 Today we have two panels, and the first one will take off just now. This will be chaired by Nandjala, and they will be looking at new visions, new images, and new stories. You have the program at hand, please. I mean, just follow the events for today through the programs. Once again, very, very pleased to welcome you all back to the second day of the conference. So I'll hand over to Nandjala. Good morning. How are you doing? Thank you all for being here. I'm probably going to get tired of hearing from me, but that's okay. Today I'm really excited about this panel. It's going to be really interesting. We've got new ways of imagining, new ways of engaging with information, knowledge, ideas that are coming from different parts of Africa, and we have a really distinguished panel. We're waiting for one person to join us, and these are all people who are approaching the subject matter from completely different perspectives. Some are academics, some are practitioners, some are actually people in the stream of being in the process of developing these new ways of thinking. Our panelists, I'm just going to really, you have most of the information, but I'm just going to blitz through some of their introductions. Miriam Paul is a doctoral candidate here at the Africa Department at SOAS, and she focuses on the post-human in contemporary Africa genre fiction, crime, romance, and science fiction. That sounds really exciting. I'm going to hand over directly to Miriam, and she's going to give us her presentation, and then I'll ask you to hold off on questions until after we've had all the presentations, and then we'll go into your questions and engage in that way. Thank you. Thank you, Nanjala, and thank you to the audience for being here for the first panel this morning, and thank you to the organizers for setting up this wonderful conference. My name is Miriam Paul. I'm a PhD candidate here at SOAS, as Nanjala already said, and in this presentation I look at the interface between, on the one hand, the real world problem of environmental change. On the other hand, fiction, African literature in general, and African science fiction in particular, and the redefinition of epistemological categories and their relation to each other in a broader sense, philosophy. I argue in this paper that turning towards African science fiction and its visions of the future will help us to develop new approaches to the problems of the environment. A quote by the environmental activist Gas Speth summarizes the relation that I'm going to describe. He says, I used to think that the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address those problems, but I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we scientists don't know how to do that. So he differentiates between the underlying causes and symptoms of the problem. He points to the level of self-understanding, worldviews, and epistemology as the level to approach in order to tackle the problems of the environment. Speth emphasizes the relevance of cultural production and literature as crucial means to change our understanding of ourselves, of the human being, and its position in the world, in order to achieve the larger objective of changing the course of global environmental processes. To zoom in on the particular relevance of science fiction, I turn to Ivor Hartmann, an editor and writer from Zimbabwe, who says about the importance of African science fiction, the following. The value of this envisioning of the future for any third world country, or in our case continent, cannot be overstated nor negated. If you can't see and relay an understandable vision of the future, your future will be co-opted by someone else's vision, that will not necessarily have your best interests at heart. So Hartmann points out that envisioning the future is largely in the hands of a rather homogenous collective of Euro-American science fiction writers and thinkers. But in order to create a more inclusive global future, a diversity of voices and visions is indispensable. In other words, I consider African literature not only in the framework of African issues, but as a pertinent contribution to global discourses of how to create the future. Coming to the epistemology of nature, technology, and the human being, one crucial aspect of the present age of the Anthropocene is that the human being is conceptualized in a position superior to the environment. The widely accepted understanding is that we are in control of our mobile phones, computers, at least most of the time, of our cars, and all kinds of technologies that we use in our daily lives. It's a one-way effective relationship. In this conception, the human's ability to develop use and control technology is proof and justification of humanity's ethical superiority over other sentient beings and the environment. It elevates the human above animals and nature. This higher ethical standing is created and used to legitimize the subjugation and exploitation of the environment. This widely accepted understanding of the relation between the human, technology, and the environment is gradually contested in African science fiction. One example of this is the novel Dub Steps by the South African author Andrew Miller, who tackles the level of the human and technology. The premise of the novel already contests the human's upper hand over technology. Imagine this, all people migrate into virtual reality, and then the system crashes, and literally nobody is left on earth. This is the post-apocalyptic and very techno-pessimist scenario the main character Roy wakes up to in a deserted Johannesburg, where human existence is reduced to a handful of people. The author uses this imagined future microcosm of relationships to examine current social values. He creates a micro-society and emphasizes technological failures of the remaining few human beings. They attempt to build an airplane, and they fail. They try to set up a slaughterhouse, and they fail. They have difficulties to set up a new Wi-Fi network, etc. In this world, technology has grown over the human's head, and human beings are not able to control the high-tech devices anymore. This illustrates what the Ghanian philosopher Quasi Reredo expresses. He says that the real cause of the environmental problem is to be found, I believe, in the fact that technology tends to grow ahead of knowledge, which in turn tends to grow ahead of wisdom and moral virtue. So he says that the scale of complexity of technology means that it becomes intangible from a perspective of morality and ethics. Technology becomes inhumane. The second point that I want to point out about this novel is that it blurs the boundaries between the categories human versus technology. There's a nano-bot drug, a sort of electronic drug that one drinks to induce into the system of the body. The nano-bots in the bloodstream link to the Wi-Fi network and transmit signals from the server to the brain to supersede the physical context. These erase the conceptual clear distinction between the categories human and technology by integrating technology into the human body. My second example is the Binti novella series by Nedi Okorafor. Nedi Okorafor reassesses the ways of technology being used to subordinate and exploit the environment. So she tackles the level of technology and the environment and their relationship. The trilogy revolves around Binti, a bold and smart 16-year-old Himba girl who sneaks off from home to accept her place at UNSA University in outer space against the will of her family and her conservative culture. The world view that I described above presents industrialization and technological advancement of any society and at the same time their degree of separation from nature as an indicator of that society's degree of civilization. So technologically advanced western societies are opposed to African societies that are generally conceptualized as close to nature. And in short, the more detached from nature a society is and the more technologically advanced the more is a society perceived as civilized. In the Binti novella series this conception is revised. The diverging trajectories of technology and the environment are redirected and thought together. This comes through in the construction of the Himba tribe, for example. It's a traditional African society modeled on the Namibian ethnic group that you might be familiar with. The tribe's closeness to nature and the environment is expressed in the application of the so-called autisa a mixture of red clay and oil that they apply to their skin. But at the same time the tribe is highly technologically skilled and they develop devices for communication that the whole world in this novella series relies on. So here closeness to nature and technological advancement are not mutually exclusive. Also technologies in this novel series are often inspired by or orientated towards natural systems or even using natural systems. Examples are all means of transport in the novella series. Lamp plants and undying trees. And Okorafor thinks the two trajectories of technology and environment together and thinks technology through the environment. So in conclusion, dub steps and binti question the understanding that humans are entirely in control of the technologies they develop. They emphasize the ways technology influence the human and mutually effective relationships. The novels blur the boundaries between the ontological categories human, technology and environment and thus deconstruct the human's superior position. The two diverging trajectories of technology and the environment are redirected and thought together. And then two novels are just two examples that demonstrate how African science fiction attempts to counteract the greed, selfishness and apathy that determine how human societies treat the environment and they stimulate a reconceptualization of the relations between the human technology and the environment. Thank you. Thanks Miriam. Next up we have Dr. John Simpson who is the British Council's senior advisor for English for Sub-Saharan Africa where he provides technical advice in language and education and development and supports the British Council's portfolio in the region. And I think this microphone's a little loud. Thank you. Good morning everyone. Just like to thank the organizers for the invitation to the opportunity to be with you and present this morning. I'd just like to, for those of you who may have a particular conception of the Council and the work that we do, in 2017 the type of interventions and partnerships that we have are very different from what might have been the case in, say, 1967 or 1987. For example, in Sub-Saharan Africa where I work we are involved in a justice for all program in Nigeria helping the, it's an Algerian led reform of the justice sector. In Ethiopia we have a civil society program strengthening the capacity of civil society organizations to contribute to national development, poverty reduction and good governance. My own work in language and education is very much evidence led. So we work across the region partnering with governments at level of both policy and practice. And of course we are very committed to multilingual education and we see the space in which English operates as very much within a plurilingual society and education system. So that's as it were, where we're coming from on this. And some of my brief presentation this morning is heightened linguistic diversity in African classrooms, the challenge to inclusive education. Two starting points for that really. Picking up on a couple of threads from yesterday, one of Lutz's conclusions that language problems as it were underline the sort of suboptimal performance in universal education. So I want to drill down a little bit and look at some of the reasons why we still have a lot of issues around language and learning outcomes. And the second one is linked to Anya Katch's reference to his mention of the huge demographic bulge currently is the single biggest shift which is occurring presently across the region, which is the rural urban migration. And one likely effect of that will be heightened linguistic diversity, particularly in urban classrooms. So the question is how do we actually get to multilingual solutions to multilingual realities and where that challenge is actually growing day by day. So that I think is a given if you like. Africa is one of the most plurilingual regions of the world. What's of interest I think is looking at the process through which some of these multilingual realities, this is an inverted pyramid then, get filtered out or funneled if you like. So we start with a huge and diverse and enormously rich asset in terms of linguistic diversity. That then gets sort of filtered out in a number of ways. One of course through countries constitutions and national language policies which designate sometimes a national language in other cases both a national language and a small number of official languages. And they of course then become velarized if you like and that obviously clearly reinforces the sense of hierarchy of languages operating. And Kenneth mentioned yesterday in Zambia, I think he said there were seven languages there which had been recognised for Yusin in education. Ghana I think has a list of 11 languages but this is out of maybe 60, 70, 80 languages across the country. So again we have that sort of filtering out effect where a relatively small number of languages are designated for use in informal education. If we come down a tier further then what we see is that many education systems operate in a bilingual mode. That's to say there are two languages of learning and teaching which operate sequentially. Very often you'll find an indigenous language which is used in the early years of education and then a switch to a European language. Usually fairly early on perhaps after the primary that may be the switch to English, French or Portuguese. And that's very much a transitional sort of bilingual model. It's not really looking to maintain the local or familiar language but move as quickly as possible to European language. And we know just how devastating that is in terms of learning outcomes and its contribution to repetition and dropout rates within the system. Kids clearly if they're not understanding the language of the classroom then they're not really able to engage or make a great deal of meaning from what's going on around them. Now not only do we have that sort of system operating but in many respects also we find a monolingual classroom policy adopted by senior education officials. Essentially what that means is that at any one time in the classroom only one language of learning and teaching is permitted. So to give an example in Rwanda where I happen to be based, Kinyaranda is the language of learning and teaching for P1 to P3. That then shifts to English in P4. So children learn all subjects across the curriculum in English or they're expected to without any further use of Kinyaranda. So there's no real attempt to facilitate the transfer or the coding of all knowledge and skills that have taken place in the mother tongue in P1 to P3 into English in P4. There's a huge kind of gap, a chasm emerges there. And of course we know in practice that teachers do use Kinyaranda in the classroom to try to bridge that gap. But of course that creates, the policy creates a sort of a guilt complex because teachers don't feel comfortable using the home language since it's not sanctioned by government. So those are just some of the ongoing issues there. So this is effect what happens then in the monolingual classrooms. And I say that transition happens at a very early stage before children are actually ready to learn through the medium of English or a language was as different from their own. The expert estimates takes between about six and eight years to develop fluency in what we call cognitive and academic language proficiency. That's the kind of genre, if you like, which supports learning in formal education. So it's not every day English, it's not playground English. It's a very specific register of the language that's needed to support learning. And an acquisition of that to a degree which will sustain learning takes at least six to eight years. But many children of many education systems are transiting kids after only two or three years of quite uneven quality of teaching of English as a subject. So it simply doesn't really support their learning. So then English medium education, we could say the same about French or Portuguese, is both creates both a heavy load for learners and for teachers and contributes really to fairly high levels of repetition and dropout. Now, when we talk with some officials in Ministry of Education and ask them for the reason for this monolingual classroom policy, some of the responses we receive along the lines of, well, it would simply be too confusing for children if we were to allow more than one language to operate in the classroom. Another reason commonly cited is that, well, if we allow teachers to maintain the use of the home language or familiar language, then they will never move to teaching in English. A third reason often cited is, well, that's how we were taught and learners should just, you know, that it's the no pain, no gain kind of school of thought on this. And it very much reflects a sort of an attitude that if it was good enough for us and we survived and we learned, then it's okay for present-day learners. The notion of elite closure, I think, comes in here very much, which is the, you know, senior officials perpetuating a system which favors a minority of children, but at the expense of the vast majority of learners who simply, you know, it's not appropriate for. Carol Benson here, who some of you will know as a leading figure in international research on language and education, points to one of the reasons for this being the conflation of national language policy and language and education policy. And she poses the question here that you will see at the top of the slide. And she claims there's a sort of a leakage going on here that the national language policy, which is about sort of economic development, creating a, the nation state as it were, trying to preserve the fabric of what is often a very linguistically and ethnically diverse nation, that dictates national language policy. But then there isn't really a segregation or a separation of that from educational language policy. That sort of filters in or leaks into educational language decisions, which are not always in the best interest of learning and achievement. So how argument is that educational language decisions must be brought into the realm of pedagogy? What are the choices of language of learning that best support success in education? What I'm suggesting is that there are actually a couple of opposing forces of work here. I think to help explain the government's degree of tolerance, if that's the appropriate word, of local languages to a degree in the early years of formal education, we could say that there is a, there are centrifugal forces at work here, pushing things away from the center and allowing a degree of flexibility and openness and inclusivity. But only to a degree, as we saw yesterday from Zambia, we know in Ghana and in other countries, it's usually only a relatively small number of the total number of languages that are found in a country, which are actually sanctioned for use in education. Then what tends to happen after the early years is that the centrifugal forces come into play, pulling things back towards the center and veilerizing often the European language, the official language or the national language. So I think this is a tension which continues something that we need really to address. This is just to share with you an insight from a recent piece of work we commissioned through Beth Earling and her team at the Open University. We asked them to go and investigate issues of medium instruction in Ghana and India and to come and report back. And this is really just one of the findings from that study which will be presented at the Aqfiq conference in September at Oxford. And we also, by the way, are convening our own language and development conference in November in Dakar in Senegal. And if you just Google on 2017 Language and Development Conference or speak with me afterwards, I'll be very happy to share with you some further information about that. So this really is looking at perceptions, particularly amongst parents and communities. And this links obviously to the notion of the hierarchy of languages and the degree to which that sort of notion is still very prevalent in people's minds and influencing their decisions. So their conclusion really is that unless some of these strategies are developed to counter these perceptions, theirs is a rather pessimistic prognosis in terms of English like to remain the dominant language of primary education. So that, if you like, does link to just one's notion of the hierarchy of languages. Also too, this is an application of that model in David Gradle's work, 2010. The idea being that when parents or children add a further language to their repertoire, it tends to be one of the language they tend to want to move up the hierarchy because of the perceived gateway sort of forces at work, accessing education, economic opportunities, et cetera. Now that's not always the case. There are horizontal choices to be made, but that's kind of the argument that's often presented from this perspective. So that's David, well, DeSwan produced the theory and then the application was by David Gradle in his book Looking at the Future of English which was something we commissioned in 2010. So really just a quick sort of few words on, many of you I think will be familiar with this 2010 report from the UN Habitat on the State of African Cities and say this links to what we heard yesterday about the huge shift going on in terms of urbanization and the likely heightened linguistic diversity that's taking place across the continent really from this shift from rural to urban and really in terms of planning for not just the delivery of basic education services but also health, access to justice. Any public service really, governments are going to need to look very closely at the effects of this huge kind of internal migration which is going on and this is actually taking place already and you'll see by 2030 there'll be roughly equal numbers of people living in urban rural areas but by 2050 there'll be about 50% more people living there. So that's an enormous transformation and it requires some very concentrated planning and effort particularly around the idea of plurilingualism and inclusion and equitable access to quality services. So one way in which that I think can be addressed is through linguistic landscape analysis or what's commonly referred to as language mapping. This is just an interesting example of something coming out of the 2011 census here looking at most commonly spoken languages in London, excluding English. You can see the clustering effect there. And so this is linguistic landscape analysis or language mapping something which is currently beginning to happen in pockets of Sub-Saharan Africa. We've seen it in places like Mali, Ghana and Ethiopia. This is a result of one which was carried out in Mopti in Mali under a USAID program across almost a thousand schools and what was interesting here is that about four languages the ones in Burgundy, Dorgon, Paul, Bambara and Bozo were seen to be a common language in over 90% of the schools and by common language they mean simply a language that pupils use amongst themselves to communicate regularly. So this is not exactly what one might call... it's a step forward we might say but it's by no means the plurilingual... it's looking for commonalities if you like and clustering rather than equity or inclusion across all the languages but it's an example of the kinds of accommodations which are currently being made through language mapping. So really what I want to conclude by saying is that language which is often considered to be a hidden factor in education and society is actually a hugely important issue when it comes to inclusion and it's often overlooked in the inclusive education agenda which is often about other things which are obviously also enormously important but I think we overlook language at our peril in terms of being both inclusive and equitable notion. I'm a little bit optimistic on this one because as far as SDG4 ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education that sustainable development goal actually creates a space for language to be investigated as an inclusive and equitable education issue so I'm hopeful that over the next 10 to 15 years we will actually start to see some of these very long-standing language issues addressed and hopefully we'll start to see actually children being given much more opportunity to learn and to succeed in a language which they are much more familiar with and comfortable in than a European one. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, John. We're going to move straight into the next presentation. This is from Judy Kibinga. Judy is a Kenyan filmmaker, documentary filmmaker and she's going to talk to us a little bit about her experience. This is more of a practitioner approach to setting up this new way of telling stories in Kenyan, well not new but certainly innovative way of telling stories in East Africa. So over to you, Judy. Good morning, everyone. It's fantastic to be here sharing what has become a real passion. The DocuBox of the East Africa Documentary Film Fund is an organisation that I founded about four years ago and rapidly got some colleagues in who became part of what is really becoming a very important journey. DocuBox are the only documentary film funding in East Africa and the whole reason why we exist is to support emerging documentary filmmakers. East African artists who are accountable, who are talented and we support them through training, we support them through mentoring but most importantly something that I've heard echoed again in different talks, we support each other. I'm a filmmaker myself by building a sense of confidence and community amongst ourselves. We support in a lot of African countries in Kenya but in particular across East Africa when we think about documentaries we roll our eyes and we just think those boring educational things that come on TV at 9pm or that we're forced to watch in school we don't really think about documentaries as creative or intimate or independent or observational we don't think about the characters who tell our much larger story through them and through their lives. So what we look for are films that uncover realities because they're authored by authentic local voices that offer viewers just new perspectives and what does that mean? If you have sort of written on the continent or watched Telly on the continent you'll notice again and again that our stories are often told by the other and in many ways that's fine we need a collection of different perspectives to who we are and where we're going but where are our stories? Is it only the perspective of the other that we have on ourselves and that's really why DocuBox has been founded to find those local voices and to learn together how to author stories with new perspectives. Okay so where did it begin? I was never supposed to run a film fund in fact when it was first suggested actually I was almost sick because as a filmmaker to me you look for funds, you don't start a fund that is complicated, that is something that other people in other countries do oh my goodness our fund I was paralysed at the thought but when I really looked at things I realised that in my own career I'd been paralysed in so many ways I worked on a film called Scarred The Anatomy of a Massacre which told the story of a massacre that had happened in Kenya 30 years before and I had opened up a newspaper and I'd read about this story where 5,000 men were herded onto an airfield in northern Kenya and systematicly slaughtered by our government and I didn't really know how to make you know being a fictional filmmaker who'd made shorter documentary films I didn't really know how to make a longer or feature-length documentary film but Wagala really made me realise how lonely that process was and as the fifth year checked in and the film launched I just thought nobody should have to do this kind of thing without some sense of community and support so simultaneously I was in the middle of creating at the request of the Ford Foundation a kind of framework for how a documentary film film fund would work and that whole process helped me really question what it was that we needed what I would need to have a better experience how we'd be able to get more people making more stories just like ours so ok our manifest everything starts with a good little document we can do blah blah fish cake so I'm putting this up so that you can help me be the judge at the end of this little talk and tell me if you feel that the things we've done over the last few years have kind of answered what began as a very theoretical manifesto and I'll just jump out at the red words which kind of summarise the whole we set out by saying that we believed that good documentaries were films that would be able to uncover new realities because they were personalised glimpse into worlds issues and lives that challenged ideas and assumptions and we further stated that we believed that we needed to support films that would make the world a better place it makes you almost want to kumbaya hold hands but is it possible? I don't know, let's see so four years on we have actually put a lot of support into about 24 films after this very long journey we have these five films almost six completed they'll be completed by the end of the year there are really diverse stories a little later, those of you who are here in the evening will actually see a trailer when Lindy and I speak in the evening that actually give us a glimpse of all these different films so films that are as diverse as Truck Mama, the story of a trucker who's a woman who drives all the way to Sudan and yet is struggling to be a mother The Delea, a story that began about the port in Lamu and really ended up being about the filmmaker converting and becoming a Muslim in the process and what that meant and who she was and very layered Truth, a story about a group of gay friends who live in one of the continent's largest slums, Madari and just for four years a film that follows the way they live and ask the question why can't we be allowed to love the people that we love films really painstaking, each of them a long four-year process but I think unlike my experience one that is supported by like minds so how do we do it we make an open call we have a panel, we select projects we go through teaser development I think just to emphasise again why I suppose I'm even bothering to share the process as I was sort of walking through so as I was thinking it's so amazing that there are all these institutions and if you want to go and do a masters or a PhD there's a process and along with colleagues who are studying different things you get to understand the process I think it's very different being a filmmaker on the continent we just get up and go we're just like film, yeah no problem some of us have been lucky to go to film school, I wasn't used many people have gone to film school thank goodness for YouTube that is the new film school but there is a way that things are made filmmaking is not just a talent it's a craft and if you're raising money for a documentary and you want to tell that all important Kenyan story or African story and you want to pitch you need to have a trailer a lot of the majority of the filmmakers who we work with didn't realise that just as I hadn't realised it and so we go through all the different steps we competitively award production grants we give master classes and we look to just empower talent that have powerful stories that need telling so in our first round of grants we supported six films on the second round another six in all in the last four years with money raise I've learnt to be a fundraiser ooh I've just gotten over the terror of doing that but I think it makes it easier to ask if you're asking for others and so we've managed to give over $250,000 worth of funding and grants we've managed to put a whole lot more into mentorship and training as well and this has led to all kinds of wonderful things because much as we love to and need to tell our own stories we are part of the world we are part of a larger global village and one of the events that we had that was super exciting and that literally began to harness the power of documentary and share it with others was the good pitch and this is an event that brings together documentary filmmakers with foundations and NGOs and campaigners and philanthropists and governments and we forge collisions around films so literally it was a day in which we found six amazing films some were ours put them on a stage and created partnerships around each one and this is really important because you know sometimes you'll have a film for instance like the letter which is in a sense about witchcraft along the coast but that goes much deeper and discovers that the persecution of the 30 or so elderly people that are killed on Kenya's coast every single month is more about economic empowerment is about a generation trying to take land from their grandparents because they feel disabled and so fine you make a story like that but if you are not connected to institutes of learning along the coast how does this film get passed on to the younger generation if you aren't connected to the churches that are you know taking these elders and forcefully having exorcisms then how do you convince the church that they need to be part of this movement and so we begin to look at films not just as a wonderful expression of creativity but a real powerful tool that can change the continent that we live in that can actually without preaching and through characters that we have carefully followed and filmed for years we can take these little gems to organizations like help the age and say look what we have help us change things with this film and that's what the good pitch was doing and that's kind of just a little glimpse I don't know if you can see it much but just this whole whole filled with people the filmmaker shaking these at the top of the table a whole coalition of amazing partners universities, ministry, government in this case truth the filmmakers shared their amazing train talked about what they needed from the room really carefully curated crowd audience and got the support they needed to you know they got support to finish the film they got buy-in from LGBTQI communities across East Africa and so that day is one of the things and one of the ways that docu-box is really trying to to say to change the way oops am I running late okay sorry I get carried away sometimes I saw you looking at your watch okay so that you know so powerful day so I think docu-box initially much as it began as this sort of fairly lonely struggle and looking up and recognizing other independent filmmakers like myself was struggling it's slowly over time growing to become something something larger and something that encompasses not just our creative community but a community of people who really value and understand the importance of stories well told so that was the registration day at the National Museum so in that single day we were able to to raise from the audience collectively over $100,000 we were able to really connect people to partners that they wouldn't have imagined being connected to and to really I think create for the first create for the first time a real buzz around documentary film and a lot of people just sort of waking up was the feeling and thinking what you mean documentary can be gripping and engaging and important yes it can so the documentary film screenings that we have every month are different from the good pitch different from what I've the things we've talked about previously we realized along the way as well we began with having monthly screenings for filmmakers and we realized that one thing that we needed to do was really build documentary audiences around what we were doing and so every single month we well not every single month we have seasons around films we go to high schools we go to campuses and I'll just show you a couple of pictures just from last month around a film that we took around the country we have our elections in Kenya on August the 8th and we thought it was really important to take a film not one that we had made but a documentary film that got students really thinking about the upcoming elections a film actually about three kids in a school in Kenya running to try and be head boy or head girl and through their campaign we see these kids engaging in all the things that we see our own politicians sexism the girls in the school turning against the young girl who's running and saying how can a girl run how is this possible one of the wealthier boys trying to tell people if you vote for me I'll slaughter a goat for the whole school at the end and just all these various ways of corruption that already are bubbling up in our young and so we took this film around and as you can see the crowds were huge and these are the audiences that we're building for the future and at the end of a film like that you're able to tell kids to look at each other and to hold hands and say you know whatever to make peace pledges whatever happens after the August the 8th you will still be my sister you will still be my brother and that's the beauty of documentary allows you to have conversations because you are hooked in by a character's journey and you suddenly relate that to your own life and through that you can change things we've also been showing a film that we supported during the good pitch called thank you for the rain and again in these Trump times there's so much debate around global warming and and about the different things that are happening in different countries and with thank you for the rain there was a farmer very simple but amazing community leader called Kisilu whose land has been completely ravaged by climate change and in thank you for the rain the filmmakers he became one of the filmmakers himself began to shoot on his phone began to shoot on a little camera that his Norwegian co-director gave him and six years later they had this powerful film and again dockybox is part of our outreach as part of the conversations that we want to promote even as we create films we took this film out to Mutumor we took it to his home area and hundreds and hundreds of farmers turned up and really began to clamor to see this film a lot of word of mouth a lot of discussion about new techniques and to be able to see the star of the film Kisilu there talking to them about his methods things that they had seen the film really bring to life all these things that can be very very theoretical so I'll just go quickly over this we are also at building a community of filmmakers who collaborate very very important for us we are physically building a space it's not a huge space but it's about three or four rooms where we hope to experiment to invite filmmakers to find a home to be able to discuss between us what's important what do we need to be making next how do you need support what are we doing right what are we doing wrong where's your film can we hold it up and can we look at it and can we criticize it one of the things we found at least amongst ourselves as Kenyan and East African filmmakers is we're really hurt by criticism we don't realize that it is part it is essential to creativity it is essential to the development of a product of a film and so I think you know so rigorous debate around films those that we are making and those that others have made that will be happening at the hub and we have workshops we've done a whole bunch of online content we have edit suites as well and I think it was it's just worth sharing here what about the box in academia what about the box as a place where a whole bunch of filmmakers who are already collaborating are able to think through the things that perhaps a professor teaching African studies in a university in the states might need some visual tools or a short documentary to bring their work alive so those are the kind of things that we are beginning to explore as we go forward so to summarize we kind of have a logic within docuBox that we've developed and that is that we support the people who make the documentaries, the audience, the audience creates the impact the impact creates a change and finally we have the change that we all seek so that's it I hope that this lived up to the manifesto that I showed at the beginning and you can see how perhaps we are beginning to change things a little bit through film thank you so much Judy I have to sort of whenever I see Judy always take a minute to just shout out her film Scarred two years ago we founded a festival in Kenya called the Somali Heritage Week which was about raising awareness about Somali culture and how I can't call it xenophobia because Somalis are Kenyans but there's a certain animus that exists with the broader society against Somali people and we showed Judy's film Scarred and the response was tremendous people were crying in the audience and we got demands that we had to screw it again so we had to move the festival calendar around so we could make time to see it again so if you ever see Scarred playing in a place near you please make time to see it up next we have Dr. Luisa Abunike did I say that correctly? Yes who is a lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University and she is currently working on a project about the legacies of the Biafra Biafra do you know honestly in my entire life I've never known how to say that it's one of those words that you see and you never actually have to say out loud Biafra war so Luisa okay good morning everyone so yes I'm Luisa my PhD here at SOAS a few years ago and I also work with CAS in organising the annual Ibo conference here at SOAS so if anyone's interested about the Ibo conference you can come and see me in the break we recently had a conference here at SOAS legacies of Biafra to mark the 50th anniversary of the Nigeria Biafra war but today I'm here to talk to you about Nigerian mainstream focus writing Nigeria through a new lens this is a very big project for 10 minutes so I will do my best and I will sort of use brief examples I can't expand and speak to its entirety so apologies if I sort of breeze over very large subjects I've got new in a scare quotes because there's nothing new under the sun so it's a new lens in a sense there's elements that are new but there are elements that are very much embedded in Nigerian literary culture so I'll speak to that so like Miriam I'm speaking about Nadia Kaurafor so she is the new lens or she writes literature through a new lens is what I'm positing and I just wanted to sort of frame her work using this quote and she speaks about the way in which she writes and her approach to writing and she calls her literature organic fantasy the idea that her fantasy literature is from the soil it's not something external it's very much intrinsic to who she is she says the fantasy that I write is far more than what is on the surface I am not just making stuff up there is a method purpose and realness to my madness it is not fantasy for fantasy's sake as so many reviewers have speculated and this term fantasy for fantasy's sake is an echoing of Chinyu Achebi's famous quote and I can swear because Achebi said it not me and Achebi says that art for art's sake is just another piece of deodorized dog shit so the idea that literature art has a particular social function is something that Aaurafor is also stating in her literature although she's writing fantasy she's saying it has a particular purpose and so part of what I want to do is insert Nadia Kaurafor's work into an existing Nigerian literary tradition I should say Nadia Kaurafor describes herself as a Niger-American writer so she's of the Nigerian diaspora living in America but very much her work writes about Africa and actually what's interesting about her literature is she very much centres Africa so she envisions a future she engages in sci-fi fantasy literature she writes sci-fi fantasy literature which is sometimes described as a very futureist literature but it centres Africa in the future at this conference I just want to make the point that Aaurafor's future or Aaurafor views the future through Africa, Africa is centred so we're probably used to seeing these end-of-world narratives where some young beautiful Americans are running around trying to save the day Aaurafor's version of that is young beautiful Nigerians running around trying to save the day so it's kind of again a new lens in terms of the futurity in the world so I'm not going to get into the debates around terminology but I wanted to sort of make you aware of this idea of Afro-futurism and I think we'll speak a bit more about this over the course of this conference but this is a quote from Quadruishun who says, Afro-futurism does not stop at correcting the history of the future nor is it a simple matter of inserting more black actors into science fiction narratives these methods are only baby steps towards the more totalising realisation that in Greg Tate's formulation Afro-deasporic subjects have lived the estrangement that science fiction writers envision black existence and science fiction are one and the same now this notion of sort of Afro-futurist literature is often associated with African-American literature and the idea that this sort of history of Africans in America if we think about that history it reads like a sort of sci-fi novel think about abduction the middle passage and life in the Americas and it can read like a kind of alien abduction novel I mean you can think about the conditions under which African-Americans lived and existed and you can see that science fiction is a lens through which to investigate and explore this history but what we've been seeing in recent years is African writers and artists actually engaging in the writing of science fiction, fantasy and exploring issues like colonisation for example through this Afro-futurist lens and that leads me to my next slide this is something that Okorofa has said about the seminal text things fall apart I have always read things fall apart as an alien invasion novel so although I'm talking about writing and using a new lens in writing I just wanted to sort of nod to the fact that there's also ways of re-reading the African literary canon and using her Afro-futurist lens to re-read the novels that we're probably all now quite familiar with and so that kind of shapes and frames things fall apart in a very different way and it also goes to show that Okorofa's writing isn't out of step with existing literatures from Nigeria and this is the point I want to make and discuss very very briefly her novel Lagoon this is a quick summary of the novel but essentially it's an alien invasion novel set in Lagos and we meet a range of characters and one of the central characters is Ayodele who is this figure who emerges from the water she's an alien, she's a shapeshifter and we follow them we follow the narrative and we follow them as they try to sort of bring about change in the nation and there's key environmental concerns in this novel the novel opens with looking at the life of fish under water in the in the sea by Bar Beach so the fact that Okorofa centres her novel or begins her novel in the sea puts forward the importance of our environment and this is something that continues to the novel the idea of pollution and the impact it has on ourselves and on our communities and it's a central feature of the novel but I don't want to go too much into this because again ten minutes isn't a long time ok so that will hopefully this will make sense I'll kind of come back to that figure of Ayodele but I wanted to talk briefly about a couple of texts that I read as part of the histories that Okorofa engages in and with and one of these texts is Flora Wapas Efru which was published in 1966 and this is a novel that looks at the lives of a particular woman in an evil community in the southeast of what is now modern day Nigeria during the colonial period and one of the central figures in this novel is Uhamiri the goddess of the lake and we see how the goddess of the lake is very important to the lived experience of the people within this community so the goddess of the lake is revered the goddess of the lake is prayed to is worshipped by a community of women and she very much looks after this community of women who worship her and the community at large but there's this reverment for the goddess of the lake that I want to suggest also links to this deep respect that is held for the environment so you cannot you cannot sort of pollute this lake because in polluting the lake it's also not only will it affect the community who make use of this lake but it's also an abomination right so it has this idea of pollution is very much linked to the spiritual and so to pollute this lake is very much an abomination because it's a disrespect to this goddess and so there's this environmental element in the sort of cosmologies of these communities that although it isn't articulated explicitly in these texts it's very much present and I think this is something that Okorofa is tapping into when she's writing her contemporary narrative of Lagoon now Efru is very much sort of a realist so to speak realist texts also Okorofa is drawing on an existing sort of speculative fiction literary tradition that exists within Nigeria an example being Amos Tutuola is the palm wine drinker published in 1952 and this novel, the synopsis of it is the protagonist the main character loves palm wine, his palm wine tapper dies and the novel shows his journey into the sort of spirit world to try and find his tapper so that he can continue to drink palm wine and we sort of meet all these different spirits along the way, he goes into communities and realms and we see him gradually progress but this is the central premise of the text this journey to the spirit realm to find his palm wine tapper who's now passed away so Okorofa is also drawing on this existing tradition of the speculative of the spiritual and it's incorporated into this narrative so this isn't something that's purely an external, this isn't an American writer who's a sci-fi and now we're sort of imposing it on to an African setting she's also drawing very much on existing traditions within Nigeria but she's also drawing on African American literature tradition and she mentions that in many of her interviews that Octavia Butler who's an African American writer and writes science fiction is very much an influence to her so one of those texts that has influenced Nadia Okorofa is Wild Seed and again this is a novel about a shape shifter about a woman actually who is born in an Ibo village and is captured or is coerced into travelling to the US or what is now the US travelling to the Americas and she becomes at the mercy of the central figure Doro but she's the shape shifting woman of Ibo heritage and you can see why this novel to an extent would also appeal to Nadia Okorofa because it's located in part of the world that a lot of her works are located in but then covers the middle passage and speaks to an African American experience and so we have again in Lagoon referencing of sort of shape shifting central characters of female and the powers of that woman yields and so okay so yes I'm making some big jumps I hope you're all still with me I hope this is making sense is it making sense? Perfect okay so I spoke a bit about Efuru and Uhammeri the woman of the lake across West Africa and Central Africa these goddesses of various water bodies are often referred to in sort of generic terms as Mami water so this is what this is how we could also frame Uhammeri and one critic has framed Ayodele in Nadia Okorofa's Lagoon as a kind of Mami water figure who emerges from the water again who has who wields this kind of power and influence within the community that she's in and this is just an excerpt from a piece that's online that sort of speaks to that Mami water framework that exists within Okorofa's writing you can read it, I won't read it out to you but again the point that I want to make or the point that I want to drive home is that Okorofa is writing out of an existing literary tradition, she's drawing upon existing frameworks she's drawing upon elements of sort of the folklore elements of the existing spiritual cosmological belief systems but she's also re-reading them and placing them in a new framework looking at them through the framework of science fiction but also making some important points around the environment which already existed within the literature of Nigeria when I was speaking about the palm wine drinker I should have said one of the elements or one of the aspects of lagoon that speaks to Tuola's work is there is a section where she showcases the Lagos Binin sort of the main, for thoroughfare the main road there and it's a road that is known to have many accidents and naturalities and she characterises this road as having a monster that resides within it that essentially is kind of eating up the people on the road so again it's engaging with current concerns and conditions it's drawing upon existing folkloric frameworks but it's also re-presenting them in a sort of Afrofuturist or science fiction paradigm but in doing so again I mentioned she's centering Africa she's saying that these narratives of the future or narratives of saving the world or narratives of questioning environmental degradation are not only relevant to Africa but actually we can read them through Africa so she's in the words of Ngugiwa Theonga she's moving the centre and that centre now in this novel is Lagos but as Miriam spoke to she's doing it very well so her essentially a Kaurafus future is an African future I'll end there, thank you That was incredibly interesting I like the I was thinking a lot when you were speaking about how people link physical phenomenon to the spiritual or to otherworldly things and we'll get into this in the discussion but one of the things that I always find interesting is how is it the fact that people already do all these kind of imaginations in their day to day life that makes it difficult for people to imagine that sci-fi is possible in the African realm in the sense that at least I can think of in my experience spiritualism has always been such a big part of our day to day life don't stand on one foot because you know it's bad luck that's a superstition that we have in my family and I think I'll save that for the discussion later but I found that really fascinating our last week on this panel is Khadija Khadija was introduced in great depth yesterday Khadija George aka Khadija Cece which is the name that she publishes with is a literary activist, a project manager and a founder of a festival in the Gambia called Mboke Festival and I believe that the festival will be the thrust of her presentation today just because it gets out good morning everybody okay what I'm going to do is I'm kind of going to do this slightly I want to just play this bit of the video first just so I can get it out of the way and I don't mix it up in the middle and get everything wrong so once you've watched this just hold on to the thoughts till the end of the presentation okay so this is about when professor Abu Gwatiungo he came to the Gambia in January for our festival and so I'm just going to play the first one and a half minutes he belongs to the pre and post-independent African writers with a pan-African mindset and ideology at variance with the norms and values of modern day politics and political systems that denigrate African cultures when he touched down at the Banu International Airport on Friday evening with a smiling face after his invitation by the organizers of the Mboka Festival of Arts to participate in the festival the professor of African literature did not means his words when he described himself as Africa's language warrior in every African country which everybody should be able to speak their mother tongue be able to write their mother tongue be able to read their mother tongue then one or two other African language within their own country and then add English or French or any other language so we start with ours first we go on adding to become more powerful but if you start with somebody else's that's like being an outsider to your own house alright let me put it this way is how I phrase it excuse me if you know all the languages of the world and you don't know your mother tongue or the language of your culture that is enslavement his ideology as regards this resource continent just hold on to that thought because I think because in terms of what has come out of the conference from yesterday and talking about language and about how it's so important in our future I thought that was an important bit to have thank you I was going to do this on a loop but maybe I'll pretend I'm doing it on a loop so I just need to do my good fundee bit and thank a debt stroke afford for giving us the money to help us start off with the festival in terms of being like a civil society organisation at the new dawn of Gambia so thank you very much to adaptive fair here and I hope Nanjela you don't mind I'll take a couple of extra minutes just to refer to some of the things that have come out from yesterday because one of the things that I think is important I have to kind of actually my one of my motos for sable publications is art is the heart of the nation so that's in Googie and Gambia maybe I'll go back to this art is the heart of the nation and I kind of came to that after I was in Washington DC in 2011 I was one of the inaugural performance arts managers in that scholarship program at the Kennedy Centre and so you know we've done all the introduction and we've gone to all of these high end events all of these people, all of this money putting money into the Kennedy Centre so it's a really stush start so we had our first meeting there were 12 performance arts managers and we had our first meeting in the restaurant right at the top of the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC I don't know if anybody's been to the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC we had to be living memorial to a president in America so we had just started the meeting and 10 minutes into the meeting somebody came running in from the kitchen and said the Pentagon's on fire and we were like what and then the president of the Kennedy Centre stood up and said well yes they've hit New York and he'd been contacted by the secret service and said you have to be on alert because you could be next and he basically said everybody needs to leave the building right now and thank goodness it was before 10 o'clock so the public hadn't come in and so for us who'd just arrived it was just like this is not what we came here for you know and it was kind of like that's what made me think why an other secret service one of the first things they did was contact the head of the National Art Centre to say you could be next which made me think you know they're hitting an art centre which is the centre point it's a heart of the nation and the same way when in Googie came to the Gambia and we just took him to a Timbuktu bookshop which is a purpose built bookshop one of the most beautiful bookshops I've been to and he said this is the soul of the Gambia and he was just so pleased that we took him there and it was just almost by accident because it is so I wanted to refer back to some of the discussions from yesterday in terms of talking about governance in terms of talking about the future because cultural practitioners and managers need to be included in the conversation when you're developing your nation when you're raising the nation and that is essential and they're not always considered as entertainment culture is not entertainment it's the heart it's the heart of the nation so we started Embokka festival not necessarily with that in mind but that's what it came to because then we happened to have it in January and we happened to have it at the time when we were about to move the old president of 28 years out and bring a new one in and people kept saying you're not still going to have the festival are you and we said of course we are you know people are in the country people expect the festival we need to have the festival people need to know that life carries on we carry on art carries on art helps to nurture people we move people onto this onto what we need so it was essential that we carried on and I just kind of saw emails through other people thinking we really feel sorry for Khadija and her group this is going to be you know total wash out total failure but it wasn't it was great it was successful and it was really good that Professor Ngugiwatiungo stayed throughout the whole thing which is why here he is he called my colleague up and saying here you've got Ngugiwatiungo in the country what are you doing with him he said he's safe he's enjoying he's having fun I think it was the night of the 18th when Barrow had been sworn in in Senegal he wasn't there but Ngugiwatiungo was and he was enjoying with the young people out on the town because they were all celebrating so there he is doing that so this is we did get some major support from people and because of what was happening we didn't actually get the banners out but they look pretty good and you know in terms of promoting what was going on and we just kind of really felt that in terms of moving into the future of the Gambia that we made sure that the festival was a highlight and that the festival went forward so basically there are three co-founders we were all doing our own programs and it just makes sense to come together so the word mboka is a wall-off word that actually means oneness one people, oneness, one family so it suited what we were going to do and so one of the founders he's a professor Dr. Mama Dusala he teaches at Dimontford and he's actually built a hub like a creative hub in a village and that's where we have our academic conference and he also did the opening festival with arts and cultural activities from all over the Gambia showcasing all the different arts and culture from all the different groups within the Gambia and there's myself doing the literature I wonder how you would have guessed that I did the literature and the book fair so we have a literary festival I did the first one in 2005 and I'd always been fighting to do another literature festival so again it came under mboka and the interesting thing about me doing the festival in 2007 I tell people some people laugh and some people are absolutely aghast but there was the Dakar Pen Congress there was a pen congress in Dakar so I took some people to that I also did a retreat, a writer's retreat and I did the literary festival and somewhere in the middle of that I got married and the only thing that didn't survive was the marriage so my first said look you just got married to the country just leave it at that so it was true and the other third person he's very key he's based in the Gambia and this is Mr. Adam Abbar and his background is to do with tourism, responsible tourism so it's kind of moving on from sustainable to being responsible so it's not just about being sustainable it's about being responsible and he's one of the key people I'd say in Africa talking about responsible tourism so it's really great to have him on board and that also then enables us in terms of pushing that whole agenda in terms of for cultural tourism which is important for Gambia because it's so known for sun, sea and sand and we're saying we've got a lot more to offer I'm saying we, I am Sierra Leone but I'm Gambian too, I'm a Pan-African there we go so it's very important to push that agenda so the world travel market in November we get a slot in that we say what we're doing, we made a call out for volunteers, we said we'd love some help because we've got no money, we'd like help we had volunteers, the volunteers came they paid for themselves, they came and we gave them this wonderful Gambia experience a work another festival but then they also learned things from us and then we support people through other things and also giving training opportunities to young people in the Gambia and there's also there's a Gambian artist who's in Wales and he's linking up with young people saying do you need young people to come from Wales to come to the Gambia as volunteers so they also have that learning and training experience so there's so many different ways as part of being Mbocca and we hold on to that term Mbocca of nurturing people in the country nurturing young people in the country but also in our surrounds we've also linked up with festivals already in Senegal who are going to be part of that you know everywhere I mean we're linking up with Numbi Arts in the UK they're coming, they're having their retreat up at Sandele Echo Lodge but they're also doing going to be part of the festival and they're going to come into town and do some of their work as part of the festival and then we're going to take some people from the festival out of town back up to Sandele which is a great place to do it so we have all different of of what could be a festival in two weeks so for example the Literature Festival obviously isn't the whole two weeks we just take a section of that time so there's different things going on at each time so people can just experience not only Gambian culture and heritage but we're fusing other African cultures and heritages into that as well one of the things that I'm trying to do for example is trying to work towards Gambia being a UNESCO city of literature it could be a city of dance, it could have been a city of music but that's not my thing so since I'm working on it, it's going to be a city of literature but we also feel that that's going to encourage literacy it's going to encourage reading and writing and as well, just take away from this thought that Gambia is only Sanse and Sanre and there's so much more to offer so a couple of more things I was going to mention Did I have any more slides? Oh yeah, so there's Ngugi in the bookshop and one of the things that he was really pleased about in the bookshop he said as soon as he walked in the first stands were African writers you have Gambian writers on one side we have all African writers on a stand on another side and then you move in and European writers at the back and he said it's so different from when he was going into bookshops in South Africa when they would put all the other ones in front but that for him was so important and they've got a beautiful little space upstairs in terms of a coffee bar and everything so it really is a wonderful space and as I said it is purpose built I mentioned all of those things so no, I think that's enough and I think that's just again mentioning as going back to the video at the beginning having again African languages at the centre I would like to try and do a conference in 2019 we'll start a new festival like a weekend festival of African poetry in translation and as I said as I show people this yesterday this is Ngugi's story the upright revolution which is a children's story but really as a lot of children's stories are they've got very good lessons for adults in three Gambian languages and we're going to try and do that because we want to respond to who we have so we're also going to have for example this year the Awari society are coming and they're going to set up in Gambia they call the game Wari but the Awari society are going to come and they're going to set up a tournament and everything so we're having lots of wonderful different aspects we're having yoga because I think yoga is very important for writers it's going to all be part of it as well so when we didn't have the yoga this time because of course we had to cut out a few things especially the outside sports because it was going to be a little bit you know sensitive having the sport at that time outside sports and then I was getting emails afterwards saying what happened to the yoga so I knew I had to get it sorted out this time which we have and wrestling matches local wrestling matches and everything so it's going to be very exciting you're quite welcome to join us I can give you a flyer if you want to come it's January the 17th the festival is going to be so please contact me afterwards if you want to know any more thank you I wanted to ask a question that I think unifies everything that we've we've heard about this morning and the question is quite simple the theme of this panel was new visions new images, new story and so there's this underlying idea of newness but one thing that has come up I think a little bit in everything that we've heard is that what we consider new is actually building on a tradition that already exists either whether we're returning to previous frameworks of language and language learning whether we're thinking about storytelling in new ways and we're talking about incorporating tradition into modern quote unquote modern festivals and so I guess my big broad question for the entire panel would be in this pursuit of newness so chasing this newness what do we lose and what is worth saving and what should we be trying to protect as we're chasing newness it's a big question isn't it we didn't want to tell you Angela but when you stand to those questions they were all big questions if we just keep talking for more than 10 minutes we won't get to the difficult questions you're not answering sorry you caught me at a very profound I was having a very profound moment so I had to ask about newness well I'm asking simply because of this tension that I see within when we talk about quote unquote Africa whatever that big word means there always seems to be a binary we always seem to have to decide whether we're moving in this direction or we're moving in this direction and you come to show us you come to London and we're here in a building that's probably 30, 40 years old and we cross the street and the building across the road is 70, 80, 100 years old and we go down to the British Museum and that building is a couple of decades old but then for us there always seems to have to be this binary but the sense that I got from what you're saying is that your work is existing in a space where you're trying to reconcile these two things is sci-fi new or is it folk tales being told in a different way and so guess what I'm really asking is if you can take a couple of minutes to reflect on what it is that you're building on and what it is that you're trying to protect and preserve in your work as you move forward kind of with quote unquote newness what are you encountering in your work rather in some ways I think just generally I mean as one of the the phrase I think Louise said there's nothing new on to me if the song the story is already there and I think it's just telling it in a different way like you said there isn't new it's just what way what are the existing and different resources that we can use in a sense it is all stories to tell our stories and it might be new to the people in the West because they don't realise that we already have this it's like I kind of found it quite amusing when Barclays Bank talk it started talking about a new app we can now do our banking online and they said we've been doing that in Africa for ages do you know what I'm saying because we have to so it's just taking what is already there and adapting it to the way that we need to use it I think that's all it is just to add to that I think it's about also finding a voice so for example I sort of referenced some of the earlier texts in my Geo and Literary Canon so a writer like Chinu Achebe after him you had quite a few writers who were sort of writing or trying to write the same style that he writes so trying to sort of draw on the folklore but sort of trying to frame the language in a particular way to sound like him, to use proverbs to use local imagery and so some critics have sort of written disparagingly about some of those that followed him of his generation but it was about trying to find a language in a voice through which to tell a particular story, tell their narrative and I think that's what writers of each generation seek to do so something like Nnedi Okorofa is very different Achebe wasn't born at the crossroads of history doesn't have that immediate access to your culture in the way that he did born in the US, grew up in Chicago faced sort of racism in her youth very much in African American circles but also having access to Nigeria and travelling home on holidays and seeing family so she is interested in an African diasporic experience she is interested in what's happening on the continent and she is finding a framework through which to engage her own experience but also the experience of her people as she envisions her people so I think we find that different influences and experiences frame us in different ways and we engage in different ways so in many ways she is engaging in some of these older conversations but she's finding her in language and she's finding her in paradigms and I think that's why she's been influenced by African American experience of Afrofuturism so we're very much thinking about Africa the continent and the future of Africa the continent and marrying the two so I don't know if it's necessarily a kind of a conscious how can I be different it's more how can I find a paradigm that fits my own experience and how can I engage and how do I find the language to engage and I think that's where her work is going at least I wanted to ask about language also John and Judy especially Judy a lot of the films that Docubox does are in English No? Okay Well the question is about language do you think it's possible for people to tell quote-unquote authentic and I hate this word authentic because it's obviously very loaded but in the context of stories that represent who they think they are accurately in a language that's not their own like do you think it's possible to have an authentic quote-unquote African experience in English I think people become who they really are when they speak in the language that they dream in and think in I remember my father talking about with great surprise when he sort of got to 65 and he said you know gosh I've just read I've just begun to dream in English and that really took him aback because his whole life he dreamt in Kikuyu you know for myself who's grown up in so many different places this is always such a guilty debate in my head because I'm not great at my local languages I understand them I speak them badly but if you look at almost all my films you know be it Killer Necklace which is in Shang something necessary which is in Kikuyu, Kalanjin and Swahidi the Docubox films with all filmmakers we insist the subjects that you're following let them speak in the language that they dream in the language that they are one thing I found also as a fictional filmmaker you can hear it when you cast and when you're reading lines you know lines written in English come out very stiffly pass me the wine cheers you know and then you ask people take that and make it your own you know what if this doesn't work throw it out what would you say in this scenario and immediately the actor becomes more authentic the script becomes more authentic you're not trying to mimic something you're trying to pull out what already exists so for me I think language is incredibly important and yeah it mimics who we are and just to refer to the earlier question that you had because I think it ties in somehow I think in this effort to chase the new we forget the foundation building we forget to ask those very basic important questions you know as filmmaker storytellers we're running after what's happening online what about the VOD platforms what about the new DSLR cameras what about we need to tell our stories quickly but we're not spending the real foundational time asking these sorts of important questions what language should we tell our stories in before we shoot them let's spend some time understanding these tools that we didn't invent you know lenses and so on so yeah just to respond briefly to both of those questions really and picking up on the theme of yesterday that really we're talking about sort of plurilingual realities here rather than writers or filmmakers artists having to choose a particular language so it's back to this notion of how do we perceive of language in the real world and possibly not separate bounded entities but there's a huge amount of code switching trans language and goes on I think that is appropriating to be captured in those different texts and so on so I'd like to think that's possible to mix and to match those different languages within particular artistic sort of products referring to the first question I'm looking at that through the sort of the educational lens and lens of government and society I think there are some very important drivers going on the whole globalization process references made yesterday to governments having their vision in 2020s or 2025-2030s very much within a neoliberal economic and political paradigm and one I think of the real downsides of that is that it actually does start to close down the space for the local you know local languages local cultures and so on and so I think that is an enormous challenge in so far as you know western sort of liberal notions and models predominate in that space I'd just like to point to one or two really interesting examples of how that is actually being counted in some ways looking through some people will be aware of the enormous amount of investment that's being made in early grade reading in formal education in Africa and a focus on technical reading skills almost to the exclusion of the oral tradition and the devaluing of that there's some very interesting activities going on in South Africa the Nali Bali project which is a community based project so it's actually taking language and literacy out of the formal education space where it's very closed down into the community and back into the oral traditions and using new technology to capture some of those stories of experiences between adults and children so I think there are opportunities to reclaim that space and to redefine the local both in language and literacy but let's not underestimate the powerful nature of the forces operating in very different directions to add to what to what Luisa said and coming back to the newness of things there's also a question of not only finding a voice but also and building a foundation but also making something audible and visible what is already there I think western publishing filters have done a job in suppressing stories that have been there and it's also a question of how we read a story as Luisa said we can read things fall apart as a science fiction story and now we as literary critics cannot deny that existence of African science fiction anymore which has been there before but I think the digital era now gives us a lot of possibilities to make these stories visible so there are a lot of literary collectives forming online and diminishing the power of the western publishing filters so there's a lot happening now that might have happened earlier with if the means would have been there thank you open up to the floor do we have a floor mic let's kind of work our way up we'll start here and then here and then here we'll take three questions at a time thank you for the can you hear me? thank you for this beautiful panel around voices, alienation exclusion inclusion, visibility audibility picking up several strands this linguistic alienation and pain and the reminder of the emir of khanu that we should not forget what existed before colonization and whether we have African solutions to problems that are maybe not African problems but imported problems the standard language cultures that rely on the selection of particular standard languages each with their own standardized orthography that intend to draw boundaries around languages is a European solution and there exist African solutions to manage multilingualism including in writing that are very fluid and much more monolingual so called lead language writing traditions that use the language of first literacy for instance Arabic for many Muslims and these days the roman script for many Christians and write all languages across board with the same conventions this is not standardized it's a very soft conventionalized system it has huge literary traditions in the idea me writing practice and it exists in grassroots writing practices across Africa in modern forms of writing digital writing and social media text messages I don't know any single African who does not practice this form of writing but it's discounted and it's a very flexible plural ringer solution that comes directly from the lived experience of African readers and writers I think that is a very promising avenue to pursue to have a real inclusivity also in writing and in plural ringer classrooms As we're waiting for the mic to travel I think there was a poet or a writer someone who said maybe it's time we need to stop thinking about English and start thinking about Englishes and how different people are using the language in different ways I really enjoyed everybody I really enjoyed the presentations my question was that quite a lot has been said about interpreting some books that have been written over half a century ago and that are standalone classics as being somehow science fiction and I just wondered what is the actual value of that because these books are standalone classics on their own they're very interesting everybody's enjoyed them the value of re-interpreting them in this genre I didn't really get the point and I just wanted to understand that a bit more and we'll take the third one and then we'll let you respond Thank you very much wonderful presentations I've really been wondering actually Jude has answered part of my question already after the chair asked the question to the panel I was wondering the fluence really of English that are the African looking presenters use I really wonder whether I really wondered whether the action speaks so fluently in their local languages back home whether they would actually express that kind of fluency thought in their languages but Jude I think has confessed the other thing I would like to say is I really wish saw us could be training scholars of this calibre for Africa unfortunately I'm a little bit scared that perhaps quite a number of these remain in Europe I'm scared about that yeah I think something that you may need to comment now my question is I would like somebody who may be political oriented to connect the relationship between politics and language and in the context of Africa I really feel that it may not really be the issue of resources that inhibit the promotion of African languages in the classroom but perhaps there is a hidden agenda in terms of power and politics please kindly dismember that for us okay we'll have to stop there so we've taken a comment on the standardization I think that perhaps Louise and Miriam you could respond to the question about reinterpreting things for the part of reinterpreting classical texts John, Judy, Khadija if you could respond to the idea of language and politics, language as politics as you find it in the work that you that you're doing if that's alright so if we start with the things for the part question thank you for that question so there's two things I'd say one of them is as readers we always bring something to the text we all read texts in different ways we will interpret texts in different ways one thing that I think is particularly interesting about Nadia Kaurafal is the way in which she sees the world so beyond her writing if anybody follows her on Facebook or I don't know if she's on Instagram or Facebook she's on Facebook all the time and you see sorry that's not a bad thing but she's constantly taking photos she travels the world a lot and she's constantly taking photos and so I've seen photos of hers like I think when she's been in possibly Japan and taking photos of sort of strange jellyfish and she finds all these she loves insects she finds all these interesting insects that I've never seen before and takes photos of them and I must say many fish and all sorts of things I must say just through looking at literally the lens through which she sees the world she's sort of collating all these strange creatures and images that are very much of this world but kind of have a sort of science fiction element to them and it makes just through seeing that I can understand how she engages and why she writes the kind of work that she writes and she says that she's not writing fantasy for fantasy but this is actually organic this is coming from her so I think likewise the quote I sort of shows from her where she's talking about reading things fall apart I think it's her own engagement with the novel and it makes sense to her on those terms and she writes in that framework I think it's partly about our own experiences and what we can take from texts and how we engage with texts it doesn't mean that that should be the only reading or the primary reading but that's part of what literary criticism is it's finding new ways to engage with works and having a plurality of readings doesn't diminish other readings it just means we have a plethora available to us we can engage in different ways and we can all take from texts in different ways so it's more expanding rather than a kind of reduction or taking away from and that's how I see it the continent the genre of science fiction then we also deny the continent the future in Hegelian fashion and as Luisa said to read a novel only in the framework of the post-colonial African novel comes with a framework of concepts and themes that we apply to that novel and if we would continue to analyze African literature as we as we did the last with the literature that emerged after independence and the fashion of things fall apart then we limit ourselves to a set of concepts like the west versus Africa and the writing back fashion and to look at literature through the through the lens of science fiction also means to open up this framework that we apply for the analysis I think well said language and politics Cookie's favorite subject one could discourse on this for the rest of the day I'm sure but trying to keep it relatively short I think the political economy of language certainly as it links to education is particularly under investigated area of research and needs much more attention we've had one interesting examples of that in recent years and I think what they've pointed up is how you can have a very kind of powerful alliance of myth if you like there are certain myths I think around European languages in terms of what they can buy or gateways to success and all kinds of things and those myths and perceptions actually are still quite strong now that links if you like parents and communities to politicians in the sense that Malawi actually a neighboring country of Zambia is a good example of this in the run up to the last national elections where the government actually made a pledge to the electorate that they would bring forward the introduction of English medium education from P4 primary 4 so there had been policy of permitting local languages to be language of learning and teaching in the early years they said it's not working so we're going to bring it forward to P1 we're going to introduce it from the very beginning and from an educational perspective that's quite a disastrous decision to make because we know the very negative consequences of that and the British Association of Applied Linguistics actually wrote to the then government of Malawi requesting them to review this and withdraw it as an election pledge but I think what that points out really is there's a certain sort of short termism amongst governments and politicians and language actually even comes into play in terms of being used as a ploy to gain votes so that's something that we're very much aware of so much longer term and this is the challenge how do we focus governments on shifting from quite disastrous language in education policies to ones which are much more productive and beneficial in terms of learning outcomes and they're actually focused on pedagogic solutions rather than political and so on so I think that struggle continues but we're learning from some of the recent sort of episodes but it's as I say very I think we need a much stronger focus and a stronger lens both academic and research on that to draw out some as you say it's not purely about resources it's about the political will it's about short termism it's about sort of governments looking for votes and caching and what they see as very popular choices amongst parents but which are actually based on myth rather than any sense of reality um yeah I guess I'm trying to figure out how to answer this question because there's so many ways and so I'll do the thing I can only do best and answer it through stories of characters I remember my grandfather my mother's father you know he was employed for the first time just before independence did the cut the hair that made you feel like your hair was flowing to the side like a European and it wasn't and he did another thing he very fastidiously studied his dictionary he would sit down open that dictionary and you never met a man who knew as many English words as he did and he went very rapidly up the line at the Kenya railways which is ah who they knew each other where he worked um and that was the fashion I think of the 60s and the 70s was to speak in that kind of way to show that you were advanced and better than everybody else by speaking this and power would respond to you by promoting you and so on enter the 80s when you know Daniel Arup Mui comes in our second president and it just became a thing at national um independence days and so on he would read the official English speech with all the ambassadors and emissaries and everyone behind him and it was always about progress and the future then he would throw that thing away and he would say what was really on his mind and you know the ambassadors and the foreign missions would not have a clue that half of it was insulting them who think they and people the audiences and the crowd the state would respond to that um I think today is yet another step in that direction um in the 90s if you as a musician took your music to a national station they it would have to be English or Swahili or a certain you couldn't mix it it was as if we were schizophrenic and we didn't know who to be you know am I my dad dreaming in my local languages have I converted am I what am I you know and there was a lot of schizophrenia and in the way that power responded to to even the fact that people speak by speaking more than one language in a sentence um today for the first time you have um musicians who are stars who who sing completely in in local superstars who sing completely in local languages this was disdained and looked down on the 70s um and and and therefore you see power is responding appropriately you know the the politicians rather than feeling the need to please crowds in certain ways are able to to embrace and encourage um local language in a way that we didn't see in the decades that preceded um I don't know if that answers the question but um but I think just that trajectory has been so interesting the and the way that that um we have wielded um English either you know as a tool to to to to show power and now that is really beginning to turn especially with people in 20s and 30s and yeah in the 20s yeah yeah um if you don't mind a quick on two on both of those questions just two quick points because I was working with a lot of African writers in England in the 90s around African science fiction and Afrofuturism but in fact we put we conflict we didn't necessarily conflate them but we put them all under one term of um speculative fiction African science fiction fantasy um Afrofuturism we call what we just called it speculative fiction and when we were talking to writers about it it's like well we've always had speculative fiction it's not new so kind of applying the term even science fiction traffic and literature to say why are we looking at it differently we're not that's just again the western term of what we already had when you're talking about the old man on the streets and I look behind and he'd gone you have that in African literature all the time we don't call it science fiction it's just our story and that's and that's a simple of the way it is and that's what is interesting now that we're applying these terms to it but like Neddy doesn't everything we've kind of always always had it so it's just using different terminology for what we already had so it comes back again to that newness thing it's not new yeah in terms of the questions around um politics and um and language I must admit I'm not 100% sure what you're asking about there because for me I don't split things like politics and art to me because art art is political and I and I don't split them so I'm sorry so I didn't it was partly not 100% listening properly and partly because I don't think I can that whole thing around language and politics it's so there's such big things that and I I must admit I don't necessarily consider them as separate because I just feel that even the work in terms of what I do it's it's political on an artistic level because it just is and you know and we know that politicians just use things like language as a power thing to they can use it to divide we can use it to bring together and we just need to use it more to bring together thank you um you're going to get mad at me because I'm not going to take any more questions and the reason I'm not taking any more questions is because I think the panel after this has been moved up and I would like very much like for you to have lunch um I think it's an important part of the day um I'd like to invite you to please come up and speak to the panelists um after the panel if you have any questions that you would like to put to them specifically um otherwise yes um two things there's some leaflets up here on docuBox and we have a couple of copies of Scarred the movie that I talked about um they're on sale um please only buy it if you are going to also make a commitment to show it to your friends don't just hide it on your shelf and the reason I say this is because this is really one of the most powerful films to have come out of Kenya in the last I would say easily in the last 20 years maybe or 20 years maybe even more and I don't don't buy it and hide it on your DVD collection hide it and buy it and show it to your friends um so please come up if you're interested in any of those two things otherwise thank you so much for your attention um enjoy your lunch and uh yeah we'll see you in the afternoon