Fiction can teach about Africa, speaker says

Fiction can take us as far away as the magical corridors of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, or as close as the sidewalks of Commonwealth Avenue.

One man, Thomas Kilduff, argued Monday that instead of being dismissed as pure entertainment, some novels have an important place in teaching history.

Kilduff, a freelance travel journalist, presented a teaching template titled “Missionaries, Snakes and Survivors: Inviting Young People to Africa with “The Poisonwood Bible'” to a crowd of 22 students at Boston University’s African Studies Center Monday.

Kilduff proposed teaching high school and college undergraduate students about the Democratic Republic of the Congo through Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, “The Poisonwood Bible,” filling a void he sees in the media.

“In journalism, Africa is covered so little,” he said. “Only National Geographic will talk about it routinely, but in general, the American media doesn’t cover it that much unless there’s a catastrophe.”

Kingsolver’s novel tells the fictional tale of the Price family, composed of narrow-minded evangelical Baptist minister Nathan Price, his wife and their four daughters, who move from Georgia to what was then the Belgian Congo in 1959.

The story follows the women’s accounts of their lives within the heart of Africa, especially presenting their frequent ignorance of Congolese culture.

He suggested Kingsolver’s novel has become a landmark in understanding post-colonial Africa, measuring it against Nigerian author Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart,” traditionally considered the staple of post-colonial African literature.

“Although it was published in 1999, “The Poisonwood Bible’ could replace “Things Fall Apart’ as the “it’ novel of post-colonial Africa,” he said.

Kilduff stressed the importance of giving students a sense of time and place in order to develop their reading and writing skills.

“This book provides such a template for writing opportunities,” he said. “Hopefully they’ll come away with a greater understanding of Africa and the DRC.”

Kilduff addressed the greater political implications of the novel, specifically by discussing the story’s setting’s very name.

“It’s a master-narrative: he who names gets to control,” he said.”The Congo gets renamed eight times throughout the novel. It’s so political, naming and re-naming. I remember when I was a kid and the Soviet Union collapsed, and all of a sudden there were all these countries like Latvia and Lithuania that hadn’t been named on the map before.”

Cedony Allen, a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student, said she particularly liked that Kilduff used literature to approach the history of Africa.

“I’m usually here [at the Center], and I thought this particular presentation was interesting because we don’t usually talk about novels,” she said. “It’s refreshing to understand Africa through a different lens. Books and movies provide a different way of looking at it, so it was refreshing to look at this subject in another way besides our normally structured lens.”

Likewise, Eric Miller, a 2006 College of Arts and Sciences alumnus, said the presentation made Africa’s culture and history seem more accessible than some academic historical writing.

“Too often, the African Center presents Africa in a distant and cold manner, using sterile terms without a human touch,” he said. “It’s a big problem, trying to get across in a more human way. A book makes it tangible.”