Laying the Landscape: The Image

I’ll admit, sometimes I struggle to define where Golden Baobab falls as an organization, a business, in the grand scheme of this vast literary and development landscape. With a pan-African mission and a list of constituents that includes children, writers, and literary professionals alike, sometimes throwing around words like ‘education’ or ‘arts and culture’ just don’t seem to fully encompass the vision. We’re about reading, we’re about stories, we’re about art and learning and childhoods that will yield adults who are destined to reach their full potential.

Every child has the right to food and health and an education, but Golden Baobab believes they deserve something more. We believe that children have a right to an imagination, and that we have a duty to inspire it in them. Because this irrational, surreal, untamable imagination, and only this, is what will see our world through to tomorrow. 

The goal is equality. The goal is education. The goal is empowerment.

The goal is this picture I have in my head. A picture of a little boy, trailing his mother through Kumasi market, or any of the thousands of similar markets in West and East and Southern Africa, his hand in hers. And in his free hand, he holds a colorful, animated book, so captivated, so enthralled, so inspired by the story it tells, that he simply cannot put it down.

This is an experience every child deserves to have. This is what we are fighting to achieve, and this is the image I hold on to as I move forward with Golden Baobab. Let’s make it happen!