Little Books for Little Hands: A Stories Across Africa Project

Few young African children have much opportunity to discover the joy of becoming absorbed in a book, either before or during school. In fact most children in Africa are expected to develop their languages and literacies from early childhood onward in environments totally inconducive to learning: among other things, the inspiration and power of stories in picture books in the eleven official South African languages (including English), is absent. The creation and production of a pan African set of Little Hands books by the Stories Across Africa (StAAf)¹ project is an attempt to help change this situation.

The books cover a range of themes intended to attract the attention of young children up to about six years of age. Some focus on early language development and concepts, such as the senses, animal sounds, comparisons, color, and number, while others are complete little stories. All are meant to stimulate and habituate reading for enjoyment in the mother tongue as well as other languages relevant to children in Africa. At the heart of the initiative is collaboration between individuals and groups working to enable a “culture of reading” in all of the five regions of Africa. To this end, a steering committee made up of individuals from Egypt, Ghana, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania, and South Africa have the task of stimulating regional involvement as well as creating contacts in the Diaspora.²

Publishing and Distribution

Creativity and skill in layout and design for multilingual texts is essential in a project of this nature. With Little Hands, a textless art template is first created for each book; the English language version then gets designed and set. After the English language version is set, each language is overlaid onto the art template. There is a constant layout and typesetting challenge for the graphic designer because of the varying lengths of translations in different language versions.³ It is difficult for a person who doesn’t know many or all of the languages she is working with (as is the likely present day scenario for most graphic designers) to deal with many different languages simultaneously—and mistakes easily happen. For this reason, sufficient time needs to be given for several sets of page proofs to be checked by language specialists in each language before going to print.

A practical challenge relating to making a set of sixteen very small books is how to present and package them. The first Little Hands books were produced by the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA) in 2002. We were told then that bookshops and libraries were reluctant to house them because they were so small. “The books will walk!” said the librarians. Much thought thus went into discovering an economical and environmentally appropriate way to package the books for easy distribution, and positive reception in communities, libraries, or bookshops. The solution was a well-designed and attractive box to contain the books, display the language and give a brief description of the project. We decided to put the front covers of all the stories on the box, with the list of titles to encourage young readers to match the cover and title with the book inside. The decision was taken to remove all text from the covers of each book for the box, so that the dropping in of text in any language would be made as simple as possible.

To further the aim of supporting the capacity of African publishers, co-publications with African publishers are being brokered by StAAf and by the South African publisher, New Africa Books. The intention is that participating publishers collaborate on a large print run, made up of several languages, thus benefiting from the low unit cost per set of books. They are then able to sell their books for profit. New Africa Books is presently discussing co-publications with several African publishers, including Bakame Publishing House (Rwanda), Shama Books (Ethiopia), and La Sahelienne (Mali). Future print runs of the books will include a royalty agreement between StAAf, who holds copyright of the books and the publisher(s). Any StAAf...