Angifi Dladla's poetry and teaching doctrines are considered tools for consciousness raising, healing and popular education for decoloniality. Through "ku femba", an age-old practice that serves as a channel to cast away evil spells in a society bedevilled by violence, Dladla displays the relationship between man, ancestors and the…

The Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria describes children as the heritage of the society because children occupy a special place in societal survival and continuity. Children are esteemed and appreciated. Thus, the embedded culture propagates the essentiality of children, the need for proper socialisation and internalisation to make a responsible…

Adults, unlike children, have a wide variety of prior experiences and knowledge which they bring to the processes of learning they engage in at later stages of life. This difference between teaching children (pedagogy) and teaching adults was identified by Malcolm Knowles in the 1980s. He coined the term "andragogy" to describe the art…

The Oghuz Turks being in existence for many a millenia in Central Asia has a rich cultural heritage conveyed from generation to generation through oral tradition. The "Book of Dede Korkut" discovered in 1815 in Dresden Royal Library by H. F. von Diez sheds light to an important part of that culture. That precious historic literary…

Starting with the writer's own experience as a reader, this article discusses poetry by Eric Roach, Derek Walcott, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Edward Baugh, Michael Smith and Velma Pollard. It explores the sense of place felt by writer and reader, going on to analyse the poets' use of Nation Language, poetic metre and intertextuality in…

Sceptics of an Africanisation of education have often lambasted its proponents for re-inventing something that has very little, if any, role to play in contemporary African society. The contributors to this issue hold a different view and, through the papers included in this issue, arguments are proffered in defence of an Africanisation of…

A recent report by UNESCO placed Scots Gaelic on a list of 2500 endangered languages highlighting the perilous state of a key cornerstone of Scottish culture. Scottish Gaelic song, poems and stories have been carried through oral transmission for many centuries reflecting the power of indigenous peoples to preserve cultural heritage from…

Pre-colonial traditional societies in Sub-Saharan Africa were mostly oral societies whose languages were not written. In the African context, especially, it was clear that the mostly oral traditions of these societies' languages were neither being appreciated nor promoted as media of communication, or means of education by the invading Europeans.…