Quality Education in Sierra Leone and Liberia

Under the shade of the palm trees in the grounds of Rising Academy Juba, staff, students and parents sit in the late afternoon sun, transfixed by an effervescent figure in orange as he spins a yarn about a King, his daughter, and the tortoise who becomes her unlikely suitor.

The man’s name is Usifu Jalloh – aka “the Cowfoot Prince” – and he is a storyteller. Through stories, parables and music, he takes the audience on a spellbinding journey through the rich hinterland of Sierra Leone’s storytelling tradition.

It’s a tradition that is increasingly under threat from the homogenising forces of globalisation, but performers like Usifu Jalloh are helping to keep it alive and rekindle enthusiasm for the art of storytelling among a new generation.

For Rising Academies – a network of schools founded in Sierra Leone - this event gives students an opportunity to rediscover a vital part of their cultural inheritance that is in danger of being washed away.

Historically, one of the functions of storytelling was to transmit values from one generation to another. Usifu Jalloh is a master of this. For example, the moral of the story about the princess and the tortoise is the importance of grit and resilience, and knowing how to protect ourselves from the potentially negative influences in our lives. (The tortoise triumphs by managing to plough the king’s field while fending off attacks from a swarm of killer bees that do for his over-confident rivals.) For Rising Academies, an organisation which tries to put values at the heart of everything it does, making a connection to the moral threads running through these traditional stories makes obvious sense.

Finally, celebrating storytelling fits with Rising’s broader commitment to cultivating ‘oracy’ – the use of spoken language – as a skill every bit as important to life, citizenship and future employment as the ability to read and write. There are a range of ways in which Rising is trying to do this – both through a greater emphasis on purposeful student talk in lessons, and through specific opportunities for public speaking like weekly debates – but storytelling is an exciting element of this.

And the most important story Rising wants its students to be able to tell is the story of their own lives. As the Italian writer Gianni Rodari once put it, “Every possible use of words should be made available to every single person...Not because everyone should be an artist but because no one should be a slave.”