For hundreds of years, Africans have preserved their history through storytelling. But, some Africans worry that oral traditions will be lost to Internet connections and social media.
This has led one Nigerian woman to create a mobile phone application, or app, as a way to preserve African folk stories. Elizabeth Kperrun is a businesswoman and fashion designer. She calls her mobile app AfroTalez. The AfroTalez app tells children’s stories that teach moral lessons. Ms. Kperrun says she wanted to create the app to preserve some of the stories told to her when she was a child in Nigeria. “Sometimes you can’t teach a child something by telling the child, ‘Don’t do this’. In fact, I think it gave me context. In a story somebody stole something and then something bad happened to them. Alternatively, somebody else did something good and they ended up really happy or really rich.”
AfroTalez is designed for children ages 2 to 10. The voice of “Aunt Liz” narrates the story, while a full-screen animation appears. An arrow signals when it is time to move on. There are also quizzes on object recognition and counting throughout.
Elizabeth Kperrun says she learned life lessons from the folk stories she heard as a child, a tradition she says should be kept alive. Kperrun spoke to her older relatives to help collect stories for the application. The stories come from an ethnic group of about four million people called the Tiv who live in southeast Nigeria and northwest Cameroon.
AfroTalez is available for Android users and can be downloaded for free in the Google Play store. So far, AfroTalez has more than 50,000 users.
Ms. Kperrun says technology does not have to destroy or replace traditions. She says her goal is to combine both new technology and old traditions to keep African culture alive. “Africa is our home. I think we are so in a rush to become Western that we are forgetting things that are really important, things that should be passed on of who we are, and I don’t think that’s right.”
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