Culture and Identity in Rural Africa: Representation Through Literacy

Abstract

Recently throughout Africa, there has been an increase in mother tongue primary education in minority language communities. There are many reasons for justifying this innovation, one of which is that local cultures are strengthened by mother tongue literacy. This paper examines the link between literacy and culture through the outcomes of a series of drama workshops carried out in a rural school in Eritrea where mother tongue education had been introduced in 2000. By using a Freirian approach, the children were encouraged to identify and discuss the issues of most concern to them. The dramas were performed in front of the community and discussed. This enabled us to identify the choices of language that the children made, the genres that they could already use and their own attitudes to their mother tongue. We were also able to identify more clearly the nature of the link between literacy and culture and suggest possible ways in which this could be further investigated and developed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.