I don’t need a hypnotist to remember my first memory as a child. It was in my grandmother’s bedroom, and I was sitting on my great-grandmother, Abiye’s, lap- she was feeding me bread soaked in sweet tea. Abiye was listening to my grandmother, who was reading her prayer book aloud for her mother’s benefit. The prayer book is the same one my grandmother read every morning until she passed – St Mary’s Prayer at Golgotha. 

It is customary in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, during those three-to-four-hour long masses, for the elderly to bring along the prayer book of their favourite saints and to ask the younger ones to read it aloud for them. It is almost a rite of passage if you are of the faith, and your reading skills might earn you a reputation. It could be that older people never learned how to read, and they carry around the little books for protection. Or it could just be that their eyesight has gone weak. So, I don’t know if my great grandmother ever learned to read.

I am away from home for a few weeks, and having run out of books faster than I planned, I have been looking for somewhere to get new ones. I discovered to my sadness that in this particular town in Kenya, there are no bookshops. It is a tourist town- but it is a town where over 1,2 million people live and raise over 400,000 children. Instead of dedicated stores, books are found on a small shelf in two of the medium-sized supermarkets that exist here.

The books in both supermarkets must have been procured by the same supplier, because all you find there are some of those evangelist sects’ inspired so-called “self-development” books on how to be rich or a superstar in five days, etc. These titles have infested the continent’s airport bookshops and streets. Then you have biographies of absolutely nobodies recounting trauma. Why….and how are these parasitic goods supplied to the continent? As for children’s books, there are those colouring or basic mathematics books that some bored housewife in the US wrote, and that is it.

So, I have been canvassing hotels and residences for anything that travellers may have left behind. I found at least four guidebooks on Kenya, which is good because I did not have one of my own. And then, gem of gems, I stumbled upon two Roald Dahl books for children!  First of all, terrible of me not to have known he was the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I always thought was just a movie. I had last year, incidentally, also in Kenya, watched Wes Anderson’s magnificent adaptations of four Roald Dahl short stories on Netflix, but had forgotten my plans to read more of his work.

So what a pleasure it was to be transported for a few days in the fantastical Willy Wonka factory and his Oompa-Loompas and to follow a grandmother and her grandson on their hunt for child-hating witches! Many of us adults would benefit from reading Roald Dahl- so many subtleties and lessons on how to raise good humans and how to help your children dream.

Roald Dahl himself abandoned the somewhat fruitless effort of writing for grown-ups and, thanks to his children, and in the wonderful company of his fellow co-dreamer, the illustrator Quentin Blake, ventured into children’s books. He says of his young public that it is a “difficult one to please” because they need constant and uninterrupted hooking and suspense. Children always want to know what happened next and why, why, why. Roald also said that in order to write for children with any likelihood of success, adults must reconnect and preferably never lose the child within themselves.

How Roald kept his capacity to dream like a child, given that he was orphaned and raised in various foster homes, is itself thanks to stories and books. He refers to these experiences in simple terms as “some funny, some sad, some disappointing, all of which I remember vividly”. He then made light of them in two other books, “Me, boy” and “Squadron 80”, which are both only loosely autobiographical, as he says, “I would never ever have the presumptuousness/arrogance of writing a biography!”.

I have had a modest but, especially in hindsight, an extremely privileged upbringing. We had access to a wonderful library in school, and my very first books were the “J’aime Lire” and “Club des Cinq” series, which my father and I cherished reading in bed before going to school. It amazes and perplexes me that I can cite many of the global references- Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan, Paddington, Garfield and his Mondays, and even Frankenstein, as hard it is to imagine that the latter was originally intended for children.

Every culture has or must have Roald Dahl-type storytellers and fantasists who help children dream. In many African countries, stories and traditions are transmitted orally. It is also very likely that these are well-travelled stories coming all the way from the mystical Far and Middle East or even farther. One of my personal favourites is Sheik Nesreddin and his many hilarious adventures.

We are also very grateful in Ethiopia for whoever translated, even partially, A Thousand and One Nights. Kebede Michael also translated many of La Fontaine’s fables, which for years were the only Amharic language reading available to children all over the country. From our own oral traditions, we cannot go without citing Aleqa Gebrehana (Aleqa is an Ethiopian Orthodox Church title and hierarchy).

Life was much simpler for the children of my generation. There was only one TV station, which broadcast for only 5 hours on weekdays and a bit more on weekends. There was only one children’s program broadcast for one hour late afternoon on Sundays and on repeat either Tuesday or Thursday. It always began with a story narrated by actor Tesfaye Sahlu, whom we called Ababa Tesfaye- may he rest in peace. If you did not have a TV at home, you went to the neighbour’s house to watch him. For years, every child in every main town in the country grew up thinking he could see us through the TV and the stories were stuff he actually lived.(May he rest in peace, and may God forgive Ethiopians for the way he was treated in his old age).

Emperor Haile Sellassie, and later, Mengistu Hailemariam, invited circus, music, and theatre groups from other countries, and for about four or five decades until mid-2000, the Addis Ababa Children and Youth Theatre was a popular destination. Many of the children’s programmes that we saw in the later years in the newly created private TV stations were designed or hosted by actors who started in that theatre. One can also find some books which are said to be for children, and shops dedicated to children’s books. I have checked out some of the books and TV programmes when a few years ago I had this totally misguided idea of writing children’s books. Like most entertainment content in the country, over the past three decades, they too were infected by the fragmented and polarized political climate. So perhaps, one wonders if Ethiopian children are better off without books and stories and TV programmes these days.

I also understand that storytelling and book reading are dying- and worryingly so- trend all over the world. Parents are more likely to just turn on some screen and leave it at that. A recent UK study lamented that “Gen Z” parents do not read to their children at night because many of them found it to be “a boring exercise”. At the same time, we hear that Silicon Valley parents actually raise screen free children and many countries are moving to ban at least phones from schools. Some private schools frequented by the ultra-rich are also tech-free and, returning to old-school, with books and mud bricks.

I wonder then what kind of idiots we have to be, to feel pride that our toddlers are good at manipulating screens and content that the inventors and creators themselves do not want for their own kids. As far as Ethiopia goes, this problem primarily concerns children growing up in urban areas.

For the rest of the country, the problem is school enrolment- UNICEF labels the situation as “an education crisis” and estimates the number of school age children not enrolled due to displacement, war, natural disasters, food shortage, unpaid school personnel salaries and even as a result of COVID 19 to be well over 15 million and it is not showing sign of decreasing. This is nearly 30% of the nation’s school age children. At continental level, conflicts and just plain bad quality education, have significantly reduced and wiped-out basic literacy levels by up to 50% on average with numbers in countries like Mali, Niger, Chad, South Sudan and DRC reaching well over that.  

Not many capitals in Africa have bookstores or there would only be one in the entire country. It is easier, in fact, to count the countries that do have bookstores. There are also no bookstores (or supermarkets) to be found in Ethiopia outside the capital, and maybe two or three regional cities. Schools have either no libraries or very poorly equipped ones. In the capital itself, books were sold or loaned in a few specific neighbourhoods, or thanks to young street vendors who went around neighbourhoods. Today, these young street vendors are banned and harassed by government security along with other street vendors who supposedly “make the city dirty”.

There will, of course, be consequences for the way the country and the continent have, deliberately or unconsciously, neglected its children and their education. Under these circumstances, discussions about children’s books and where they get their learning from seem out of touch. The question of how books are written and published in Africa is also an issue that merits an entire investigation of its own. But it also makes every book by an African who has not had exposure outside the continent, regardless of its quality or content, an absolute miracle that it exists at all.

So, in the meantime, we should just keep our children away from screens, tell them as many stories as possible, and expose them to these books that have come to us by miracle, even prayer books.