More Nambya textbooks in process

After the publication of primary school textbooks written in Nambya in 2010, and their successful implementation, work is now underway for a secondary school series.

Then Nambya Cultural Association has an active group of teachers and editors who have already done books for Form 1 and 2 and hope to have those for Forms 3 and 4 completed in another year.

An urgent factor pushing forward the development of the new series is that Nambya will soon be examinable at the O and A levels, as the Ministry of Education announced in November 2014.

This process is also an opportunity to review some fine points in the recommended orthography of the language.  Accordingly, the language committee met with a linguist from the University of Zimbabwe on 14 April, 2015 and suggested some small revisions from the orthography used in the recent 2nd edition of the Nambya Dictionary.

At that meeting, Dr. Jorge Rocha, a genetic historian from Portugal, described some of the research he has been doing on genetic connections between groups in Southern Africa and invited the Nambya community to participate.