EXPOSE Alumna Delivers Books to Arusha’s Children

By Brooke Ortel Writer

In February 2020, NOLS grad and Advisory Council volunteer Wandi Steward went to Tanzania to climb a mountain. She came back determined to deliver culturally appropriate storybooks to the children of Tanzania.

While she didn’t know it at the time, this was the beginning of the Afrikan Baby Book Project, also known as the Black Baby Book Project or Arusha Literacy Project.

What started with bringing a few school supplies to the children she met during a trip to Arusha soon became an international adventure involving Afrikan authors and publishers, virtual book drives, a California-based Rotary Club, and lots of suitcases filled with children’s books.

On that initial expedition, Wandi began a climb up Mount Kilimanjaro with a group of fellow Outdoor Afro leaders. Unfortunately, a nasty bout of food poisoning sent her back down the mountain after the first day. After months of preparation, her dreams of reaching the summit were dashed.

But the trip wasn’t ruined–not a bit. “It was lemons to lemonade,” she explains. “I was in Arusha by myself and I wasn’t going to sit there and cry about it. I went out and got to know people in the community. It was awesome to connect with folks.” She also made some observations. First: the people she met were incredibly welcoming hosts. Second, the children needed school supplies.

Six months later, Wandi returned to Arusha. This time her mission had nothing to do with Kilimanjaro–she was back to visit friends. She brought along some crayons and other basic school supplies for a local children’s home. “The response of the kids was phenomenal,” she remembers, “It was like I’d given them gold.”

But as she sang songs and played games with the children, Wandi noticed something else. There was a troubling disconnect between the material in their storybooks and their daily lives. Here, in this Tanzanian village, children were learning to read using Dick and Jane books from the ’60s. “A lot of their reading material was simply culturally inappropriate.”

This is a symptom of well-intentioned but misguided attempts to combat the ongoing book famine in Afrika. Twenty-foot shipping containers stuffed with decommissioned library books from donors in affluent countries are transported to Afrikan with the intention of promoting literacy. But, for children in rural villages, these storybooks depict an alien lifestyle. The characters and storylines are completely unrelatable. Meanwhile, local authors and publishers struggle to compete with the flood of free books.

What is it doing to their minds? Wandi wondered. “If you’re in a tiny agrarian village reading about little Robbie riding the subway, how do you relate to that?” A classic alphabet book beginning with, “A is for apple, B is for bat or bear…” would be completely unrelatable. Where would the children find an apple? And why not “B for banana” instead? “Bananas are everywhere, baseball bats and bears are nowhere.”

She tried to think like a child, she recalls. “I would not be interested in reading if I could not relate something about it to real life. That becomes a barrier to literacy. Part of becoming literate is having the curiosity to read.”

Wandi also points out that “these books are about non-Afrikans, non-People-of-Color, all displaying some sort of material wealth.” What this ultimately translates to is “the genesis of braindrain. Starting when they are young, these children are being taught that material success and happiness and knowledge is outside Afrika. None of the reading material in their school affirms who they are or celebrates their amazing environment.”

Fueled by this new awareness, Wandi set out in search of culturally appropriate reading material for her young friends in Arusha. She contacted Kulthum Maabad, an Afrikan author who had recently written Afrikan Heroes, an illustrated children’s book featuring Nelson and Winnie Mandela, Patrice Lumumba, Paul Kagame, Desmond Tutu, and other Afrikan leaders. It was just the kind of book Wandi was looking for.

She personally purchased Kulthum’s entire inventory, nine books at the time. The author hand-delivered all nine copies of Afrikan Heroes to the tiny schoolhouse in Arusha.

But the project was no longer a “one and done” operation. Soon the Whittier Sunrise Rotary Club was busily raising funds to support Wandi’s efforts, donating funds to purchase 200 copies of Afrikan Heroes, which were delivered to 14 children’s homes in time for Christmas 2020.

The next year, Wandi found herself delivering 1,400 books to children in Arusha and Kigali. “Children literally lined up to get the books. Experiencing that kind of response was amazing—watching children just hugging books is phenomenal to me.”

In 2022, the Afrikan Baby Book Project partnered with the World Space Foundation and attained nonprofit status as a 501(c)(3) organization. Wandi has also organized live and virtual book drives in which donors can fund the purchase of a variety of Afrikan-authored children’s books.

Going forward, Wandi plans to coordinate sending funds directly to publishing houses in Rwanda and Tanzania, enabling local publishers to distribute the books directly. The goal is to transition to a process in which Afrikan publishers deliver books written by Afrikan authors, to Afrikan schoolchildren. Plus, it’s more efficient than lugging books across the ocean and the entire Afrikan continent by hand!

The mission of the Afrikan Baby Book Project is to “spark curiosity, inspire confidence and creativity and to encourage critical thinking and compassion. A lot of that can come through reading. That’s the whole point of having culturally relevant books.”

Lately, Wandi has been reading a lot of Afrikan children’s folktales. These stories “make you think, and they’re beautifully written. None start with ‘once upon a time’ and none end with ‘happily ever after.’” But they resonate.

The ultimate goal of the Afrikan Baby Book project, Wandi says, is “to inspire the children to write their own stories. They all have their own fantastic stories that should be shared with the world.”