to the literary gems in our forthcoming series.
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It is then that we went to that school in Rongai. There, we displayed the dummy pages on the children’s desks and asked them to choose the ones they liked best, just as we had done in the production studio. To our utter surprise, none of the images our staff had pointed out as the best seemed to impress the little ones.
As a matter of fact, the ones we in the editorial department had thought could have been better were ranked top. How? we wondered. We then went to a few other schools with the same pack and the results were eerily the same. We were stumped.
What was more, the teachers, whom we asked to point out what they thought would resonate with their charges, pointed pretty much to the same page-spreads that their pupils later said they (dis)liked.
Initially, I had thought the problem was that the team at the production studio comprised all adults and therefore, could not think like the children. So, how were the teachers able to predict what would interest the learners? A teacher who also happened to be an author of children’s books at one of the schools we went to mercifully broke it up for us.
Years of working with children, she said, had exposed her and her colleagues to the little ones’ likes, dislikes, concentration spans and quirks of action that resonated with them, and so on. As we trooped back to the office, I shuddered to imagine what would have happened had we not visited schools to find out from the real wearers of the literary shoes we were piloting for the school market where they really pinched or felt cosy.
One of the things we had failed to notice was that the fun we had seen on the pages had been filtered through our theoretical, adult eyes. That, and the fact that our sense of editorial quality was not necessarily a guarantee of a warm reception in the market. Of course not everyone agreed with this conclusion. There was the forever pertinent question of whether a good book for children should just entertain them or teach them values and improve their command of language. Someone threw another curveball, arguing that it was teachers and parents who decided which storybooks were good for children, and that children were too young to be involved in the matter. These, however, struck me more as cases of egos bruised by the fact that our oh-so-infallible ideas of quality had been fact-checked and found to be bogus.
Deep down, we all reckoned that we had been wrong. For us, the most profound paragraph had been the one where a child had been taught a new thing or where a punctilious moral lesson had been imparted, reducing scenes in the books to static images of adults teaching children the complex art of living. We had packed the world of supposed child fun with our adult and parental ethos. We learnt, in a rather brutally cold way, that for children, the best lessons are never the ones cognitively internalised but rather those modelled in the work in such a fun way that children can go to great lengths to practise what is in the book in living reality.
Those who grew up in our time will never forget the children in an English textbook who suffered terrible tummy problems after preparing and eating grass soup. Who can also forget Mwalimu Jinni from Masomo ya Msingi? For older folks, Simon Makonde is not just a fading memory from a Grade Four book but a lasting metaphor for anything too short-lived to gain respectability.
Some writers of children’s books explored complex themes such as social stratification. Barbara Kimenye satirically portrayed this through the school where her mischievous character Moses studied with fellow boys. The series has since been translated into Kiswahili by scholar Enock Matundura.
The divide between haves and have-nots is also highlighted in The Wonderful Ball, a lower-grade reader by lawyer Kabaru Ndegwa, which won the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature (children’s category) in 2007.
For those lucky enough to access international bestsellers, English classics and The Arabian Nights come to mind. Who can forget foolish Abunuwasi (Abdul) cutting the branch he sat on—an image that inspired many a hotel painting in the 1980s?
In our time, besides the classics, there were Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and other series. Are such gems being rolled out in East Africa today? We hope so. Unlike before, when storybooks were so popular children discovered them before parents, friends still ask me what to buy for their children.
On a serious note, writing for children is no shortcut. Crafting compelling stories demands imagination, respect, and patience. Truly, children’s literature is no child’s play.
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By Henry Munene