More than 400 million children, and counting, live in Africa today. In a population that will double to 2.4 billion by 2050, according to the United Nations estimates (a quarter of earth’s population combined), Africa’s child population is projected to reach 1 billion by 2055. This makes it the biggest child demographic compared to the other continents. While mortality rates have declined among all age groups in Africa, child deaths tend to be concentrated at the youngest age groups with 85 per cent of all deaths to children under age 15 occurring among children below age 5, with over half of the world’s 5.4 million under-five deaths in 2017 occurred in Africa. Africa’s children, though increasing in good numbers, also face a rapid decreasing rate attributable to several factors, the principal ones being lack of awareness by parents and neglect by governments. The humanities could lend a hand in mitigating these by encouraging reading skills through children’s literature in order to build on the pre-colonial foundation of folkloric literature to ease the impact of government neglect and to reasonably secure the future of this critical demographic.

This panel therefore traces the discursive shift owing to literary artists’ ingenious responses to ease the lives of African children the 21^st century, a period marked by rapid spread of the internet, increased knowledge of child diseases, complex relationship amongst pupils, the spread of urbanity and cityscapes, emplotment of reverse folklorics – folkloric realism, and other forms of Africa’s postcoloniality. These postcolonial conditions get refracted, influencing young reading minds. Thus, a new construction of childhood in children’s literature has emerged.

Taking Nigeria – Africa’s literary powerhouse and most populous country – as a case, this panel focuses on three markers of discursive shift: the elicitation of empathy for sickle-cell anaemia child victims; introduction of reverse folklorics; and the survey and analysis of the new mode of children’s literature driven by the internet. Since the Nigerian government seemed unconcerned about the country’s status as the global epicentre of the sickle-cell disease, Jude Idada takes up a remedial responsibility in his award ($100,000.00 worth NLNG Prize for Literature) winning children’s text, Boom Boom (2019). Boom Boom, Martin Ogba argues, marks a clear departure from the canonical Nigerian text on child disability, Cyprian Ekwensi’s The Drummerboy (1960), in two ways. First, whereas the latter text represents a lively and sociable child with an outward defect, blindness, Boom Boom depicts the inward defect of a lovely, lonely child. Where in Ekwensi’s work the protagonist has his disability alleviated through sympathy, in Boom Boom, the child’s disability are co-experienced by the victim and his loved ones, leading to empathy. This indirectly sensitizes children readers on the need for mutual care for hurting friends abandoned by the government.

Still on Boom Boom (2019), Jude Muoneke contends that a shift occurred in contemporary Nigerian children’s literature with deployment of ‘folkloric realism’, a term implying ‘reverse folklorism’. By this he means the transplanting of animals from the world of fantasy to the modern realistic world, where such animals, instead of acting in alignment with anthropomorphic tendencies attainable in traditional African folkloric literature, particularly, with respect to intelligence and speaking human language, retain their non-linguistic cues decodable by their human auditors. The setting of the work helping to achieve this realism is no longer the kingdom of animals, but the land of humans, a modern realistic environment where both the human and animal live and bond like relatives. Muoneke’s piece describes the non-linguistic cues and their consequent impact on both the tense plot of the text and readers, using a medley of concepts. He concludes that this decoding of animal language within human setting transports folklore to the domain of folkloric realism.

Ignatius Chukwumah identifies a discursive shift marked by rapid spread of the internet that has initiated an interactive reading mode for both young adult readers and adult text authors. Where in the past, reading time, space and text were almost determinate, these three elements have become fluid and expansive. Such features as online texts stories in episodes, directed towards children’s and young adult’s pleasures, cover pages, and immediate interactive readers’ responses tend to dispose of the traditional reading mode where a child sits with a book in hand. This essay surveys the stories on this Nigeria’s most popular story site, EbonyStories and analyses the characterizing traits, themes, and forms of characterization, while describing the impacts of the internet on the framing of the stories for readership-viewership.