The threads of a little boy’s life are drawn together and lead to a happy ending, thanks to the wisdom of his grandfather, in this beautifully written and illustrated picture-book: Babu’s Song by Stephanie Stuve-Bodeen and illustrated by Aaron Boyd (Lee & Low, 2003). Set in contemporary Tanzania, Bernardi lives with his grandfather, Babu. They make a living from the toys which Babu makes and Bernardi sells at the market. Bernardi shares a love of soccer with the other boys his age and he wishes he could afford to go to school like they do…. and he longs for the new football he sees in a shop window.

One day Babu gives Bernardi a musical box he has made from an old tin: it plays a song that Babu used to sing to him, which makes it extra special as Babu lost his voice after an illness several years earlier:

Bernardi hugged Babu, and together they listened to the music. That night for the first time in many nights, Bernardi fell asleep listening to Babu’s song.

The following Saturday, Bernardi sells the music box to an insistent tourist and decides he will buy himself the football. However, he finds that he cannot buy it and, filled with guilt, he hands the money over to Babu. Babu leaves Bernardi for a while, then returns with three surprises: a school uniform, because he has paid the fees for Bernardi to go to school; a soccer ball he has made; and an old lard tin to make another music box.

Babu’s Song became an immediate hit in our household and, since it arrived a few months ago, we have read it many times. I’ve included it in my Personal View for our current music theme; and it is definitely one of the books Steve Adams of the Willesden Bookshop would have been referring to when he spoke to me about children’s books about Africa and India starting to reflect a modern urban setting. The illustrations here really help to get that across.

All in all, there’s plenty of food for thought and this is exactly the kind of story we need to get children thinking at an early age, even if subconsciously to start with, about the distribution of world wealth. For parents reading this book with their children, it is a wake-up call: a tourist paying, albeit generously, for a hand-made souvenir makes it possible for a child to attend school…

Little Brother read this as his African book in our Book Challenge so I’ll leave him with the last words:

There are some sad bits and some happy bits, which makes it a heart-moving story.

I have been a frequent visitor to the Willesden Bookshop’s website over the years. It’s a veritable honey-pot for anyone looking for “Children’s Books from Around the World”: they stock many books it is difficult to find elsewhere in the UK. On our last trip to London we decided to go to the actual bookshop, where we were overly tempted by the array of books, and met Steve Adams, the owner.

As its name suggests, the bookshop is situated in Willesden, in North West London, which is one of the most ethnically diverse boroughs in London with upward of 30 languages spoken in its schools. Steve talked about rising to the challenge of finding books that reflect this diversity of culture in modern Britain. As far as publishing goes in the UK, “There’s a great time lag between recognising that diversity and publishers coming out with appropriate books” – with some notable exceptions, namely Frances Lincoln, Tamarind Books and some books from a few of the big publishers like Penguin. There’s an increase in books reflecting contemporary African heritage but it is still difficult to find Asian children in a normal British setting. There are some lovely books like My Mother’s Sari but they do not often step outside the stereotypical view. However, looking out into the wider world, books are starting to appear which show modern Indian cities – and the same with Africa: not just a focus on rural life in these countries but also books showing the modern urban areas. (more…)

Jeanette Winter’s Wangari’s Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa (Harcourt Books, 2008), is featured as a new review in our current issue of PaperTigers and I very much look forward to seeing this version of Wangari Maathai’s story as I love both Jeanette Winter’s illustrations and her turn of phrase.

We have recently read instead, as part of our PaperTigers Reading the World Challenge, another version of the same true story, which also came out last year – Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai, written and illustrated by Claire A. Nivola (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). It was recommended to me by the wonderful Willesden Bookshop in London, and I’ll be blogging about my visit there soon! Like Wangari’s Trees of Peace, Planting the Trees of Kenya tells the story of Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai’s campaign to save the landscape of Kenya and, through the foundation of her Green Belt Movement, to enable people to help themselves.

It begins, just as a book aimed at a young audience should, with her childhood and progresses through her time as a student in the US, to the changes she discovered in the landscape of Kenya when she returned. My two were so engrossed that Little Brother immediately took in the disastrous implications of Wangari standing in the midst of agricultural workers, gazing at the stump, which was all that remained of her beloved, sacred fig tree. However, Wangari did not just sit down and lament. She began by (more…)