David South Consulting

Tag: storytelling

  • South Gets Reading Bug with more Festivals

    South Gets Reading Bug with more Festivals

    By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

    SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

    There is no better indicator of significant economic progress than the rise and rise of book festivals across the South. These symbols of intellectually curious and globally aware middle classes are also boosting economies and contributing to a bigger, more sophisticated creative economy – something that will drive future growth across many sectors.

    The trend is most advanced in Asia, where according to the OECD, “large numbers of Asians are expected to become middle class in the next 10 years” (OECD Working Paper No. 285). But the rising middle class can also be found across the South – and so can the new book festivals.

    According to Sanjoy Roy, managing director of New Delhi-based festival producer Teamwork Productions (www.teamworkfilms.com) ,” India’s rising economic growth has ensured that the great middle class is happy to travel and to spend.”

    “More and more Indians are taking to tourism both local and international. India’s large middle-aged upper middle class and wealthy sector feeds occasions like the literature festival, ensuring attendance, making it a word of mouth must-be-seen, must-attend occasion on the social season calendar.”

    Recognition of the importance of this trend can be seen in the recent growth in book festivals associated with the Hay Festival (www.hayfestival.com) based in Hay-on-Wye, Wales. There are now Hay festivals in Beirut, Lebanon; Bogota and Cartagena, Colombia; Zacatecas, Mexico; Nairobi, Kenya; the Maldives; and the Indian state of Kerala.

    The festivals are part of the powerful global creative economy, which is seen as the “interface between creativity, culture, economics and technology in a contemporary world dominated by images, sounds, texts and symbols” (UNCTAD). The cultural sector has been shown to be an effective way for emerging economies to leapfrog into high-growth areas in the 21st century world economy.

    Roy also confirms the economic impact of book festivals. He produces India’s Jaipur Literature Festival (www.jaipurliteraturefestival.org) , which attracted over 32,000 visitors this year. The hard numbers show the economic impact of the event: “Approximately 3,000 room nights were booked by visitors during this period at an average of US $100 per night,” Roy said. “Our own spend in Jaipur during this period was approximately US $500,000. Shopping, meals and transport spend I would peg at between US $200,000 and US $300,000.”

    The OECD defines the global middle class as those living in households with daily per capita incomes of between US$10 and US$100. It calculates that Asia accounts for less than one-quarter of today’s middle class, but says that share could double by 2020. Within a decade, “more than half of the world’s middle class could be in Asia and Asian consumers could account for over 40 per cent of global middle class consumption.”

    The World Bank takes an even more optimistic view, seeing this burgeoning middle class’ spending power as being triggered once people get out of the desperation of a subsistence existence. This means the “developing world’s middle class is defined as those who are not poor when judged by the median poverty line of developing countries, but are still poor by US standards. The “Western middle class” is defined as those who are not poor by US standards.” Although barely 80 million people in the developing world entered the Western middle class over 1990-2002, it found an extra 1.2 billion people joined the developing world’s middle class. Four-fifths came from Asia, and half from China (World Bank).

    With the rise of the creative sector, significant innovation will come from the global South, according to the director of the Hay Festival, Peter Florence.

    “The digital revolution will be absolutely essential to developing countries,” he told the Associated Press. “They are going to skip two levels of publishing industry tradition. The mobile phone is more important for writers in those societies than pen and paper is. That is a very interesting continuation of oral culture. At the same time the West has decided to start moving from audio editions to digital downloads, oral culture is just moving straight into digital culture in many places around the world.”

    The impact of a growing middle class can be seen in fast-growing India, which is forecast to become the largest market for English language books within a decade.

    A survey by Tehelka (www.tehelka.com) found Indians favour stories about local conditions and set in the places where they live.

    India’s most popular current writer is Chetan Bhagat, a former investment banker. He has sold more than 3 million books in the last five years. His latest, Two States, sold a million copies in four months.

    Bhagat writes about the country’s aspiring middle class. His publisher, Rupa (www.rupapublications.com/Client/home.aspx) , believes he appeals to a “pan-Indian, pan-age group.”

    For Roy, it is still too early to tell how the new Hay Kerala festival in the state capital, Thiruvananthapuram, will affect the economy of the area (the first one is from November 12 to 14, 2010).

    “In the long term we hope this too becomes like Jaipur, attracting an international and national audience from outside the state,” he said. “Kerala has a robust economy. What it may do is increase the total tourist influx into the city and divert some of the annual Goa traffic to its own benefit.”

    Roy says the Hay Festival Kerala will follow the programming pattern of other Hay festivals, combining international authors with a strong local flavour.

    “India is celebrating its golden age in the creative arts and literature not just in English but across all official and subsidiary Indian languages,” he said. “The depth, scope, extent and range of writing in both fiction and non-fiction is incredible.”

    Drawing on his success with the festival in Jaipur, Roy has advice for others in the South looking for creative economy success.

    “It’s all about location, location, location,” he said. “A festival city like that of Cannes, Venice, Edinburgh, Avignon, Hay are special. Choose the right location, be inclusive and bring the local community on board and have the power to sustain – and in due course with a strong programming base, the festival will grow.

    “Every festival will have its own learning (curve) and those who take these on board will find it easier to be successful.”

    Published: June 2010

    Resources

    Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator. 

    Creative Commons License

    This work is licensed under a
    Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

    ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5311-1052.

    © David South Consulting 2023

  • The South has a Good Story to Tell

    The South has a Good Story to Tell

    By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

    SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

    The fast-changing modern world is raising the living standards of billions in the South – China alone has lifted 400 million people out of poverty since the 1980s – but it is also risking the loss of many rich cultural traditions. One of them is storytelling.

    Oral storytelling is a critical tool for passing on history, while teaching morals and ethics, especially in societies with low rates of literacy and little formal education. But with the rise of modern media and advertising, few traditional storytellers – many of whom are old – stand a chance. Populations are on the move like never before. As more and more people end up in sprawling cities, many are becoming disconnected from their roots.

    Yet across the South, people are finding ways to re-invent story telling — and also to make money, preserve cultural pride and feed the appetite for novelty in hungry, modern media and business.

    In 1997, storytelling was acknowledged by UNESCO, which pledged to back humanity’s oral and immaterial heritage, and to protect a vast number of oral and musical traditions, crafts and knowledge – plus the “living human treasures” who possess them. It backed this up in 2003 with the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. It supports storytelling through its International Programme for the Development of Communication.

    But what about the young – the most important generation for storytelling to have a future? In Bogota, Colombia, students have started a movement of urban storytellers. Aged between 17 and 35, they draw on the things they have learned in university. They eschew linear narration and instead adopt the popular language of films and advertising. Inspired by one television commercial, a story revolves around a drop of tomato sauce falling from a high-rise building, sparking a gun battle. The staccato narrative takes inspiration from post-modern authors like Italo Calvino. It is also the perfect narrative to capture modern, urban audiences who live in a world saturated with media.

    By blending together ancestral and post-modern tales, these student storytellers are luring Latin Americans back to listening to stories. Live storytelling, when done well, has an ability to connect with other people like no other medium. This new generation also is helping make Colombia a gathering place for storytellers in Latin America, expressed in events like the Hay Festival Cartegena, a literary event that draws authors from around the world.

    But is there any money in storytelling? Tale-spinners like Argentinian Juan Moreno say yes. Moreno quit teaching 17 years ago to tell stories for money in theatres, bars, universities and libraries, tapping into a contemporary marketplace for storytelling.

    In fact, it is better paid than acting in the theatre, he claims, and if you are good, it comes with lots of travel. There is a global round of congresses, festivals and seminars to keep storytellers connected, inspired – and paid.

    Moreno now makes money teaching many professions how to use stories to be more powerful communicators. He told the UNESCO Courier, “the value of the spoken word, words that heal and restore, that can give life but also take it away,” are key to many fields, like law and social work.

    The world centres of storytelling are very much focused on the South. The International Congress of Oral Storytelling, part of the Buenos Aires Book Fair, has been running every year since 1995. At the Congress, tips are exchanged over the subtle tricks of timing and voice, gestures and facial expressions. Other Southern cities with storytelling events, include Bucaramanga, Colombia, Monterrey, Mexico and Agüimes, in the Canary Islands.

    While young people are breathing new life into storytelling, Morocco’s legendary storytellers have been facing a common dilemma seen across the developing and developed world: how can they compete with flashier and more distracting pastimes like computer games and TV?

    Illiteracy in Morocco affects 40 per cent of the population, so telling stories is an excellent way to reach this non-reading group. Stories and parables have long been seen as a great way to convey ideas, values and philosophies.

    But Morocco’s storytelling sages, or halakis, are using their heads and turning to computers to get their stories told, and prevent their thousand-year tradition from dying out. With the help of UNESCO, the halakis have created a digital archive of their stories in audio and video.

    Based in Marrakesh’s famous main square, Jemaa al-Fna, they compete in a hury burly of street entertainers and aromatic foods; it is a place where men with monkeys vie with snake charmers for your attention. Morocco’s storytellers would set up in the public squares of the cities of Fes, Meknes and Marrakesh to entertain crowds and educate about morality. These would include the ethical values of kindness, honour and chivalry. But Marrakesh is now the only place where a half dozen old men (there used to be 20 in Marrakesh) still practice this ancient art form.

    UNESCO declared the square in 2001 part of the world’s “Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.” Video recorders have been documenting the storytellers and chronicling them on the internet.

    Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, who spends part of his year in Marrakesh, has championed the halakis in his book, Marrakesh Tales, and in bringing UNESCO in to help them. He has defended their corner against the plans of city planners and developers.

    Seventy-one-year-old Moulay Mohammed is blunt about the current state of storytelling: “Young Moroccans would rather watch TV soap operas than listen to a storyteller, much less become one themselves,” he told the BBC. Mohammed’s stock-in-trade is the Old Testament and all of A Thousand and One Nights: both tales of sultans, thieves, wise men and fools, mystics, genies, viziers and belly dancers. And he has been telling these tales for 45 years.

    In South Africa, digital technology is also breathing new life into storytelling – and infusing the stories with urgent, contemporary issues like HIV, and domestic and sexual violence. South African women are using digital technology to preserve traditional storytelling: A collection of 15 digital stories – called “I Have Listened, I Have Heard” – made in 2006 are being distributed along with books. They assembled the stories using audio recorders and made movies of the readings with digital cameras. It was funded by the Foundation for Human Rights and made at the Women’s Net Computer Training Centre in Johannesburg.

    The storytellers worked together on each script, taking a day. They would tell the group a story focusing on particular experiences or meaningful moments in their lives. The group would comment and draw out the best bits of the story. The whole process helps the story teller to flesh out the story with metaphors, narrative techniques and milestones.

    Published: April 2008

    Resources

    • The basics of story telling are answered in this webpage: www.timsheppard.co.uk
    • Singapore International Story Telling Festival 2008: This year’s festival also includes a new addition: Asian Digital Storytelling Festival
    • International Congress of Oral Storytelling: Held from 2-4 May 2008 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Website: www.el-libro.org.ar
    • Folk Tales: Online project where Pakistani students and their teachers share folklore and fables with students around the world. Website: www.edutopia.org
    • Thirsty-Fish: Story and Strategy: A consultancy that helps businesses build their brands based on age-old practices of storytelling. Website: www.thirsty-fish.com

    “I think you [David South] and the designer [Solveig Rolfsdottir] do great work and I enjoy Southern Innovator very much!” Ines Tofalo, Programme Specialist, United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation

    Creative Commons License

    This work is licensed under a
    Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

    ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5311-1052.

    © David South Consulting 2023