The Child in the Story: Depicting the Child in Selected Works of Gambian Authors

Abstract

Issues affecting the common people or related to marginal lives constitute the greater part of the novellas and novels published in The Gambia. Several authors use the child as a hero and with the child, built themes around the school, travel, adventure, crime, city life, sexuality, and several other issues. Other themes touch on politics and socio-cultural issues. Many youths of colonial and post-independent Gambia would remember the didactic tales in the Aesop’s fables, the tales of Charles Perrault, the Fontaine tales, and other works of children literature. These are stories that consciously emphasizes role-model qualities to the intended child-reader. The coming of western education to West Africa and particularly to The Gambia brought with it the tales of the colonizers. Books such as the works of Charles Dickens (David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist), Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the Adventures of Tow Sawyer) have been used for decades in the African schools. However, the socio-cultural realities of the African child were never captured in those tales. In this article, we intend to give an overview on how the child is depicted in the works of a selected works of Gambian writers. The school story, either set within or around the school, remained a dominant theme in the early works of Gambian writers, particularly in the early 20th Century. It is an environment where most children grow and develop and it is an appropriate setting where authors explore issues such as rural-urban migration, the education of the girl child, early marriage, and early pregnancy, as well as social-cultural practices such as female genital mutilation and violence against women, among others.