In May Afrikult. worked with a group of year 7 pupils at Addey and Stanhope School in Deptford. We took them through our ‘Poetry, Performance and African Languages’ workshop over 2 sessions, and supported them to write a creative piece in response to what they learned during the workshops.
Addey and Stanhope has participated in Africa Writes Young Voices programme for the last two years, so it was really exciting for us to be working with them this year. They even had a library dedicated to Africa Writes and African writers!
Something that really struck the pupils was learning about just how linguistically diverse Africa actually is. For us as facilitators it is always satisfying knowing that our participants go away with new information they had no idea about, and that encourages them to want to learn more amazing facts about Africa. During this workshop we also challenge pupils to think beyond the realms of literature that is written in books in English by introducing them to oral literature, and the fact that oral literature is the most common form of literature in Africa.
The creative writing topics picked by our participants ranged from poems about family, to speeches championing school and education for young people. This group of participants really engaged with quite a lot of content and were able to think about what they care about and why. Some of those writing poetry pieces even took it a step further by embellishing their pieces with structured rhyme!
This is now the third year that Afrikult. has been involved in Africa Writes Young Voices programme and each time we work with a different group of young people we get different responses. Something that remains the same though is that young people have so much to say and fresh perspectives to offer when they are given the chance.