In front of a large map of continental Africa, Olayinka Olagbegi-Adegbite lifts her hands, pauses, and then begins tapping a quick-paced beat on a West African djembe drum decorated with beads and macrame strings.<\/p>\n
\u201cGet up, dance and join me!\u201d she urges the kids surrounding her at the Children\u2019s African Story Hour in Pinney Library on Dec. 8. She takes a brief break from drumming to hand out maracas and shakers. The children shake the instruments as they jump and dance, filling the room with a cacophony of mixed beats and animated giggles.<\/p>\n
\u201cOkay, friends,\u201d Olagbegi-Adegbite says as the children\u2019s beats quiet. \u201cDo you know where we are traveling today!?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEgypt!\u201d answers one excited child.<\/p>\n
The child\u2019s answer is correct. Guest storyteller Safi Soliman, who is from Cairo, is reading Zamzam, written by Karen Leggett Abouraya and illustrated by Susan L. Roth, which tells the story of a young boy who travels between Alexandria, Egypt and New York City to visit both sides of his extended family.<\/p>\n
Children\u2019s African Story Hour is a free event that aims to teach elementary-aged children about countries and cultures on the African continent. The monthly event at Pinney Library spotlights one of Africa\u2019s 54 countries, with a storyteller from the country reading a children\u2019s book that takes place in, or is about, the chosen country. Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Morocco and Malawi have all been featured.<\/p>\n
Zamzam, the title character in the book Soliman is reading, uses English to describe his life in New York and beginner-friendly Arabic to describe his time in Alexandria (like \u201cgedetti\u201d for grandma). Nora, Soliman\u2019s eight-year-old daughter, knows the English-Arabic translations and shares them with the other children as they listen to the story.<\/p>\n
Olagbegi-Adegbite tells me it\u2019s important for children to understand that Africa is not a singular place. Rather, it\u2019s a vast continent with more than 50 countries, including 12 cities with populations over five million, thousands of ethnic and cultural groups, and where 1,500 to 3,000 languages are spoken.<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody says \u2018I\u2019m traveling to North America,\u2019 when they mean the United States, Canada or Mexico,\u201d says Olagbegi-Adegbite, who is from Lagos, Nigeria. \u201cAfrica is a concept, not a place. People should distinguish which country they are speaking about.\u201d<\/p>\n
Olagbegi-Adegbite is the assistant director of UW-Madison\u2019s African Studies Program, established in 1961, and its outreach manager. She started Children\u2019s African Story Hour in 2022, inspired by a now-defunct program called African Storytelling on Wheels, which she participated in as a student at UW-Madison.<\/p>\n
The African Studies Program partners with the African Center for Community Development, the Madison Public Library and University Apartments to present Children\u2019s African Story Hour.<\/p>\n
During the reading, Zamzam rides a camel, and one young girl in the audience cracks a joke: \u201cWhat do you call a camel with three humps?…pregnant!\u201d A grandmother from Sudan, who brought her granddaughter to the story hour, laughs heartily at that.<\/p>\n
Soliman takes breaks while reading to share facts about Egypt, which Olagbegi-Adegbite says is why she invites storytellers from the spotlighted country \u2014 so they can offer cultural knowledge and share lived experiences.<\/p>\n
\u201cDid you know that in Arabic, the official language of Egypt, words are read from right to left?\u201d Soliman asks. And, \u201cDid you know that Egyptians invented early forms of paper by pressing papyrus leaves?\u201d<\/p>\n
After Soliman finishes reading Zamzam, she shows the children Egyptian items she brought with her, including model pyramids, a traditional Egyptian coffee kettle (called a dallah), and bookmarks decorated with hieroglyphs, which she passes out for the kids to take home.<\/p>\n
While snacking on koshari, a popular Egyptian dish made with chickpeas, fried onions, tomato sauce, rice, lentils and pasta, the children recreate Egyptian hieroglyphs with crayons.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u201cChildren\u2019s African Story Hour makes people more aware,\u201d says Olagbegi-Adegbite, as the children and their caregivers file out of the room at the end of the hour. \u201cIt creates an awareness that there is a place called Nigeria, that there is a place called Egypt, and that those places are beautiful and exciting.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
23 million:\u00a0Population of Cairo, Egypt<\/p>\n
1:\u00a0New story hour location. <\/p>\n
Starting Jan. 13, Eagle Heights Community Center, every Tuesday<\/p>\n
1.5+ billion:\u00a0People living on the African continent<\/p>\n
2:\u00a0African countries that are disputed territories (Somaliland and Western Sahara)<\/p>\n
10:\u00a0Children at the Children\u2019s African Story Hour on Dec. 8<\/p>\n
64:\u00a0Number of years UW-Madison has had an African Studies Program<\/p>\n
2025:\u00a0Year that Zamzam was awarded \u201cBest Picture Book\u201d by Children\u2019s Africana Book Awards<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In front of a large map of continental Africa, Olayinka Olagbegi-Adegbite lifts her hands, pauses, and then begins…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23568,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[63,1749,14480,1980],"class_list":{"0":"post-23567","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-africa","8":"tag-africa","9":"tag-african","10":"tag-lauren-hafeman","11":"tag-story"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23567\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}