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The Writer as Teacher: A Comparison of the African Adventure Stories of G.A. Henty, Rene Guillot, and Barbara Kimenye

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Nancy J. Schmidt
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Extract

Adventure stories are favorites among children in many parts of the world. Africa has been the locale of hundreds of children's adventure stories written by African and non-African authors for over a century. These adventure stories, along with other fiction, are just as powerful teachers about Africa as are professional educators.

This essay will compare the adventure stories of three wellknown and popular authors (as judged by literary critics and child readers) who based their stories on extensive firsthand experience in Africa. The writers belong to three different generations, and their adventure stories are typical of those of many other writers of their time. Representing the Victorian Age is George Alfred Henty, whose name is “probably identified above all others with the Victorian adventure story” (Townsend, 1975: 63) and whose books were so popular with children that in 1894 some British teachers limited the number that students could read (Welsch, n.d.). The early twentieth century is represented by Rene Guillot, the initiator of the exotic novel for children (Jan and Patte, 1973: 360) and winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Prize of the International Board on Books for Young People—a prize which has been awarded only three times since 1958. Although Guillot wrote all of his children's books in French, almost all of them have been translated into English. Barbara Kimenye (a journalist from Uganda, short story writer, and one of East Africa's most prolific children's writers) represents the mid-twentieth century. She writes about ordinary people “who live outside the pale of ordinary society” and makes their lives interesting (Nazareth, 1974: 167).

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , September 1976 , pp. 69 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1976

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