of a human person. Story can be sung, chanted in poetic form, spoken prose, or a
combination of any of those.
Enhanced information is information conveyed by means of short bursts of symbolic,
poetic, or special language, such as that found in proverbs, sayings, riddles, and the
like. Language play, story and enhanced information form the basis of much of the
world’s children’s literature.
To cite some specific examples from the country of Nigeria, the myth of ‘Why the sky is
far away’ as written down in My Father’s Daughter (Segun 1965) is a belief story within
the story of the author’s childhood. The styles in which both of these stories are
presented, as well as their contents and contexts, tell us something of the culture out of
which that book comes, and most particularly, how the culture is changing because it is
in the process of developing, as defined above. An example of enhanced information from
Nigeria would be this riddle: ‘I pass the living, they are silent; I pass the dead, they
speak to me.’ The answer: leaves. This conveys information about the physical
properties of leaves in a symbolic way. The fact that this information is encoded in a
riddle and the contexts in which such a riddle would be used by adults with children
tell us something about the culture of the people using the riddle.
Much of playful language, story and enhanced information was and still is expressed
in oral formats in direct exchanges among two or more persons. In some cultures these
oral expressions were/are accompanied by body movements, by playing of musical
instruments, by drawing or sketching or moulding of images, by manipulation of
objects. In some cultures there was less oral expression, and more body movement
(dance or mime or acting out), or more pictorial expression.
Some of these cultures transformed their pictorial images or objects into recording
systems. Relatively quickly, a few cultures developed long-lasting formats (clay tablets,
smooth stones, papyrus scrolls, palm leaf pages, cloths strips, wood boards, leather
strings, parchment sheets, paper) on which they could record many things. For even fewer
of these cultures, record-keeping soon developed into fully-fledged writing systems that
could record all types of human speech, including oral performance speech. Gradually,
specialists in these cultures moved from composing and performing orally to a process
in which they composed, wrote down, corrected, re-composed, re-wrote, re-corrected and
hence we arrive at literature and children’s literature.
In the twentieth century came the modern media of radio, television, film and video.
Some cultures began to use all these means, as each developed, to add to the oral and
printed versions of story and enhanced information they gave to their children.
Other cultures continued to exist and regenerate themselves chiefly through oral and
mimetic means, either by choice or because of economic forces that pushed for
development in other technological areas. These cultures sometimes used the same
types of stories and enhanced information as the cultures in which writing systems and
the modern media flourished, but the form and content were different. Each
presentation was unique. This meant that those responsible for passing down culture
had to develop extensive memory. In some places, memory aids such as vines or strings,
beads, notched sticks or coded boards were devised to help retain a greater amount of
story and/or information. Most of these memory aids are not considered writing
systems, but they are certainly parallel recording systems, and it is now becoming clear
656 THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE