THE AKO PROJECT:
Bilingual Books and Posters for Schools in Madagascar

THE AKO PROJECT

The Six Ako Project Storybooks:

For ages 5-10. Format A4 closed, 32 pages. (First two books A5 closed).
Dual language: Malagasy and English. One language larger depending on country.

Ako the Aye-Aye

Bitika the Mouse Lemur

Tik-Tik the Ringtail

Bounce the White Sifaka

Furry and Fuzzy the red ruffed lemur twins

No-Song the Indri

THE SIX AKO PROJECT POSTERS:

The posters are as detailed portrayals of each of the six different habitats.  These will be real teaching tools with more and more to discover as children look closer.  Each shows the differing landscapes with inset regional species of plants and animals. The posters are matched to the storybooks with text in Malagasy and English.

The posters will also be sold in the UK as art works. A1 size, laminated, just light enough to roll in tubes for shipment

Supported by McCrae Conservation and Education Fund and UNICEF Madagascar.

Poster Artist:

The Creative Team:

Dr. Alison Jolly, author.  Studying wild lemurs since 1963.  Taught at Cambridge, Sussex, and Princeton.  Eleven books (7 on Madagascar), 100-odd academic and popular articles, 18 TV programs.
Email: ajolly@sussex.ac.uk

Dr. Hantanirina Rasamimanana, Malagasy author: École Normale Supérieure of the University of Madagascar: Field research on ringtailed lemurs, founder member Malagasy Primatological Society. Many school-teachers and graduate students of Madagascar are her ex-pupils so she is at the intersection of research and education.
Email: rasamitovo@gmail.com

Deborah Ross, artist: Published in Natural History Magazine, The New Yorker, New York Times, Harper’s Magazine.  Graphics for Bronx Zoo, Brooklyn Zoo, Dallas Zoo and Long Beach Aquarium. Watercolor workshops at School of Visual Arts, Walt Disney Feature Animations, DreamWorks, Pixar, and Cal Arts, and for Malagasy villagers at Kirindy and Tampolo Reserves.
Email: tokounou@mindspring.com
Website: www.deborahrossart.com

Melanie McElduff, designer, Chermayeff and Geismar Studio design firm. She designed Ako and Bitika and will ensure that the series continues with the same high standard and visual format.
Email: mcelduff.melanie@gmail.com

EDUCATIONAL SUPPORT AND ASSESSMENT

Education workshops on the Ako Stories began in 2008, under the direction of Dr. Hantanirina Rasamimanana of the École Normale Supérieure.   It was quickly clear that teachers had little or no training in biodiversity education.  They said, “what if the children ask questions? We will have no answers.” (See Amer. J. Primatology article for results.)  With a grant from the Liz Claiborne Art Ortenberg Foundation, Dr. Rasamimanana’s team is producing a teacher’s guide, field tested by rural teachers, and due for the 2011-12 school year. rasamitovo@gmail.com

Education Supervisors:

Dr. Hantanirina Rasamimanana

Science Faculty, École Normale Supérieure of the University of Madagascar. rasamitovo@gmail.com www.univ-antananarivo.mg/spip.php?rubrique13

Judith Hawker

Primary School Languages Coordinator, Brighton and Hove School District, UK. A multicurricular project on language teaching combined with literacy, science and cultural outreach, using the Ako books. jhhawker@gmail.com

Francine Dolins

Department of Psychology, University of Michigan Dearborne. Organized an international workshop on Conservation Education using primate flagships at the International Primatological Congress, Edinburgh, 2008, and innovating an Ako-based project in Michigan.   fdolins@umd.umich.edu  www.casl.umd.umich.edu/index.php?id=685578

DESCRIPTIONS OF THE AKO SERIES

The books are storybooks, each with a named hero or heroine.  Although checked by experts for scientific accuracy, they are meant to be fun or touching or scary, not overtly educational.

Ako the Aye-aye (his name means Echo) is a playful little aye-aye. His species is solitary so he can only play with his mother’s tail. He finds and loses a brown lemur playmate, and eventually is hanging by his feet when he forgets to be scared of humans.  Visitors to the reserve see him playing and stop being scared of the ill-luck supposed to be brought by aye-ayes.  This book is set in the east coast littoral forest with coconut and travellers’ palms.

Bitika the Mouselemur is a baby lemur of the smallest species in Madagascar. (Bitika means Tiny.) She ventures out of the nest and meets lemurs of other sympatric species which make her feel smaller and smaller and smaller,  Then she saves her mother’s life from a white-browed owl. She ends up feeling like the biggest lemur in all Madagascar!  Bitika is set in the western baobab forest of the Menabé.
  Illustrations from Ny Tsididy Bitika  

Tik-Tik the Ringtail is for older children aged 8-12.  Tikitike means “explorer” in Malagasy, or “Let’s go” in ringtailed lemur sounds. An adolescent male ringtail is confronted by growing up in a species where females are totally dominant, and young males emigrate to different troops.  He leaves his mother and sister’s troop to travel alone through the forest.  He spends months trailing another troop and trying to approach a beautiful female.  In the end she comes into oestrus (suddenly smells absolutely wonderful).  He challenges the dominant male and wins.  He has grown up; the beautiful female thinks so too.  In the story 11 different ringtail social calls are presented in context so that if you read the book aloud the children can click, meow, purr, howl, squeak, shout war-cries, and give alarm calls.  Tik-Tik is set in the spiny forest of the south.
 
Furry and Fuzzy the Red Ruffed Lemur Twins: two infants are parked by their mother in a liana tangle high in a rainforest tree on the Masoala Peninsula. They are visited in turn by mother, father, and aunt.  Rain becomes a cyclone.  The branch breaks. They fall in the night by a forester’s hut that also loses much of its thatched roof. Twin children want to make pets of the baby lemurs.  Their mother wants to cook the lemurs, but the father says they must be returned to their own family—“What if a family of lemurs found you and wanted to make pets of you?

The final two books are about a sifaka living among 100-foot karst pinnacles who leaps to safety from a hungry fossa.  The indri No-Song in learns to sing with her family in their hill forest of cliffs and waterfalls. Each member takes a different role in the chorus—this is new science, in collaboration with Viviana Sorrentino.

DISTRIBUTION

The books are being distributed by Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, by the GERP (Groupe d’Etudes et de Recherche sur les Primates, the Primatological Society of Madagascar), by members and alumni of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure, and by the Lemur Conservation Foundation (Tampolo Reserve). 

Many other conservation education projects exist in Madagascar.  The Ako project would be pleased to work with any of these, supplying books, learning lessons from each other, and collaborating rather than competing for funding.
Ako and Bitika are available at $12.00 or £6.00 each from
 
The Lemur Conservation Foundation
Myakka City Lemur Reserve
PO Box 249
Myakka City, FL 34251
(941)-322-8494 (office)
(941)-322-9264 (fax)
librarian@lemurreserve.org
www.lemurreserve.org
 
Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust
Les Augres Manor, Trinity
Jersey JE3 5BA
Channel Islands
UK
Tel +44 1534 860000, Fax+44 1534 860001
info@durrellwildlife.org
www.durrellwildlife.org

Background by Alison Jolly:

The Mrs. Trimmer Moment?
Children’s books about animals in Madagascar and the West

Literacy in Madagascar began with English missionaries in the 19th Century.  Education was codified under French colonialism, 1895-1960. The French philosophy was that children of France and the Empire should study a single curriculum.  This in theory gave each an equal chance at the best possible education for a civilized view of the world.  History began with “Our ancestors the Gauls”, biology with grapevines and rabbits.  If a Malagasy teenager reached lycée level biology he or she might learn there were unique animals in distant parts of the French Empire.

The first attempt I know of to provide materials on Malagasy wildlife in Malagasy was a pamphlet-book, Zavaboary Malagasy, written by J. ANDRIAMAMPIANINA in the late 1950’s, funded by Survival Anglia.  This was never distributed. 

The second attempt was proposed by myself in 1964, approved by the Minister of Education, M. BOTOKEKY, and produced as a series of 8” x 11’’ cards with black and white drawings of a mammal or bird and a few relevant facts.  It was printed and sold from ORSTOM in the Tsimbazaza Zoo, in French, and funded by the New York Zoological Society.  These reached some high school and university teachers. The cards remained almost the only such materials available for the next twenty years.

An earnest attempt by myself and Guy RAMANANTSOA in 1979 at brokering a school textbook failed completely in the prevailing political climate.  The other materials I know of were a series of matchbook covers, with matches too expensive for peasants to buy (circa 1975), and a poster proposed by myself, painted by Steven Nash, and printed by the Wildlife Preservation Trust in the late 1980’s.  The poster did reach many lycées and hotels, largely through being sold for payment at Tsimbazaza Zoo.  In the late 1980s Barthélémy VAOHITA of the World Wildlife Fund produced a set of children’s reading books called Ny Voary, which are (at least in theory) distributed to all primary schools.  They have never been incorporated into the official curriculum, however.  They succeed in expressing interest and empathy with nature through poems and stories but are little related to Malagasy wildlife and contain some strange mistakes.

Since the growth of the conservation movement after 1990 many NGOs have undertaken to combine community education and children’s education.  WCS, Durrell Wildlife, and Bat Conservation Int’l have important programs focussed on their local conservation areas within the huge island.  WWF publishes a magazine of comic strips called Vintsy which reaches high schools throughout Madagascar, along with Vintsy Clubs  of interested teenagers.  Vintsy is sold at a heavily subsidized price rather than given away.  A new single-issue comic Arovy fa Harena  has just been printed for use around Lake Alaotra—its hero is the bandro, the Lake Alaotra bamboo lemur wearing a red scarf and talking with a gang of children.  This is produced by a Malagasy NGO which is welcome local involvement.

However, these efforts are either localized to specific target communities, and/or still seen as foreign to the local scene.  There is nothing like our western approach to fill a baby’s cot with cuddly animal toys and start reading picture-books as soon as it can talk.

This attitude did not always exist in the West, either!  The first book taking the point of view of wild animals in order to teach children empathy for other creatures was written in 1786 by Mrs. Sarah Trimmer.  It became known as the History of the Robins, and stayed in print for 125 years.  Her book is still readable today: although the children’s mores have changed, the robins’ have not.  A cock and hen redbreast attempt to raise four nestlings: Dicky, Flapsy, Pecksy and Robin.  The parents teach them how to find food, how to fly, about predators, and particularly that some humans may be trusted but most cannot be. 

Meanwhile a human mother tells her son and daughter they may feed the robins crumbs but should not cage them or destroy nests.  The book is remarkable for its balance. Animals should not be put before humans, but one must be aware of their feelings. Of course you may sweep cobwebs out of your house, but you should not destroy spider-webs outdoors—indeed, you should try to imagine with “microscopic eyes” what labour has gone into their creation.

Mrs Trimmer was a formidable author and educationalist whose timing was exactly right.  She wrote at the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of the Romantic era, when Europe was developing empathy with much of nature—and even campaigning for other people, the black slaves on whom so much European profit was based.  Following Rousseau, attitudes toward children changed to think they deserved children’s books and toys at their own level, not just miniatures of adult goods.  At the same time many in society grew richer, and thus able to afford books and toys specifically for children.

In the West we now share a culture of animal stories for children.  Of course there had been stories about animals which personify human traits since Aesop in the 6th C BC.  However, after Mrs. Trimmer come biographies of individual domestic animals (Black Beauty, Lassie Come Home) and tales of heroic wild creatures (eg. by Kipling, Jack London, Earnest Thompson Seton and  Bambi as written by Felix Salten).  Early in the 20th Century we have cute semi-animals (Peter Rabbit, Winnie-the-Pooh.).  Then come ultra-cute wild animals in the Disney tradition, notably Bambi and the Lion King. 

Real lemurs are quintessentially cute wild animals.  A quick count gives at least twelve children’s books on lemurs currently in print in English.  Let me single out The Adventures of Riley. Riley carries the imprints of most major conservation organizations, including WWF, CI and WCS.  It is impeccably scientific with cartoons and quotes of many wildlife research scientists.  It is politically correct with a Malagasy camerawoman leading two American children, though there aren’t any Malagasy camerawomen.  The children wear US field gear beyond the dreams of almost any Malagasy child.  The American-oriented text about helping to make an exotic wildlife film is integrated with the pictures—it could not be translated into any other language, let alone Malagasy.

I would argue that it is possible that Madagascar will soon reach a “Mrs. Trimmer Moment.”  Incomes are finally beginning to rise after the slump from 1970 to 2002. 

University-trained elites are now well aware of conservation and its potential to aid their country.   The good work of Ny Voary, Vintsy, and the focused NGO community education projects have laid a groundwork of knowledge.  The Ako books, and with luck many others by other people, now have a chance to be bought (with heavy subsidies) as objects which people want for their own children.  The accompanying teacher support programs will spread the word that wildlife is actually attractive and fun for its own sake, and that lemurs and other animals have feelings and fears much like ourselves.  

We may be misjudging, since many Malagasy have far more pressing concerns than reading a children’s book, however lovely the pictures and engaging the story.  But if indeed this is the Mrs. Trimmer Moment, Ako and friends should be ready for it.
Alison Jolly
 
 Illustrations from Ako and Bitika books