Honey, who shrunk the bookshelf?

My Parents immigrated to South Africa in the ’50s. They brought with them their excellent UK education, including an embedded reading habit, which they passed on to their children by ensuring that each of us could read at the earliest age and giving us books to call our own.

Passing on the love of reading is my greatest gift to my children. I wish I could give it to every child in South Africa.

Why is this important? Children who can’t read are at an immediate disadvantage. Practical applications apart, reading provides a context within which we understand how the world works.
Through books — fiction and non-fiction — we reach beyond ourselves to learn about others. We are confident that we can hold our own wherever we are, because we know more than we would if we didn’t read.

I’m fairly sure that Bantu education, which ensured black South Africans were educated only to a level that prepared them for unskilled labour, did not include in its plans the development of a reading culture in black families.

The recipients of Bantu education are my peers; their children, those of my children.

The sins visited on millions of fathers and mothers by apartheid continue to be visited upon their children.

Fifteen years into a democratic South Africa, my children go out into the world with a singular advantage over the majority of their black counterparts — they have well-educated parents who encouraged them to read.

This is why the government’s literacy programmes need to be fast-tracked in schools. It’s why we should be building libraries, not closing them. It’s why it’s so important that every child has access to books that they can call their own. And it’s why the calls on Trevor Manuel to remove VAT from books must continue.

On Wednesday he will present his annual budget. In 2004, despite pleas from across the country, he rejected the VAT-off- books petition co-ordinated by journalist and activist Terry Bell, citing difficulty in defining books for tax purposes, and claiming that only higher-income households and the publishers and distributors would benefit.

After pulling my eyebrows back to their normal position, I call Bell to find out what has happened since then and hear there is a move to take up the fight again. Among those behind it is Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer. I asked her to comment :

“We have a very high level of illiteracy and semi-literacy in our country. Full literacy is the basis of education, once the ABC has been learnt.

“Schools need libraries, communities need libraries, and the prohibitive cost of books, while VAT is levied, means the schools and municipal public libraries cannot afford to buy books.

“Whatever other conditions have resulted in the incredibly low matriculation passes this past year, failure of candidates to be fully literate in terms of vocabulary and comprehension, which comes only from reading, is the result. S tudents do not read enough. C hange the dismal ‘outcomes’ by abolishing VAT.”

If you support this move, you still have a couple of days to send a tip to Trevor: www.treasury.gov.za/tipsfortrevor.asp.

http://www.thetimes.co.za/