Our flagship programme is the annual Ba re e ne re Literature Festival. This is a multi-day event that brings together hundreds of people from a variety of backgrounds and ages including writers, editors, publishers, poets, students, artists and educators to engage through literary arts and diverse modes of storytelling. Activities include: poetry performances, story readings panel discussions, townhall-style conversations, bookmaking activities for children, annual keynotes and practice-oriented writing workshops.
Arts education research.
Ba re e ne re is part of Another Roadmap for Arts Education. This is a community of Arts organisations and researchers from around the world who collaborate on creative projects and conduct research with the aim of making arts education more inclusive and locally-oriented rather than replicating foreign frameworks and practices. Ba re e ne re’s research is focused on deconstructing and decolonising Arts education in Lesotho and Southern Africa. We’ve also hosted a workshop for our international peers in Maseru.
To enhance the skills of Lesotho’s people in the areas of critical multimedia literacy and creative writing Ba re e ne re designs and facilitates workshops. These have taken place as part of our literature festivals and as their own events, utilizing curriculum we’ve created specifically for our local audiences. Creative writing workshops offer dynamic exercises that get participants on their feet and engaging with media in order to stimulate story ideas. Critical literacy workshops have encouraged relationships with Sesotho language and have been a lab for inventing new Sesotho words and artistic dictionary pages.
Ba re Dictionary.
To get young Basotho excited about their language, Sesotho, Ba re e ne re demonstrates the descriptive power and innovative growth of Sesotho by instituting the BA RE Dictionary Project. This project introduces and catalogs new Sesotho words with definitions and example sentences. Our audience is encouraged to share their own creative sentences with these new words and suggest their own words. The words are often influenced by slang, afro-futurism, new technology and complex emotions. We’ve also implemented a workshop series where participants collectively create new works and then design their own dictionary pages for them.
To create a new outlet for creative writing in Lesotho, we published a short story collection in 2016 called “Likheleke tsa puo.” Meaning “wordsmiths” in Sesotho, this book contains 23 original stories that have never been published before. They are written in both English and Lesotho’s own Sesotho to allow writers to express themselves how they are most comfortable.
Ba re e ne re engages Basotho students and writers through writing competitions hosted in schools and online. In the competitions Basotho are encouraged to think creatively about a topic and respond with a piece of original writing. Winners of the competitions are awarded prizes and honoured through public events. Student writing competitions have been facilitated with the support of Peace Corps. Entries to online writing competitions are also published periodically on our website.
Spelling Bees.
Ba re e ne re has engaged in multiple national student spelling bees. Students at schools across the country have competed to spell both English and Sesotho words at their school level and the highest performers are invited to participate in the National Spelling Bee. This project is facilitated in schools with the support of Peace Corps.
Ba re e ne re | Arts Education 