Mohalenyane Phakela
LITERATURE organisation, Ba re e ne re, recently made a presentation on the history of Lesotho’s literature at the Intertwining Hi/Stories Arts Education Festival workshops which took place in Vienna, Austria.
Lineo Segoete, the organisation, made the presentation at the workshops from 2 to 7 October.
Segoete narrated Lesotho’s literary history from the time of Evangelical Church Missionaries’ arrival in Lesotho in the nineteenth century.
The festival is an initiative which brings overlapping stories of arts and education from different parts of the world, to challenge the seemingly entrenched European and Western narratives of art and education.
The festival invites teachers, museum and gallery educators, art students, researchers, social workers, critical thinkers and artistes to engage in storytelling sessions in workshops.
Segoete this week told the Weekender that she was invited “because of the work Ba re e ne re has been doing”.
“The experience was fulfilling and mind blowing. I am an advocate of research, especially on matters of history and culture, so it was easy to find topics and develop them into presentations. The ultimate aim of the workshops I organised and facilitated was to develop learning units that can be used by educators of arts and culture.”
She said at the festival they sought to understand the contributory factors to the challenges facing to critical literacy development in Lesotho.
“We sought to understand which events in history led to the current state of storytelling and writing in Lesotho. The second part was about introducing practice-based techniques to remedy the challenges we have in Lesotho, especially in schools, while also teaching outside Lesotho about who we are outside of what Google tells them,” Segoete said.
