SAWUBONA: I SEE YOU

AFRICAN STORIES FOR ALL AGES

by Mary Ball Howkins


Formats

Hardcover
$39.99
Softcover
$16.99
Hardcover
$39.99

Book Details

Language : English
Publication Date : 1/20/2025

Format : Hardcover
Dimensions : 6x9
Page Count : 164
ISBN : 9781665767101
Format : Softcover
Dimensions : 6x9
Page Count : 164
ISBN : 9781665767088

About the Book

In Nigeria, a perceptive boy understands how back-punishing women’s work is in sweeping inside and outside a village hut with a short-handled broom of natural fiber. Sympathetically, he builds a long-handled version for his mother and grandmother, opposing the group’s fierce clinging to an absence of support for local women. In Cape Town, South Africa, a girl dresses like a boy to be safe from unwanted male attention while fetching water for her household during a city-wide, politically driven drought. In Zimbabwe, a girl and her younger siblings escape a marriage secretly designed to undermine their fragile family unit. Forced marriages resulting from a family’s hardship can cause multiple disasters for a native female child. In another story, a Maasai boy builds a device to prevent lions from killing family livestock. This story, although fictionalized, mirrors the efforts of an eleven-years-old Maasai boy, Richard Turere, in Kenya. All narratives in this collection are fictional, yet grow out of today’s real circumstances. The narratives seek to educate readers about ways in which these children can overcome cultural obstacles. In living with a six-month-old warthog and vervet monkey, to her pleasure and occasional dismay, the author learned about conservation issues surrounding humans and orphaned animals. The two aggressive youngsters have been woven into two stories highlighting some consequences.


About the Author

Mary Ball Howkins is an animal whisperer who has worked on behalf of elephants in Namibia, lions in Zimbabwe, cheetahs, lions, and painted dogs in South Africa. After teaching African children in both an orphanage and wildlife preserve, she joined her knowledge of wildlife with challenges native children encounter in stories.