By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 03

A Namibian giraffe finds foreign readers while the country still works to build its own.

There is a giraffe named Alfonso at the centre of this story. In The Accidental Hero, released in the United Kingdom, he is separated from his herd on the African plains and, almost by accident, becomes the hero who saves himself and the friends he meets.

It is a gentle picture book, illustrated by Anil Yap, now sitting on international shelves. The cultural interest is where the giraffe comes from: a Namibian story, read to children abroad, which makes a modest book a small act of cultural export.

A Namibian story on a foreign shelf

Children’s books are how a country’s images travel earliest. Namibian shelves already fill with home-grown wildlife characters, from zebras on Etosha safaris to weaver birds; Alfonso simply carries one across a border, into homes that may never see the place. That the book competes on merit as a story, not as a curiosity, is what makes the reach real.

A picture book is often a country’s first ambassador into a foreign home.

The reading culture back home

The export sits against a harder domestic backdrop. Namibia has long struggled with a thin reading culture, and recent effort has gone into changing it, among it the Namibia Reads application launched in March 2020, which put more than a thousand children’s e-books within reach and drew several thousand young users in its first months.

A win abroad is quiet proof for the harder work of building readers at home.

For a reader, teacher or cultural body, Alfonso’s journey abroad is a reminder that Namibian stories can travel on their own terms. The question it leaves is whether the culture that produced the giraffe will also build the home readership that lets the next Alfonso begin on a Namibian lap, not only a foreign one.

Sources: The Namibian; Digital app promotes reading culture in Namibia (CGTN); Namibian children’s books (Namibia Book Market)