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Jean-Pierre Rossie
rossie@sitrec.kth.se
www.sitrec.kth.se

I am convinced that it should be out of question to consider this research on children's play activities of past and present times as a purely academic or folkloristic occupation, how praiseworthy it might be. Much to the contrary, this research should bear concrete results. I am thinking here of the fields of child welfare, formal and informal education, the adaptation of the school to local conditions, the relationships between parents and children, between parents and teachers, of community development and the promotion of intercultural understanding. In a book, Games and Toys: Anthropological Research on their Practical Contribution to Child Development. Aids to Programming Unicef Assistance to Education, published by the Unit for Co-operation with UNICEF and the World Food Program of the UNESCO in 1984, I already had the opportunity to propose the use of local play and toy cultures as a source of insight into the child and the society (p. 19-24), for relating school education to the real life and environment of the children, for stimulating the interest and participation of parents in the school, for the elaboration of pedagogical material anchored in local culture, for the training of para-professional and professional personnel of day-care centers, pre-schools and primary schools and for activities in youth movements (p. 24-32).

My ideas about an eventual use of North African and Saharan children's play and toy cultures for local pedagogical and cultural action are restricted to a theoretical and wishful level as the development of such actions belongs to professionals and other cultural agents from these regions. Yet, I can point to a recent development linked to the creation of Amazigh cultural associations in Moroccan cities with an important Amazigh-speaking population. So, when invited by the Association de l'Université d'Eté Agadir to give a talk during the seventh session on Amazigh culture and the question of development held from 25th to 27th July, 2003, a change of attitude towards children's play and toy culture could be detected. For my talk I chose the title Moroccan Amazigh children's play and toy culture and the questions of development whereby I stressed the possibilities for using Amazigh children's toy making and play activities in preschool and primary school education, in the training ofprofessionals for these schools or of volunteers for youth houses and vacation colonies, in sociocultural action, in programs for promoting Amazigh language, in the development of child literature based on local realities, etc. As afterwards I was approached by different persons wanting to hear more or eventually to test these possibilities in practice I have the impression that there is a growing interest in using local play and toy heritage. The coming years will show if this interest has been more than a passing by enthusiasm.

The proposals for using my data in the sphere of intercultural or peace education in a Western context on the contrary are based on personal experience. In this context, the following words of Claude Lévi-Strauss: the discovery of others is the discovery of a relationship, not of a barrier are particularly adequate.

PEDAGOGICAL AND CULTURAL ACTION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

As it is accepted that there is a close relationship between the quality of stimulation at home during the first years of life of a child and the results in the primary school (Groupe Consultatif... Unicef, 1991: 10-11), it is very relevant to give special attention to children's games and toys and to the attitudes of the adults towards them. In the just mentioned publication on preparing the children to the school system and adapting the school to the children, it is written that it is necessary to take the responsibility for the adaptation of the schools to the needs of the children and not any longer to ask of the children to adapt to the system. Halpern and Meyers conclude by stressing that an integrated child-primary school program would permit the elaboration of a link between the interests of the family and those of the community and the reinforcement of the formal school system. It would for example be possible to integrate the values and contents of the local culture in the school program,first of all in the preschool, then in the primary school (1985). (Groupe Consultatif... Unicef, 1991: 22). Intercultural

One of the contents of the local culture that perfectly fits into formal school programs is the play activities and toys of children. Seen from this angle, it should really be harmful if those in charge of the education in North African and Saharan countries would neglect the play and toy heritage of their societies and give way to the overwhelming influence of the playful culture proposed by the consumptive society and Western media, of the standardized European or American pedagogical toys and games and of the mass produced plastic toys that more often than not are of poor quality and sometimes even dangerous.

When one reviews all these toys made by children with natural and waste material one can only be astonished by its creative use, a creative use that contains a real learning process. In a short note on "Zambia: the environment, mess and the joys of recycled and natural play materials", written for the Newsletter of the Bernard van Leer Foundation by Bernadette Luwaile Mwamba of the Salvation Army Pre-school in Lusaka, one reads: "For generations children have played with sand, water, soil, mud, clay, stones, sticks, twigs, corn husks, nuts, fruit, leaves and flowers. But today, shop-bought toys predominate. Yet it is more important than ever for our children to value the Earth's resources. If we can foster their awareness from their earliest days, their future will be more secure. To occupy, amuse and educate young children it isn't necessary to buy expensive toys - an important consideration in these difficult times. Masses of cheap play materials are readily available if youhave a bit of imagination, a lot of patience and the readiness to allow children to play 'messily'." (1996: 21).

One could also think of promoting the interaction between traditional games and toys and modern pedagogical games and toys of Western origin to develop an adapted pedagogy. An example of this interaction is found in the study of Chantal Lombard on the toys of the Baoule children in a rural African society. Her research was related to a program of the government of the Ivory Coast to develop the educational system based on a redefinition of the pedagogical values. Chantal Lombard notes that her analysis is based on two statements. First, so that the traditional creativity can be integrated into the school system as ferment for the development of the children, it is necessary to open the school whereby it becomes a place of encounter between traditional culture and modern scientific knowledge instead of being a place of disruption. Second, so that the traditional creativity acquires a new dimension and enriches modern thinking it is necessary that the school brings the children to another level of mastering the material environment and that it reconciles technology with creative imagination (1978: 209).

As far as I know, it is in Algeria and Morocco that there seems to exist an attempt to integrate some local play culture in the school, although at a different level. In Algeria there has been an attempt to integrate some traditional games in the field of physical education. Youssef Fates, who defended a thesis at the Univesité Paris 1 on the topic of sports in Algeria, writes that the Direction of Studies, Research and Coordination of the Ministry of Youth and Sports of Algeria has organized a national inquiry with questionnaires throughout the country in order to receive information on the games and those who play them. Besides the fact that this inquiry should have lead to the elaboration of a reliable document related to the realities of the region, the Ministry wanted to start a project for the animation of youngsters based on the use of traditional games and sports. Moreover, these traditional games and sports should become a means of mobilizing the popular masses in general and the youth in particular. Unfortunately, Youssef Fates had to note in 1987 that the results of this inquiry had not been analyzed so far (p. 18). So one can assume that this attempt to integrate local games in physical education and in the animation of youngsters has not gone beyond the level of good intentions.

In Morocco another attempt to valorize the play and toy culture could become a reality through the collaboration of two projects receiving subventions from the Bernard van Leer Foundation, an international foundation that centers its efforts on the development of low cost initiatives based on the participation of local communities and directed towards the welfare and education of socially and culturally disadvantaged children between 0 and 8 years. The two organizations are the Alliance de Travail dans la Formation et de l'Action pour l'Enfance, ATFALE or child in Arabic, based at the Mohamed V University in Rabat, and the Ministry of Education whose project is directed towards the 36.117 kuttab or Koranic preschools who care for some 800.000 children between two and six years in 1994-95 (Bouzoubaâ, 1998: 5).

Those two projects work together to give training to the personnel of these kuttab, untrained as they are to work with this age group and for whom no on the job training existed. During the training attention is paid to different topics such as language, health, arithmetic, methods and organization of the school, but also to the topic of games and toys. For this Brigitte El Andaloussi made an activity guide on play in the preschool, a first version published by ATFALE in 1990 and reprinted in 1992 (ATFALE, 1992) and a reworked version published by Gaëtan Morin éditeur - Maghreb in 1997 (El Andaloussi, 1997). In the first version one found the following direct reference to Moroccan traditional games quoted hereafter in a translation based on the French original: it is important that the teacher knows the traditional games of the region where she is working and that she stimulates their expression in her institution as these games present a real interest on several levels. The more the children will be provided with schooling, the less the traditional games learned in the family, in the streets or the fields will be transmitted to the young child notwithstanding their indisputable value for the child's development. Indeed, these traditional games partially contain the collective memory of a country; they promote children's creativity and initiative and offer possibilities to maintain relationships between children of different age groups (ATFALE, 1992: 10). Although I regret that this important paragraph, being the only one on this topic, has been left out in the 1997 version - whereas the other advices found in the short 1992 chapter "Jeux traditionnels" remained in the new chapter "Quelques conseils pratiques" (El Andaloussi, 1997: 10) - it must be said that the preschool teachers' interest in the local child culture is now stimulated in relation to the "comptines", the counting and nursery rhymes and songs (El Andaloussi, 1997: 9). Discussing what the teacher can do to develop the practice of the counting and nursery rhymes and songs, one reads that she or he should look for all what exist in her/his cultural patrimony. Therefore the teacher should make a collection, enriching it through exchange with other colleagues and by asking mothers for the little songs they sing to their children (El Andaloussi, 1997: 9).

A conversation at the Reeducation Center of the Save the Children Fund of Marrakech in February 1992, with Amina Drissi who participated in an information seminar of this preschool project showed that the Moroccan play and toy heritage was somehow integrated in the training. But I found a more precise indication for this when visiting the Preschool Resource Center in Kénitra. This center, located in November 1993 in a classroom of the Shuhada primary school of this city, showed how a preschool class could be organized as to better adapt to modern pedagogy. In the dolls' corner I not only saw imported plastic dolls but also dolls with a frame of reed dressed in the local fashion and made by participants in the training proposed by ATFALE. For the promotion of pedagogic innovations the working out of activity corners in the kuttab is of great importance. "Setting up activity corners where children participated by bringing recycled materials also mobilized teachers, children and parents. The 'food store', 'dolls' and 'health' corners were among the most popular and most frequently found corners.". Moreover, the meetings at a Resource Center also served the purpose to stimulate the making of low-cost educational games and toys (Bouzoubaâ, 1998: 10, 12). So, although the direct reference to using Moroccan children's play culture disappeared from the 1997 activity guide for the preschool it is to be hoped that stimulating to use this patrimony still continues in the training programs.


No doubt the local children's own toy and play culture should play an important role in the preschool. A role the more important as the participation of parents in the preschool forms an integral part of these projects. These parents might be stimulated to participate for example by asking them to help with making and repairing toys, as this has been done in other developing countries (Bernard van Leer Foundation News-letter, 1991: 14). The 1997 activity guide mentioned above now offers a response to this possibility. Under the heading promoting the making of traditional toys by parents so that they may transmit these toys to their children, it is said that as the toy industry has ruled out all traditional techniques of toy production the preschool should use the mothers' knowledge to make dolls or the fathers' knowledge to make carts using natural and waste material. The low cost aspect of self-made toys is also mentioned. Agreeing strongly with this viewpoint I should relativize the dominance of toys made by the toy industry not only in villages and rural urbanized centers but also in the popular quarters of the big Moroccan cities. First of all many Moroccan children still live in rural areas where making toys even by children from preschool age remains a common activity and where the creation of the traditional doll and of animal figurines still exists sometimes even in the first village outside the small town. Secondly, research in small towns like Goulmima, Khemisset, Midelt, Sidi Ifni shows that although some types of self-made toys and especially the traditional dolls have disappeared other toys, especially the self-made vehicles still exist today. In relation to the dolls made by girls it is so that I only saw once in a city, namely Sidi Ifni, a six-year-old girl spontaneously using the traditional cross-shaped frame of reed or sticks then dressing it with rags (Rossie and Daoumani, 2003, Video 1). However, a common procedure is the replacement of the traditional frame by a cheap plastic doll but dressed with rags by the girls. Thirdly, even in the popular quarters of big cities of Agadir, Kénitra or Marrakech I have found children, more often boys than girls, making some toys themselves.

Witnessing the children's own skills in making toys it would be really useful that a preschool teacher tries to find out what the children already know and can do. This way an important pedagogical rule can be applied, namely starting from the child's own experience in his own milieu. Next to the parents one should also build on the older children's experience and interest in making toys. A preschool teacher could even find useful help in creating pedagogical and other toys for her practice by integrating older children, who are the real toy-making experts, in this effort.

Reading some observations on the kuttab made by members of ATFALE, one measures the importance of the obstacles that must be overcome before these preschool institutions can make profit of the creativity that Moroccan children show in their playful activities. "Cramped on benches behind their desks, facing an imagined blackboard in semi-darkness, they are unable to move about and fulfill their need for play. Nor is there any playground." (Bouzoubaâ, 1998: 6). Introducing a new pedagogy that takes into account the specificity of the child and its playful creativity is made still more difficult as "Parents sometimes expressed reluctance at 'paying for their children to play in the kuttab'. They looked for an immediate return on their investment such as seeing their children write a few letters of the alphabet and recite Surats from the Koran." (Bouzoubaâ, 1998: 12).

Returning to ATFALE's activity guide on play in the preschool and especially to the concrete examples of games played inside, games played outside, language games and team games mentioned in the technical sheets (El Andaloussi, 1997: 53-78), these examples could serve very well for trying to find among the games played today by Moroccan Amazigh-speaking and Arabic-speaking children games that match the pedagogical objectives mentioned for the games proposed in this guide. Actually the mentioned games do not seem to refer to the play experience of most Moroccan children and it is wishful thinking to believe that many preschool teachers will be able to find and use local children's games. The making of an supplementary guide filling the gap would be a real help to preschool teachers but also to primary school teachers teaching the first years and even for volunteers working with children in vacation colonies and youth houses. Although certainly more difficult one could also try to find amongMoroccan children's games or inspired by these, activities and themes to develop pedagogical games as those presented by Brigitte El Andaloussi (1997: 1351). The same can be said of another activity guide for the preschool, namely the one on the physical activity of the small child. Alain Léonetti who wrote this interesting guide says in the context of a physical education centered on the child's needs that to be able to do so the spontaneous play activity of the child must be favored (1997: 3). Yet, the proposed examples do not reflect the Moroccan children's play experience but are linked to a European background. The use of physical activities and games from such a background certainly has its value but supplementing it with examples based on the local play and toy culture would make possible the integration of children's spontaneous play in the Moroccan preschool. According to Harinder Kohli, director of the World Bank for the Maghreb, the most urgent needs in the social sphere are to be found among the rural populations, especially the women and children (the Casablanca's weekly paper l'Economiste, 1993: 30). Any social policy for the children and their mothers only can succeed when it takes into account the socio-cultural reality in which they live. One modest but effective means to do this is to relate to the playful experiences of rural children in the social and pedagogical activities set up for them. At the level of the rural school, this could help this institution to be less an agent of uprooting, as Moroccan scholars, among whom El Mostafa Haddiya (1988), did describe it, and to become a link between the rural community and its development.

In the study Child Survival and Development in Africa, Ibinabo S. Agiolu-Kemmer writes: "Can we not build upon the traditional system's emphasis on early development of vocational and life skills? Is it not possible to incorporate culturally relevant experiences and traditions into the curriculum alongside the conventional subjects for all the levels of the school system? The mothers of the Ntataise project in South Africa may not have found the preschool so difficult to understand if they saw project workers helping their children to construct models of houses, trucks and familiar animals, or perhaps teaching them to make clay pots and pans... (many) practical skills can be taught to children within the context of play. Natural objects such as sand, clay, water, sticks, straw, seeds, bottle tops, empty packets and tins are easily available in most communities. Children need to play with toys and objects they can destroy and put together again in the process of playing with them. When wedonate expensive toys to community pre-school centres in order to encourage cognitive stimulation of the children, mothers and project workers are afraid to allow the children to play with them because they do not want the toys to get spoilt. Children gain a lot from constructing their own toys using discarded packets, containers, tires and so on. Many of us have been impressed by the model trucks, cars and aeroplanes which African children, especially in rural areas, construct on their own without much guidance from adults." (1992:7-8). In another country and continent, e.g. in India, a project supported by the Aga Khan Foundation teaches day care workers "how to use creative but low cost materials to stimulate a child's thirst for discovery" (Bernard van Leer Foundation Newsletter, 1993: 3).

The analysis of the traditional toys of India and the efforts to use these toys for therapies for handicapped children elaborated a.o. by Sudarshan Khanna of the National Institute of Design at Paldi Ahmedabad, India, have roused my admiration and clearly show yet another way to use local toys and games. In two books Dynamic Folk Toys (1983) and Joy of Making Indian Toys (1993) Sudarshan Khanna presents toys made by Indian children or other toy makers. Just as for the Saharan and North African toys, some of these Indian toys are peculiar to their region of origin and others are variants of universal types of toys. As a professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design, this scholar stresses the elements of technology and the scientific principles that are at work in the elaboration of and playing with these toys. Another Indian scholar, Arvind Gupta, has written several remarkable booklets on using local toys and the way in which they are made and function to promote innovative experiments for learning scienc eand mathematics.

About the actual situation and the future of these traditional Indian toys Sudarshan Khanna writes: "The earnings of most dynamic folk toymakers are very low. Their clients come from poor communities for whom they have to keep the price to a minimum. Low economic returns are one of the reasons for massive dropouts. The other factor is the inroads made by the mass-produced, factory-made plastic toys. Despite the low returns and the absence of any institutional support, dynamic folk toymaking is still alive but flickering. At present, there is hardly any design development but a lot of toymakers are aware of the importance of creativity and innovation in their profession. The dynamic folk toys are of such importance, it is sad that these have been neglected by society. But in recent times, some realisation has dawned among educationists and child development experts that factory-made toys cannot replace the artisans' toys which express our cultural roots. Our society will have to accept that toymakers have a much wider role than merely being producers of playthings. It is now high time that the artisan is recognised as a professional in his own right. A lot needs to be done to heal the damage done to the field of artisan-made toys. Some years ago, the Development Commissioner of Handicrafts, in collaboration with the National Institute of Design, had formulated proposals which would revitalise the sector. It is necessary to build toy museums, training centres and marketing tie-ups at the state as well as national level. It is essential to create ways and means by which talented toymakers, innovative educationists and committed designers team up to salvage this sector of our design heritage." (1987: 13-14). Since then Sudarshan Khanna has succeded in establishing within the National Institute of Design a specialized center for research on toys and for the development of local craftship in this field.

This scholar also participated in the Unesco-Workshops organized by the German non-profit making association Fördern durch Spielmittel - Spielzeug für behinderte Kinder, in translation Stimulation through Play - Toys for Handicapped Children (Immanuelkrichstrasse 24, D10405, Berlin). The aim of this project is to develop toys for children's rehabilitation. From the letter of invitation to the fourth UNESCO Symposium, Workshop and Exhibition in the fall of 1996, I quote the following about the background and aim of this project: "There are so many handicapped children on the planet that we feel it necessary to create a framework whereby the conditions for these children can be improved continually and more effectively. It is particularly important that handicaps are detected at an early stage, and considered. In this way, the children's mental and physical development can be encouraged from the beginning and their integration can be supported. Toys and learning aids play an importantrole in early childhood. Only good and suitable toys are needed which encourage to play as well as meet the highly functional and structural requirements of this task. With these ideas as a starting point, the Project Toys for Children's Rehabilitation was proposed in 1989 to be a contribution to the World Decade for Cultural Development and was recognized as a "World Decade Activity" by Unesco (registration N° 079). Within the framework of this Project, three Unesco Workshops have already been held. The participants of these Workshops developed a variety of designs for toys and created several prototypes. These drawings and models have been exhibited on various occasions in Germany and abroad. Many seminar results were published in 1992 and 1995 in a two-volume handbook Toy Workshop/Toys you can make yourself for handicapped and non-handicapped children. The fourth Unesco Workshop will continue this interdisciplinary experience. Again, new ideas and prototypes of toys and learning aids will be developed. This workshop will alsomake the results available to the parents of handicapped children and the teachers and staff of institutions where handicapped people work. The toy designs will be published, after having them carefully tested, in one or more handbooks with building instructions. Thus, great attention will be attached to turning designs into toys without using excessive amounts of materials or complicated techniques. We would like this Workshop to offer practical and theoretical help, but also moral support to specialists from countries having only small resources available for the development of toys."

Through this UNESCO project it becomes possible to develop new and interesting ways to use traditional and self-made toys. I hope that one day some Saharan and North African toys will come to serve the purpose of creating culturally and socially adapted toys that can be used in the rehabilitation of handicapped children and the development of other children as well. I have yet to mention a Tunisian initiative. When I revisited Tunisia in 1987, I talked with some officials of the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Tunis and the Musée du Bardo in Carthage, this after I noticed that in these museums and that of Sousse one did see nothing or almost nothing that referred to childhood or toy and play culture. At that moment a growing interest in these topics was revealed, which lasted in the creation of a research group on Tunisian games and toys from the origins till today. Although I have had no further news of this research group after the organization of a conference in Carthage in 1989 and the publication of the results of this conference (Jeu et Sports en Méditerranée, 1991), it is to hope that its ambitious aims will materialize.

In a chapter called The Education Revolution, published by UNICEF in 1999, it is stated that a comprehensive approach of learning for life necessitates that "children must be able to express their views, thoughts and ideas; they need opportunities for joy and play; they need to be comfortable with themselves and with others; and they should be treated with respect" (p. 22). This learning for life being described as follows: "This is the basis of a series of new approaches to teaching and learning that are designed to make the classroom experience more fulfilling and relevant... What will be required are more fundamental changes in education policies and processes to instill and stimulate a lifelong love for learning. This will enable people to supplement or even replace the skills they learned in childhood to respond to new needs over the course of their lives" (p. 18).

How could one formulate a better statement for using the children's creativity in making toys and in playing or even inventing games. A lot of skills learned in childhood are learned and exercised in play and toy making activities involving peers, older children and sometimes also adults. If adults want to make the classroom experience more fulfilling and relevant, is then the taking into account of children's play and toy making experiences not one of the best possibilities to achieve this? At least, if these adults are not controlling too much the children's spontaneous play activities or do not change them into real didactic exercises.

In one of UNICEF's websites, Teachers Talking about Learning, in the section entitled "Learning games from around the world" based on the Vietnamese Multigrade Teacher's Handbook, it is said "Children love to play games. Given the opportunity, they'll make up rules for new games, using balls, bottle caps, or whatever's available as the raw materials. Games that involve role-playing, solving simulated problems, or using specific skills and information can interest children in the curriculum and in learning. Games can be structured to lead to active learning. And this learning can go right to the development of communication, analysis, decision-making, and other thinking skills". In the next section "Journal activity: Games for learning" teachers are stimulated to "create learning activities based on the games that children play".

Three examples from sub-Saharan Africa show that it is possible to use games and toys for a development better adapted to children's needs and to the context in which they grow up. The first example refers to a program using play and toy making activities in order to sensibilize children for their rights and responsibilities in Zimbabwe ("We are also human beings.", 2001). Elisa K. Lwakatare of the Tanzanian Ministry of Education and Culture presented the second example during the 2nd International Toy Research Conference organized by the Nordic Center for Research on Toys and Educational Media in June 1999. This preschool education coordinator spoke among others about the necessity to make educational toys locally. This necessity was during the same congress also stressed by Arvind Kumar Gupta in relation to India. In his conference text Elisa K. Lwakatare writes: "Toys serve an important part in human life in the socialization process through the activity of play. In otherwords, the use of imported toys encourages the development of cultural norms and values that are foreign to Tanzania. While some toys are suitable and could be adopted into Tanzanian culture, the accessibility is still limited due to low purchasing power of many Tanzanian families. The thrust of Education and Training policy in Tanzania as spelt out in the current education reform is to promote equitable access to quality education and training. This means equitable access to toys as educational materials. In other words making the use of toys as an integrated aspect of the educational communicative process. This can only come about by promoting local design and manufacture of toys, preferably, using local mater-ials. The need for educational play materials, therefore, is enormous due to the promotion of pre-school education in this reform. The number of pre-schools in the country is growing rapidly. While they were only 247 in 1993, the number has risen to 3667 to date (1999). The rising in demand callsfor an equal rise in supply of play materials if this level of education has to be adequately supported. This provision of educational materials (toys) must be backed with a thorough research in order to come out with the most suitable designs and economic use of materials" (1999: 7-8). Even though this Tanzanian policy of developing locally educational toys adapted to local sociocultural and material conditions is in its beginning, it is already of great importance because it puts forward the problem and develops means to resolve it.

The third and up to now best example I know of using local toy and play culture is described in Early Childhood Matters (Bouma, 2000). This program for early childhood development is initiated, controlled and operated by Samburu parents of the Samburu District in Northern Kenya following societal changes linked to their semi-pastoral way of life. Traditionally the children where looked after and educated by grandmothers during the absence of the parents. These grandmothers care for the little children but at the same time they play with them and teach them poems, stories and songs. This is called the lmwate system, lmwate meaning enclosure. Although "this system of childcare has worked for countless generations" it felt into disuse till the parents realized something had to be done for their little children looked after by only somewhat older siblings or remaining alone. After discussion within the community and with the grandmothers still knowing well the lmwate, they decided to create a modern lmwate. They parents made an enclosure with a big house for the little ones serving as rest place and refuge. "Based on the advice from the elderly, they made a number oftoys, collected a number of songs, stories, riddles and poems, and designed and built play equipment. The toys included wooden and leather dolls and balls, clay and rattan animals, slings, rattles, catapults. The play equipment included climbing frames, raised platforms, miniature houses, swings, see-saws, hoops, crawling tunnels and so on... The programme is open every morning and can only be sustained by the input of parents. All the mothers take turns to work in the programme (p. 32-34). Soon this modern lmwate system was being supported by the community-based Samburu Early Childhood Development Project, a joint project of the Kenya Institute of Education and the Christian Children's Fund. "Apart from training on early childhood development activities, the project also provided training on health, nutrition and hygiene. It also helped the (lmwate) Committee with obtaining basic medicines and supplementary porridge for the children's midday meal, including enriched porridge for those who suffer from malnutrition. Once all these elements were in place the project stepped back. Its involvement is now confined to being available when the Committee itself approaches it, although the Committee does keep the project up to date with how everything is going (p. 34).

There is no doubt that this need for educational toys exists in North Africa and the Sahara and when I see all the toys made by Moroccan children still today it cannot be that difficult to find models for adapted educational toys that are cheap to produce and useful for preschools and primary schools. The remarkable development of preschool classes; for example in Morocco, could well make this necessary once school practice will take into account the value of children's play and toys, and this simply because Western educational toys are so expensive that most schools of the concerned regions have no means to buy them.

Whatever program that wishes to promote the well being, the development and the education of children could ameliorate its efficiency by using strategies that urges adults to listen to the targeted children and stimulate the participation of these children in the elaboration of the program. In a number of Early Childhood Matters, edited by the Bernard van Leer Foundation in February 1999, this foundation stresses that "In line with their age, cultural background and development opportunities, children are shown to be resourceful and valuable partners" (Number 91, p. 4). In an article published in the same number, David Tolfree and Martin Woodhead strongly "argue for practitioners, researchers and policy makers in early childhood development to listen to children" (Number 91, p. 19). In this context, the taking into account of children's play and toy making activities seems to be a very valuable way to listen to these children.

Following Flemming Mouritsen of the Danish Odense University in his working paper Child Culture - Play Culture the importance of research on children's play, games and toys clearly comes to the foreground. This scholar stresses the necessary shift from an adult perspective towards a child perspective: "Pedagogy has been based in theory and practice on what children are to become, before anyone has taken an interest in knowledge of what children and children's lives are". I think that the development of such a children's perspective really can be stimulated by observing and analyzing the play activities, games and toys of children with as few adult presuppositions as possible.

Finally, I would like to direct the attention of researchers and research institutes, especially those linked to non-western societies, to the evolution of childhood, play and toys in rural areas and in popular quarters of towns. I have the impression that not enough efforts and means are invested into research on children's cultures. Yet, if the situation of children and parents should improve in these areas and if the desertion of rural areas has to be diminished, a better understanding of childhood and its evolution will be indispensable.

INTERCULTURAL AND PEACE EDUCATION IN A WESTERN CONTEXT

The usefulness of the Saharan and North African play and toy heritage is not limited to North Africa and the Sahara or to the Third World as it is quite possible to integrate it in what is called intercultural, mundial or peace education, for example in Western Europe where many immigrants from these regions settled down decades ago.

As a volunteer of the Ghent Committee for UNICEF in Belgium, I worked out a small project I like to entitle "the world at play: intercultural education through toys and play". Within this project I started in 1989 to work with a preschool group of children of about five years. I showed them a short series of slides referring to the games of make believe of the Ghrib girls and boys of the Tunisian Sahara. In this series of slides are shown and the reality and the interpretation of this reality in the children's play and toy making activities.

The themes evoked are the life in the desert, the oasis, the animals, the household, the spinning, the weaving and the modernization of nomadic life. After the children have seen and commented the slides, I asked them to look for some advantages of living in the desert and some disadvantages of life where they grow up as well as for some inconveniences of life in the desert and some pleasant aspects of life in their homes. The children spoke, for example, of the sunny weather, the free space, the availability of play-mates in the desert in contrast to the rainy weather, the danger of playing outside, the loneliness of a lot of children in Belgium or the scarcity of water, food, toys and luxury goods in the desert versus the abundance of all this in Belgium.


After playtime, the girls and boys were divided in several little groups. Each group made something to create an oasis village.
Some children made a copy of the houses they did see on the slides, others made a palm tree, a well, a dromedary and so on. The materials at their disposal were waste material, plasticine, building blocs, green pipe cleaners and cardboard tubes of kitchen rolls. As I mentioned at the beginning of the session the relationship between the transhumance of Saharan nomads and that of the modern nomads of circuses and fairs, some children created with Lego blocks a caravan. Another task was to find among plastic animals those who can live in the desert and the oasis. At the end, the children learned a little song with a more or less known repetitive simple melody but with adapted words. Then they walked around their oasis village while singing and imitating the walking of a dromedary.


Since this experience, I used the same approach to the intercultural from the first to the sixth year of the primary school, each time during one hour. In the class I used a video of twenty minutes on the way children from Kenya in East Africa live and play, a video realized for the Dutch Committee for UNICEF. This way some Ghent children were confronted with a quite different material situation and family life but they also saw that the Kenyan children are creative in the making of their toys. This brought more than one primary school child to express spontaneously its admiration for this creativity and know-how. After the video, the same way of opposing what the pupils like or dislike in their own life and that of the African children is worked through. As I give this intercultural program in the lessons of religion or lay ethics, the teacher often continues this approach in a subsequent lesson and/or gives the children the possibility to make toys with waste material they bring from their homes. Sodoing a small pedagogical project is elaborated possibly giving rise to an exposition of the toys, designs and stories realized during this intercultural education program. It also occurred that I was asked to enter a pedagogical project related to a specific theme such as 'water', 'waste and recycling', 'environmental protection', 'children's creativity'. In those cases I selected a series of slides on play activities and toys from the Tunisian Sahara and Morocco to exemplify certain topics linked to these themes.

Another experience, I have lived through in April 1992, brought me into contact with two groups of completely or partially deaf children. The program lasted for half a day. As the possibilities of verbal expression are limited, I stressed the visual aspect by showing first the already mentioned video followed by a series of 50 slides on the life and the games of the Ghrib children. Afterwards the pupils of the specialized primary school made toys with waste material, musical instruments and so on, just as they had seen on the video and the slides. This first attempt clearly shows the usefulness of such an approach, although it would be necessary in order to be more efficient to insert in the pedagogical process an introduction of at least one hour to transmit to such deaf children the verbal information that makes the visual information more easily understood.


In the context of a UNICEF-day, organized by the Ghent Committee for UNICEF on May 10th, 1998, it became once more clear that children are easily stimulated by examples of toys made by Moroccan children to create themselves toys with waste material.

What I found very stimulating and useful in such playful approaches to intercultural education is, next to the stimulation of the creativity and personal effort of these Ghent children, the promotion of a more positive image of Third World children, an image that very often is unilaterally negative and based on images of sick, miserable or from hunger dying children, images one regularly sees on television, as if this is the only reality of Third World children.

The results of these pedagogical actions have convinced me of the certainly limited but creative possibility to use play activities and toys for an intercultural purpose. By doing this it may be feasible to prepare young children to become adolescents and adults less prejudiced towards the social, cultural or ethnic minorities or majorities living with them, on the one hand, and towards peoples and societies of foreign countries on the other hand.

Lazarine Bergeret of the International Federation for the Education of Parents is sharing this idea. In her article on dolls in the toy-library she writes that the curiosity of those working there extends from the toys to all cultures, all latitudes, all periods, all civilizations and the enrichment of their information brings them slowly to look for a common message of humanity for which play could be a common language. Maybe then dolls might be, if not lend in a toy-library, at least be exhibited there, just as it could be done in a school. Lazarine Bergeret continues by saying: often the teachers I could inform or stimulate to take advantage of the workshops, organized within the exposition on the dolls of the world in the Musée de l'Homme (in 1983), telephoned to tell me of their observation of an enrichment in the children's improvisations but also of a better understanding between children of different ethnic groups. It was not the anticipating choice of the parents that determined the style of thedolls but a first step towards a possible empathy through the sole confrontation with the dolls of the others. I cannot affirm or deny that it is necessary to have dolls in a toy-library. Each team of toy-library workers has to think about its own choices, however I know that each child writes its own history through the changing succession of its choices. And perhaps this history would be less violent if already during childhood the dolls of the others were known and accepted (1985: 164, 166).

Lazarine Bergeret and myself, we find ourselves in good company in this field as already in 1989, the European Council's Workgroup for the Encounter of Cultures, Division of Education of the Council for Cultural Cooperation, included in its recommendations for intercultural pedagogical activities the theme of play and toys (p. 9-10).

Therefore it is necessary to link an intercultural approach of play, into which fits my research, to a playful approach of the intercultural. This is essential as the individual of today, and surely the one of tomorrow, will find it difficult to survive in a local and world-wide environment, more and more multicultural and interdependent, if he has not learnt to develop a personality able to understand and the universality and the specificity of the living conditions of his own group and of the other societies all over the world. I hope that this way the youngsters and the adults can function in a more appropriate manner in the multicultural societies that have developed recently in today's larger cities.