Narrative intervention and the African hyena folktale
by Elleke Boehmer
Hello: my name is Elleke Boehmer and I am writer and storyteller, and also a professor of world literature in English in Oxford.
In my research since 2009, including on the Accelerate Hub, I have explored narrative as a mode of social intervention among young people in a range of African contexts, including Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa, Kenya and Namibia. The young people all face a range of challenges, including limited access to resources, and restrictions on their hopes and expectations. Using a range of storytelling activities, a number of us involved in the Hub found that narratives provided effective ways through which the young people could speak about the situation they were facing without necessarily naming it or talking directly about themselves, which often presented them with difficulties, including of self-exposure. For one group, the Ugly Duckling story from Hans Christian Andersen allowed the young women involved to discuss some of the unwelcome bodily changes that happened with puberty and growing up. In another group, as I outline in the recorded talk, the hyena story offered a means through which young people could talk about sexual predation in their community by using a kind of code or disguise, and again avoiding self-exposure. Something I found especially striking was how stories were freely borrowed and exchanged across cultural borders. The young people did not need to draw on stories from their community alone. There’s more about our work in this Conversation article: here’s the link: https://theconversation.com/better-access-to-stories-can-improve-adolescent-lives-in-africa-140495