The South African government and proffessions are taking stock of the transforamtion of the last decade. Manucipalities still face serious problems such as urbun populattion growth, poverty, housing shortages environmental and health problems.
This study examines if public libraries in a province in South Africa are ready to assume an
enhanced responsibility for information literacy education, specifically that of students, and, if so,
what inhibiting and facilitating factors might exist. The public libraries in the rural province of
Mpumalanga provide the case site. “Readiness”, at one level, refers to physical capacity and, on a
second level, to more subjective attributes such as staff attitudes and beliefs. The paper reports on
the first phase of the study – in which both quantitative and qualitative data were gathered by
means of a questionnaire/interview survey of 57 public librarians in 46 sites. The study finds that
Mpumalanga public libraries are indeed heavily engaged in serving school learners. Shortcomings
in certain physical facilities, such as the lack of space and absence of retrieval tools, are inhibiting
factors with the heritage of apartheid still impacting on the availability of and quality of service.
The low level of professional education of public library staff is found to impede innovation in
library programming. The prevailing information literacy education model largely comprises oneto-
one support, although there is a fair amount of source-based group library orientation. Moving
towards information literacy education will depend on a shift in conceptions of the educational
role of public libraries. In the absence of recognition of their curricular role by public library
authorities and educators, many public librarians are not sure that their services to school learners
are legitimate. There is, however, dawning recognition that present approaches are not meeting
the needs of school learners and that more effective communication with educators is required.
This recognition comes from public librarians’ frustrating encounters with learners rather than
from insight into information literacy education theory and experience. The fundamental conclusion
is that sustainable information literacy education in public libraries will depend on more
dynamic leadership and on a vision of a new model of public library.
This article compares the representation of African borders in the 14th-century
travelogue of Ibn Battuta, the 19th-century travel narrative of Richard Burton and the
21st-century travel writing of Paul Theroux. It examines the mutually constitutive
relationship between conceptions of literal territorial boundaries and the figurative
boundaries of the subject that ventures across borders in Africa. The border is seen as
a liminal zone which paradoxically separates and joins spaces. Accounts of border
crossings in travel writing from different periods suggest the historicity and cultural
specificity of conceptions of geographical borders, and the way they index the “boundaries”
of the subjects who cross them. Tracing the transformations in these conceptions
of literal and metaphorical borders allows one to chart the emergence of the dominant
contemporary idea of “Africa” as the inscrutable, savage continent.
The scarification in Aké is invested with major significance apropos Soyinka’s ideas on African
subjectivity. Scarification among the Yoruba is one of the rites of passage associated with personal
development. Scarification literally and metaphorically “opens” the person up socially and cosmically.
Personal formation and self-realization are enabled by the Yoruba social code brought into being
by its mythology. The meaning of the scarification incident in Aké is profoundly different. Determined
by the form of autobiography which creates a self-constituting subject, the enabling Yoruba sociocultural
context is elided. The story of Soyinka’s personal development is allegorical of the story
of the development of the modern African subject. For Soyinka, the African subject is a rational
subject whose constitution precludes the splitting of the scientific and spiritual which is a consequence
of the Cartesian rupture. The African subject should be open to other subjects and the object
world. Subjectivity constituted by the autobiographical mode closes off the opening up symbolically
signalled by scarification.
Moolla, Fiona F.(Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012)
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Abstract:
The article discusses Somali literature, with particular focus given to the influence of Somali oral poetry and folk tales on modern novels. The difference between the concepts of orature and oral literature is examined, and the history of print and oral literary culture coexisting in Somalia is commented on.