History was one of my favourite subjects at school. It took me a long while to understand why I was most interested in the back stories of cultures other than those of my forebears.
It wasn’t because the stories or characters were more interesting. I was taken in by the power of storytelling.
My first history teacher in secondary school had the gift of the gab. He knew how to keep me and my contemporaries engaged. The ones who taught me further down the line were also skillful, but they might have been let down by the turgid quality of the storytelling in the West African History textbooks.
The moral of this tale is that style should be taken into account when one considers effective ways and means of presenting content.
Sadly, there are many folks in the world with precious information to share who have hardly ever known the experience of being enthralled by engaging narration.
