|
Early Friday afternoon, and the Karoo sun is searingly bright, hot even though it must be winter. I deduce the season now, rather than remember it, because I know I must have only recently turned seventeen. Old enough to take the exam for my learner's licence and get into the driver's seat at last. Just to be at the wheel of our battered yellow Datsun bakkie (these are the days before Nissan) seems the height of heady independence to me.
But first there is this room at the Provincial Traffic Department, with its rows of benches, at the front the easel with its black-lettered eye-test chart. The stocky traffic officer gives instructions with a mixture of stern and jovial banter. He has a uniform; he knows he has authority. Hundreds of young men and women - still schoolboys and schoolgirls here - have passed, or failed, under his watchful eye. There are only about five of us today, scrubbed-up, shiny with nerves and eager expectation, keen to wrest the first keys of adulthood from our parents' hands.
There is one exception. In the back row, his rangy blue-overalled frame jammed into the bench, is a black man, much older than the rest of us. At least fifty, a grandfather. He has taken off his floppy khaki hat and twists it in his hands. The wrinkles on the dark nubs of his knuckles are engrained with dust. The black apples of his high cheekbones gleam; there are curly sprinkles of white in the bearding at his chin. A dignified face, but I can smell his sweat. Brought to town by a farmer who has gone to buy supplies at the co-op while his worker takes the exam - so that he can drive the truck out on the main roads beyond the farm's boundaries, can take sheep or cattle or cabbages to market.
The traffic cop scans the list of names. Mine, being near the beginning of the alphabet, has a good chance of being called out first. And it is, and I must stand back in the aisle to do the rudimentary eye test, all other eyes on me. I am not sure if I am cheating or not, can't tell whether I really do see all I think I see so clearly, because the patterns of the smaller lines are already engraved in my memory: I'd already read them closer at hand, nervously, compulsively, when I first came into the room, before we were hustled to our seats.
The other girls and boys are all from the Afrikaans school: a Du Plessis perhaps, some Van Heerdens? I can't recall, because it's only the farm labourer I remember, that the cop called him "Jy daar". The Xhosa name difficult, no need to bother to pronounce it properly. "Jy daar." "Ekskuus, baas."
Do I really remember the details of this exchange? Was the eye test then, or later when I did my driver's? Am I embroidering, filling in the gaps? But whatever the details, the words, the atmosphere in that room remains unforgettable, how the man's nervousness filled it, the ripe scent of his sweat in the heat. I remember him shuffling the multiple choice exam paper at his desk, across the aisle and one row back from me. Without looking, I knew he was staring at the page, struggling with the simple words as we scribbled, and I willed him to understand, to know the answers, to take up his pen. I could feel the tentativeness with which he raised his hand to ask a question, and knew he was lost. The sentences had defeated him. Vivid, painful, the sense of humiliation in that room: a small round man uniformed in power and a tall man in blue overalls with his helplessness written all over his face. While a handful of white schoolchildren race ahead in life, fuelled by white privilege, armed with the power of those twenty-six lead soldiers, the alphabet, to make the world their own. (Though the powers-that-were then would certainly have preferred to credit Benjamin Franklin as the originator of that famous quote - "Give me twenty-six lead soldiers and I will conquer the world" - over its other cited source, Karl Marx …)
Years later, in a deeper, darker winter on the east coast of Scotland, I was overcome by homesickness and a surfeit of words. I was heartsick of dissecting poems I could never hope to write, as if I knew better, and being told to apply some framework I had no faith in, to someone else's creative work. I watched my country from afar as it opened up to its new challenges, blossoming into a different place as the '94 elections approached, and I decided to kick over the traces of literary theory and deathly academia and turn to something of substance, something that would "make a difference".
I had the money for another year's study after the English Literature Masters, but the long haul of a literature PhD was no longer a desirable option. But I fell, gladly, into the Applied Linguistics department - still the world of words, always, for me, but this time at an intriguingly pragmatic level. Language, and how we learn and teach it; how language spreads, changes and is controlled. As I outlined my essays on the new South African language policy and the government's papers on language in schools, I learned not just about the future, but also about the past, and often as I tracked the dynamic changes back home, I thought of that man wrestling with language and the system. Did he pass the exam in the end, was he still working on the same farm now, was he hoping the world would spill out its rewards for him at last after all these long, hard years, now freedom had come? And what of all the other South Africans like him, for whom this dawn came late in life, and those for whom the party symbol on the voting paper was essential because the words meant nothing?
This awareness was part of the impetus behind my thesis that year, on adult literacy programmes in the new South Africa (still in a box in the garage: I am afraid to dig it out and look at it again for fear of all its glaring inadequacies). Naïve, idealistic, impassioned, I translated into numbers the things I already knew from experience to be true, the statistics on illiteracy in South Africa, and for the first time dwelt deeply on the far-reaching consequences of not being able to read. How much harder it would be for the new democracy to grow stronger when people could not read the papers for themselves and enter into the realm of written debate. How could health targets be reached, disease effectively combated, women's position improved, without education disseminated through reading? How very vulnerable individuals - and countries - are without literacy.
I spun out solutions from the success stories of other countries - hours and hours in the National Library on George IV Bridge and in Kinnells Coffee Shops on Victoria Street, immersed in case studies from Chile, Cape Verde, Ethiopia, Tanzania. If any of these countries could do it, we could follow their lead into greater emancipatory literacy. Brazil's Paolo Freire and his "pedagogy of the oppressed" inspired me. I read greedily about the campaigns in his native country and of Nicaragua's National Literacy Crusade where in the early 1980s tens of thousands of volunteer teachers were trained and sent out to teach people to read and write.
Was this, our new beginning, not the right psychological moment to seize the day, prove the pen mightier than the sword, raise every inspiring cliché like a banner and march into a fully literate future? Surely there was enough good will around - or at least enough white liberal guilt - for young school leavers to take a gap year, or six months to teach those less fortunate some basic skills? Conscription to the army was till only very recently part of the fabric of society; surely, given the right motivational campaign, the government could sell the idea of a voluntary period for all to bright young men and women eager to make a difference, and so bring the miracle of the written word to the masses? For those with families and successful careers in the cities, surely a couple of hours a week could be gleaned from them, for a great harvest of words. And the retired, the healthy elderly, seeking to continue to make a meaningful contribution - wouldn't we find good mentors and administrators and teachers in their midst? No matter what people's field of speciality, if they could read and write themselves, with some focused training they could also teach others. There would be no forced service, but there would be a sense of missing out, of not being part of the exciting new enterprise of this country, if you chose not to take part.
Motivation would be vital, the campaign would have to be "sold", the nation would have to "buy in" to the great idea. You'd need advertising, the involvement of all media, but with the right leadership and belief progress would be made, so that reading and writing would become words on everyone's lips, and a pen would be poised in every hand. A huge logistical challenge, yes, but what a difference it could make if even only a small part of the community could be mobilised.
Later, I watched the furore around the "Zuma Year" from abroad, with a wry sense of my own misplaced optimism. And yet, there is a difference between a small sector of the professional community being pressed into forced service, and shorter-term or occasional voluntary work drawn from across the nation once people have been persuaded of the principle. Logistically it would be impossible to involve every sector of society anyway, even were they willing, and there would be many details to work out in pilot programmes.
But despite the grand idea of the thesis never coming to practical fruition, and now being consigned to a box in the garage, I am heartened by how much is being done in South Africa by many organisations concerned with literacy, small and large. The HelpAge International website has positive feedback from older literacy learners, like the story of two older men who got jobs as security guards after they'd acquired the necessary skills to read visitors' names. Or 82-year-old Mrs Mchunu: "I am very happy because now when I attend meetings, I am able to understand the minutes of the meetings and can also contribute. In the past I felt as though I was crippled. I wasn't even able to help my grandchildren with their homework … You're never too old to learn. For me it was like stepping out of the darkness into the light."
An interesting element of the HelpAge project is that older people were involved at all levels of the programme. People aged between 58 and 81 were trained as facilitators to help others read, count, measure and follow instructions - simple yet life-changing skills taught, and a productive role created for many who would no longer be in paid employment.
Elsewhere others are doing equally good work. I know there are initiatives in several of South Africas official languages all over the country though it would take a more informed person than myself and more space than I have here to list them adequately all working hard to decrease the illiteracy level (14 percent is one figure I've seen quoted, defined as those fifteen years and above who cannot read and write. Here are two (very) different sources with the same basic information, the CIA's publication The World Factbook, www.cia.gov and the UNDP's Human Development Reports, www.undp.org.)
I hope that in the LitNet space we'll have a chance to hear more on this subject from sources on the ground, in action as it were. After all, a forum such as this is possible only through reading and writing, and all the hot air about the democratising force of the internet holds true only once people have the skills to competently grasp it as a communicational tool.
Of course, and sometimes to my regret, I am no longer directly involved in basic literacy, working as I am on a different face of the literacy range. (Though, facetiously: if I had a rand for every time a letter arrived in my office addressed to the Blake Friedmann Literacy Agency, I'd be a rich woman!) Still deeply involved with words, though, not at grassroots level, but firmly in the business of telling stories, or helping others to make their stories heard. I believe that there are stories that can be empowering to people even before they can read the words themselves, that what one can learn from stories can be immensely liberating, even pre-literately though to read novels, histories, essays for yourself makes the world even richer, and a very different place. Basic literacy and numeracy the ability to read labels and prices in a supermarket yourself, or write your own name, with all that this new competence entails is a way to walk from A to B. Being able to read articles and books for your own pleasure or edification is the sprint or the toyi-toyi, whatever you make of it, a whole new way of moving through the world.
I realise, with a sense of my own good fortune, that some of my earliest clear memories are about words and writing, reading and stories. Colouring in the eyes of the children in my mother's beautiful illustrated Child's Garden of Verses one boring Sunday afternoon when everyone else was asleep. With a dark marker pen which, terrifyingly, spread to black out the children's rosy faces. My sister Janet teaching me my ABC before I went to school, with home-drawn flash-cards: Apple, Bee, Carrot … Then, using my new-found writing skills, laboriously writing my name on my mother's beautifully embroidered dressing-table cloths - initials and surname for some reason, very formally (perhaps I'd seen her labelling my sisters' clothes for school). Indelible marking pen again. Not quite as finely and discreetly inscribed as I'd hoped. My poor mother. Though of course my guilt was plain for all to see, as obvious as any gangland graffiti artist's, and I remember the shame of the spanking I got afterwards very clearly as well …
My sister Mary Lou reading to me, in daily instalments, the books that have remained firm favourites ever since: The Silver Sword, I Am David, To Kill a Mocking Bird. Books which, when I acquired the powers, I read and reread and which remain in my Top Fifty all-time greats - and To Kill a Mocking Bird in the Top Ten.
Reading is the dimension of life I cannot imagine doing without. As Alberto Manguel writes in Into the Looking-Glass Wood: "What remains invariable is the pleasure of reading, of holding a book in my hands and suddenly feeling that peculiar sense of wonder, recognition, chill or warmth that for no discernible reason a certain string of words sometimes evokes."
Another vivid memory fragment is the moment when I snuggled up to my grandfather, who was visiting from Scotland, and peered over his elbow at the picture book he was reading to me - a library book about a plucky mouse, I recall - and realised I was actually reading with him - those squiggles were real, explicable words! A moment of epiphany, the beginning of a great and continuing adventure. As Mrs Mchunu says: "Like stepping into the light."
HelpAge weblink
Works by the author:
Weather
Eye |
Isobel Dixon was born in Umtata and grew
up in Graaff-Reinet. She studied at Stellenbosch University and with the
help of the Patrick and Margaret Flanagan Scholarship, completed Masters
degrees in English Literature and Applied Linguistics at Edinburgh University.
She works at the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency in London, where she represents
over 30 authors from around the world, among them several prominent South
Africans. She translated Marita van der Vyver's novel Breathing Space
(Penguin, 2000) into English and her poetry collection Weather Eye,
which won the Sanlam Prize, was published by Carapace Poets in South Africa
in 2001.
Click here to receive our newsletter - your weekly culture fix!