This past week the librarians started reading and discussing Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor. Here’s some of their summary of the first part of the novel:
At long last after some strange and dreadful scenes and happenings noticed by Sunny; Sunny, Chichi and Orlu finally arrived at Anatov’s abode. Anatov after interacting with Orlu and Chichi took Sunny through some initiation rituals into the Leopard People (Leopard people are persons with magical powers or mystical true ability). Anatov drew a circle around Sunny with powder, and then traced a symbol in the air with his knife. Sunny was sore afraid at that moment. For a moment, Sunny was terrified. The serial killer called Black Hat Otokoto has been killing children, which was Sunny thoughts at that moment during the ritual performance by Anatov. Anatov charged Orlu and Chichi with Sasha to continue to take care of Sunny by way of teaching her the rest of all that she needs to know about the Leopard people and returned in four nights time, twelve midnight sharp with her. Sunny was told she has been initiated as a free agent into the Leopard people and fortunate on her part her spirit was in that line of a leopard person. Sunny purse was surprisingly heavy with chittim (currency of the leopard people) a sign of the rituals initiation at work.
And some comments on reading the novel:
Our thoughts on the novel so far, the novel appears a little bit easier to understand than the previous two novels we read, is full of news words. We learnt about the meaning and spelling of some words that in fact we are seeing for the first time. Words like; scrawny, flickering, puffy, blabbing, hazel and many others. We are hopeful by the time we finish reading the novel we would have learnt more words than we have seen and learnt so far. The novel so far is getting more interesting and we are continuing the reading in our quest to know after the initiations into the leopard people family, Sunny’s exploits. More reports on our further discussions will follow soon!
The library in Boni has been closed for almost a year now. The office of the mayor (the local rural council) had been unable to agree over how to supervise and pay the librarian. The cost is rather small, about $1,500 per year, but some local governments are unwilling to allocate any amount to support their local libraries. They justify this refusal in a variety of ways: they claim they are not allowed, legally, to hire a librarians; they have no extra budget for a library; they have no ability to supervise a librarian; the librarian is too old. The list of excuses goes on, and sometimes is incoherent. The team often gets a sense that the mayor and his staff are negotiating with us: “We know that you, FAVL, want the library open, so how much are you willing to pay us to get us to approve opening it?” We do not play that game.
Dans le cadre de la promotion de la lecture, le C.M.H dont le rôle essentiel est de produire et éditer des œuvres locales et éducatives pour les tout petits, a repris avec beaucoup de détermination ses activités qui ne sont pas moins négligeables. Qui dit lecture, doit d’abord parler d’écriture : les deux sont indissociables, car la culture de la lecture passe nécessairement par celle de l’écriture. Dans cette veine, Sieni Dieudonné, un de nos assistant program officer s’évertue depuis maintenant deux mois à imaginer une série de thèmes éducatifs qu’il a écrits à l’adresse cette frange jeune constituant le potentiel de lecteurs par excellence. Il vous présente ici un échantillon de ce qu’il a déjà fait et qu’il compte poursuivre les semaines à venir.
