Storytelling has, as far back as I can remember, been an integral part of our culture and our pedagogy – how we learn. Parents told us stories of their growing up, how they came first in class. Aunties and uncles told us stories about events that happened before we were born. Grandparents weren't left out. Sunday school teachers taught us stories from the Bible. And the list goes on.
For me personally, while growing up, Tales by Moonlight and the Sunday evening stories by Aunty on NTA were the highlights of my TV-watching week. I'd wait up on Sunday evenings, praying that whoever had to do my braids for the week didn't require me to sit facing them – so I could watch the TV.
Somehow, over time, stories evolved to become primarily moral instruction. They instruct us and entertain us. And moral instruction stories are good. But if we make this the only use of stories, we rob them of their opportunity to instruct and entertain us in other areas.
Why can't we use stories to learn more about the world around us? To understand the rules by which the universe operates? To fall in love with science – not as a subject to pass, but as a way of seeing?
Consider what happened when you first heard the story of Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree. Whether or not an apple literally hit him on the head, the story does something a textbook definition of gravity cannot: it makes you feel the moment of realisation. You are there. You wonder the same thing he wondered. And suddenly gravity is not a formula – it is a question a curious person asked, and spent a lifetime answering.
Story in science
Alexander Fleming wasn't looking for penicillin. He came back from holiday to find mould growing on a petri dish – and instead of throwing it away, he noticed that the bacteria around it had died. The story of penicillin is the story of a man who paid attention. That framing – science as the art of noticing – changes how a child approaches a laboratory. They are no longer afraid of making mistakes. They are watching for what the mistake reveals.
Or consider the story of Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who grew up in London with dyslexia and was told science wasn't for her. She became a space scientist and science communicator. When African children hear that story, something shifts. Science stops being a foreign country whose passport they were never issued, and starts to feel like somewhere they might also belong.
This is not a soft, feel-good point. There is hard evidence behind it. We know that dual coding – combining visuals with narrative – improves learning retention significantly. We know that children voluntarily re-read stories for pleasure in a way they will never voluntarily re-read a textbook. We know that when students see characters who look like them solving problems they recognise – power cuts, water access, farming challenges – the activation energy required to engage with science drops dramatically.
The problem in Sub-Saharan Africa isn't that children can't do science. It's that by age fourteen, most have already decided science isn't for them – because nothing in their science education ever looked like them or their world.
Eighty percent of students across Sub-Saharan Africa score below minimum proficiency in science and mathematics. Not because they lack intelligence. But because they are being asked to learn through examples that don't reflect their reality: snow they have never seen, ecosystems they will never encounter, scientists who do not look like them. We are teaching the right content through the wrong story.
The solution is not to lower the standard of the science. It is to raise the standard of the storytelling around it. To say: here is a girl named Amara in Lagos who notices that the water from the well makes people sick and decides to understand why. Here is a boy named Kwame in Accra who wants to know why the maize on his family's farm keeps failing in the dry season. Their curiosity is the same curiosity that drives every great scientist. The only difference is whether the story we tell them gives them permission to see themselves as scientists too.
Stories do not replace rigour. They create the conditions for it. A child who is captivated by a story about Amara testing water samples is a child who will pay attention when you explain what bacteria are. A child who cares about Kwame's maize is a child who will want to understand soil chemistry. Narrative is not the alternative to science education – it is the on-ramp.
We have always known this. Every grandmother who ever sat children around a fire and explained why the tortoise has a cracked shell was using story to transmit complex knowledge about consequence, patience, and the physics of falls. We did not discover storytelling as a pedagogical tool. We inherited it. We just stopped using it for everything except morality – and in doing so, we accidentally locked the door to science for a generation of children who could have been the ones to open it wider for the rest of us.
It is time to use the key we already have.
Join the movement
At STEMcom Africa, we create STEM comics featuring African characters, African settings, and science applied to problems African students actually live with – from power cuts to water access to climate and farming. Our comics are free, mobile-optimised, and built to work without electricity or reliable internet, because that is the reality of the classrooms we are designing for.
We are targeting one million students by 2029. Not because it is a round number. Because there are at least a million children on this continent who have already been told, in a thousand quiet ways, that science is not for them – and we intend to tell a different story.
👉 Explore the library – Join the movement.
