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Showing posts from March, 2015

Appropriating THINGS FALL APART in the Sierra Leonean classroom

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Chinua Achebe's first novel Things Fall Apart  is one of the most widely read books in African literature. To mark the second anniversary of his death, language and literature professor Sheikh U. Kamarah takes a look at Achebe's classic in the Sierra Leonean classroom. One of the world’s greatest works of literature in English, Things Fall Apart , has been, and continues to be appropriated by different communities around the world. In West Africa in particular, where the “world” of Things Fall Apart is very similar to the “worlds” of the various communities, it has been easier to appropriate the late Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece. In Sierra Leone, Things Fall Apart has been one of, if not the most popular novel; one that almost every educated person either would have read or heard about. In teaching this novel, many teachers in Sierra Leone have invariably relied on the Sierra Leonean culture or aspects of the Sierra Leonean culture akin to aspects of the culture of th

From the Bo School Years

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Luseni Dassama's "Self-Preservation: Beginnings of an eternal conflict" was first published on his Facebook wall April 9, 2010. The story is an excerpt from a chapter in his autobiography Bo School Years , which spotlights a teenage boy's introduction to an adult world of traditional gender roles and beliefs. February 1984 The Bo School "You ask me to help you?! Man is evil, capable of nothing but destruction!” W e were all repeating this line and laughing as the movie came to an end. Some of us had seen “Beneath the Planet of The Apes” a few times, but we never tired of it. This was a special Friday evening screening arranged by our French teacher. Apparently the original “Planet of The Apes” was written by a French writer and our teacher was keen for us to delve beyond the surface of the film and understand the subtext, context or whatever it was that he kept going on about. “It is an example of social commentary through the use of dystopia,