CAN WE GET THE YOUTH TO READ AND WRITE MORE

A few years ago, a friend from Lesotho became engaged to an American. As they began to lay out plans for their traditional wedding, my friend told her fiancé to do what any 21st century person does - Google a traditional Basotho wedding.

A search in Google yielded results and a short click into Wikipedia, he found words and phrases such as, lobola, the transfer of brides, negative effects of lobola, extravagance and dissolution.

This information painted a monolithic picture of our traditional wedding ceremonies and also combined all of the SADC region’s tradition into one word – bride price. Upon learning the information that had been picked up from an internet search, my friend and her family explained their customary marriage to her fiancé and his family and ensured the tradition and culture would not be watered down as told by the four or so European names that had claimed to edit the information.

Story telling has been passed down from generation to generation.
We used to sit around fires in rural homes and listen to our grandparent orate tales of giants, and warriors in the most beautiful way that our language string words together.

If we were lucky enough, we came across books such as Indaba, My Children by Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. There has been a paradigm shift to digital platforms, the growth of e-commerce and the rise of information in your palm, and advent of everything now has also meant less time to do what we used to enjoy doing when we were younger.

This lack of African stories told by Africans begs the question; is the culture of writing down our stories as opposed to oral narration strong enough to have grown roots on the continent? I believe it is on the rise enough for there to be concerted efforts to remove barriers in the telling of our stories.

In my opinion it is inaccurate to say Africans do not read or are reading less. All that does is raise the question; what material is there to read? What are the systems which we have in place doing to ensure it is not such an uphill battle?
It is perhaps more apt to say our literacy rates are not growing fast enough and this is due to the accessibility factor I mentioned in the introduction.

We cannot talk about accessibility and trends and norms without highlighting that intergenerational critical debate is frowned upon in most, if not all, African cultures. In this way our voices are stifled and we are simply not used to using them to contribute to what is going on around us. In most cultures when elders are talking the young people leave the room and cannot engage in those discussions. Not speaking over your elders is a shared value which we walk around with as Africans. It doesn’t matter what contribution you have to what is being discussed but we all generally know not to interject when those older than us are speaking.

The suppression of our voices in that way makes it difficult to suddenly use them in literary spaces. In Africa we still believe that knowledge comes with age, which is a viewpoint we should consider somewhat circumspectly. People seem to prefer learning from elders, and in the process rejecting self enquiry, and research. Critical argument is seen as disrespectful in a culture that maintains that age means wisdom.

Without denigrating the way we interact with our elders we are at a point where we need to identify what our line is so we can ride that line. So I argue that we carry a lot of that cultural adherence in being silenced and our opinions not being sought and it manifesting in us censoring ourselves. As a result we are conditioned to look outwards for commentary on things which pertain to us directly. As young people we are stuck in this limbo of wanting to learn from our elders but also having something to say and then worrying incessantly about no one wanting to hear it.

All of this happens because our voices and our opinions have not been nurtured well enough to serve our own interests.
The African reliance on the spoken word is widely accepted as among the main reasons we don’t write or read as much as we could. It is often argued that our lack of interest in reading is attributable to our strong oral tradition. Now, there is no denying that in the absence of written records, Africans developed a highly effective oral tradition.

This was necessary for survival. Without the luxury of written diaries, notes and reminders, Africans had no alternative but to commit all important matters to memory.
However, in a time when we can both Google and recite our praise names from memory we have to boldly write our stories.

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