Browsing by Author "Caroline C. Hunt"

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Kimenye’s Moses series and implications on pleasure, neglect, and the child reader: A transnational re-reading of Barbara Kimenye’s Moses series
(Centre for Democracy, Research and Development, 2026) Alice Jossy Kyobutungi Tumwesigye; Caroline C. Hunt
The Moses books by Barbara Kimenye, long popular with young readers in Uganda, deserve more exposure outside their country. Published from 1968 to 1998, these 15 novels depict Moses and his friends and their struggles at boarding school. We argue that Kimenye flouted Ugandan expectations of the time—that books for the young should be didactic—and that her position is significant. We also argue that although Kimenye uses the familiar tradition of the school story, she moves beyond that tradition to challenge outdated attitudes and expose some of the corrupt practices of her time. The wide variety of literature series has come into greater focus in the half-century since Cawelty, Radner, and others drew long-overdue critical attention to popular fiction. The importance of series fiction for young readers is now well accepted, starting from the Stratemeyer Syndicate and moving toward (but not ending with) modern-day television, film, and online series. Outside of the United States and Great Britain, however, literature series seems to have received less attention than it deserves from scholars of children’s and Young Adult literature. One series that deserves a closer look is the Moses books, by Barbara Kimenye, whose popular Moses series offers much to readers across the globe. Begun in the tumultuous post-independence period and continuing for over thirty years, these books drew many young readers into reading for pleasure—a goal that may seem obvious from a twenty-first-century Western point of view but that was, we suggest, not always the accepted attitude among Ugandan educators and scholars. We also argue for the importance of Kimenye’s careful selection of topics in the Moses books—quite different from many of her other works, even those for children. Gender stereotypes and pervasive corruption are two such topics that we explore.
Socio-Cultural Dynamics in Kimenye’s Moses Series and Implications on Societal Understanding of Pleasure, Neglect and the Child Reader: A Transnational Re-reading of Barbara Kimenye’s Moses Series
(Journal of African Interdisciplinary Studies, 2026-06) Alice Jossy Kyobutungi Tumwesigye; Caroline C. Hunt
The exclusion of Barbara Kimenye’s Moses series from the Uganda Syllabi is striking, given its proven capacity to elicit laughter and sustained readership. Ugandan classrooms, however, continue to privilege didactic utility over aesthetic pleasure, framing literacy as preparation for examination. This orientation shifts attention away from texts that encode local experiences of corruption and gender stereotyping and contradiction through humour, so Kimenye’s work is received for linguistic flair rather than critical potential. Juxtaposing Ugandan curricular documents with American Young Adult teaching notes, this article argues that the divergence underscores competing epistemologies of literacy. In Uganda, reading remains tethered to moral instruction and assessment metrics; in American classrooms, the same texts cultivate voice, timing, and reading for pleasure. We suggest that reclaiming Kimenye is therefore not merely canon recovery but a pedagogical intervention that repositions Ugandan learners as readers first, not test-takers, and fosters critical, pleasure-driven literacy that persists beyond the classroom.