8 SEPTEMBER 1999
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
Madam Speaker
On this day, people in practically every country, including ours, are celebrating International Literacy Day. As Minister of Education, it is a privilege for me to join hands symbolically with them in an act of universal solidarity and resolve. The main pu rpose of this statement is to begin a debate on the subject, in this House and in our country.
I want to say why it is important that we South Africans should think seriously about literacy and about why it is vital to the development of our country, to the deepening of our democracy and to the empowerment of all our people.
Today, if I had felt so inclined, I could have sat at my computer, accessed the Internet, and read the daily edition of the New York Times six or seven hours before most Americans had woken up.
Who among us can dimly remember when fast news was sent in broken sentences by telegraph and cable, and really fast news came chattering over a telex machine? People talked then about the marvels of technology and the shrinking globe. Today, such marvels s eem quaint and hopelessly limited.
Each of us here has instant access to an exponentially exploding flow of information, generated by someone next door or ten thousand kilometres away. True, much of it is inconsequential rubbish, inscribed on a world-wide electronic tabloid. So be it. The I nternet is a house of many mansions, or at least sites. The Internet opens up whole libraries at a touch. Thousands of knowledgeable discourses and scientific debates are streaming over the globe by satellite as I speak, racing across computer screens in a ll the world's languages.
Yet 140 million people in sub-Saharan Africa cannot read or write. More than 60 per cent of them are women. In South Africa 3,5 million adults over the age of 16 have never attended school. At least another 2,5 million have stayed a few years in school but through lack of practice can no longer remember how to read or write. So at least 6 million South Africans, who are a quarter of the adult population, are shut off from the written word. The figure may be as high as 40% of adults.
Many millions more, including young people, read and write at such a rudimentary level that these skills are of no practical value to themselves or anyone else.
So, as we sit in this chamber, celebrating International Literacy Day, on the edge of the new millennium, let us remember them. In a continent crying out for rebirth, the mental space they occupy - these citizens of a world without letters or numbers - is almost as confined as their ancestors in times immemorial.
In South Africa, the greatest shame is that today's condition of illiteracy was avoidable. It could by now have been expunged from our society, if the masters of minority racial rule and the criminal apartheid project had not been so terrified of a literat e black population.
A fraction of this country's wealth, ploughed annually over generations into reading and writing and books and newspapers for the rural and urban poor, would have yielded a magnificent harvest.
We would not be where we are now, as a nation, weighed down by the historic burden of injustice and inequality, struggling half-educated to cross the threshold of the 21st century.
Sol Plaatje was the fiercely proud offspring of literate, independent peasant farmers in the Free State. His greatest grief was to see the thriving South African peasantry destroyed, dispossessed of their own land, crops and herds by the evil Land Acts of the new Union Government, condemned to wander the country as sharecroppers, migrant labourers, proletarians or domestic servants in the new mining and industrial towns.
Sol Plaatje lived by the written word. He was a teacher for a while. He became a messenger in the telegraph office, then a court interpreter, fluent in Setswana, Xhosa, Zulu, English and Dutch, a journalist, a founder of newspapers in the Setswana he loved , and a frequent contributor to the English-language press. He translated the plays of Shakespeare into Setswana and collected anthologies of Setswana proverbs, working at times as a researcher for the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. He was the first black South African novelist.
Sol Plaatje's formal education in a Lutheran mission school stopped before the end of the primary grades, but he was a lifelong learner before the term was coined, and he became a giant of South African letters and politics.
Plaatje lived and died at the crucial intersection of South Africa's history, where a cowardly imperial government created an overtly racist constitution, and handed the reins of power to the forces of reaction and oppression. He experienced dispossession. He fought against it. He foretold the bleak future of repression and resistance through which generations more were condemned to pass until liberation day.
From how many Plaatjes, men and women, were the blessings of literacy withheld? And are still withheld, as we haul ourselves out of the morass, a century later?
We have heard the stories of President Thabo Mbeki describing how he learnt the social realities that informed his politics in his parents' shop in the rural Transkei, by reading and writing the letters that passed between illiterate migrant workers and th e families they left behind. I am sure many members of this House recall interpreting the world for adults who could neither read nor write. As a child in such times one learnt the ways of the world through this service; one learnt of marital infidelities, and longings, and loneliness, and financial hardship and pain and love and suffering.
Literacy is about retaining dignity and self-respect in a lettered world. It is about functioning to the full as a human being among one's peers. It is about the empowerment of the spirit, the informing of judgement, the development of skill and understand ing, fulfilment of citizenship.
Above all, literacy is a prerequisite for the achievement of true equality in a country that remains viciously segmented by educational deprivation even when the apparatus of discriminatory laws has been swept away.
Shall we, therefore, Madam Speaker, allow ourselves to entertain the thought that the guarantees in the Bill of Rights are, in practice, more accessible to literate South Africans than to illiterate South Africans who being denied more than only dignity? T hey are being denied access in one way or another to almost every other right in the Bill of Rights:
"Everyone is equal before the law." How do you even access the law if you don't understand it?
"Everyone has the right to choose their profession freely." If you are illiterate you are inevitably condemned to a life of manual or domestic labour or no employment at all; your lack of choice means you are actually enslaved by your illiteracy and by the lack of options open to you.
"Everyone has the right to privacy." How do you even read the search warrant if you are illiterate?
"Everyone has the right to freedom of expression". In today's society the word has no power if it cannot be written or read.
"Every citizen has the right to choose their profession freely." If slavery is the lack of choice, then slavery once more is imposed upon the illiterate.
"Everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing." Bonds, leases, contracts all require literacy, and so the illiterate find this right abrogated
"Everyone has the right to freedom of movement." How do you even read the train timetable?
It ought to be doubly disturbing because the social effects of illiteracy are so predictably passed from one generation to another, especially in conditions of poverty. There are many exceptions, of course, but it is sadly true that the children of poverty -stricken and illiterate South Africans are more likely to be caught in the trap of poor education and poor economic prospects.
The consequences are inescapable. If we, the generation of 1994, fail to eradicate illiteracy now, we pass an inexcusable social legacy of incapacity and alienation to our successors.
May I remind my colleagues in the House, Madam Speaker, that section 29 of our Constitution establishes the right of every person to a basic education, and the wording of this right, with unmistakable intention, includes adult basic education. This is not a right from which the state will easily take refuge in the defence of "resource constraints" and "practical possibilities". I make bold to say that the right is peremptory, and our duty inescapable.
That is why the condition of our adult basic education and training system, through which literacy is achieved by illiterate South Africans, is so lamentable.
At my first press briefing as Minister of Education, I announced my wish to eradicate illiteracy in South Africa in five years. Having been told that this was admirable but utopian, I modified my position. I announced that I wished to break the back of ill iteracy in five years, and that is where I shall stand fast. In the face of manifest and intractable injustice, utopianism coupled with practical action is the only principled position available.
No adult South African citizen should be illiterate in the 21st century, but millions will be unless we mobilise a social movement to bring reading, writing and numeracy to those who do not have it.
We need a national strategy to deal with this priority, and I begged for such a movement in my recent "Call to Action: Mobilising citizens to build a South African education and training system for the 21st Century", a national mobilisation of all the sect ors of our society.
Firstly, all employers, including employers in national, provincial and local governments, must be encouraged to run or support literacy programmes for their employees. Many do so already, and some are leaders in this field. But a major opportunity opens u p through the introduction of the skills levy, and the establishment of Sector Education and Training Authorities under the National Skills Authority. I am consulting the Minister of Labour with a view to ensuring that we target a massive increase in the p rovision of adult basic education and training through this route. Illiterate citizens who are not in employment would also have access to such programmes through the National Skills Fund.
Secondly, we must stimulate the civic virtue of voluntary service in support of the promotion of literacy. I have extended an open invitation to all religious, political, social, educational and community formations to help us design a major programme of v oluntary service in the cause of literacy and numeracy, and make facilities available to run it. Students, especially in secondary schools, further education and training institutions and higher education, will have an excellent opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to community service by becoming literacy practitioners. I will be consulting on this matter with the National Youth Commission.
Even voluntary service requires funds to meet overheads and other costs. Given the scale of the need, such funds might be considerable. Once the programme has been planned and costed, I will appeal to national and international grant-making agencies to ass ist. The National Development Agency should have a strategic role in providing support to participating NGOs.
But we should not forget that literacy provision has its pitfalls. Literacy for literacy sake is often doomed to failure. We need to focus on sustainable literacies to prevent regression, and learn from the experiences of other countries in Africa and else where.
In many countries, where there is often a zero VAT rating on books and cheaper methods of publishing and printing, people revel in the printed word despite fears that television and computers are undermining reading.
By contrast, South Africa is in a depressing. Even simple books are unaffordable for most people. Most homes therefore have few, if any, books, magazines or newspapers. Classrooms are often bare of books. Even the supply of ordinary textbooks has been rest ricted by financial constraints. Schools with well-used general libraries are extremely rare, and schools with adequate sets of class readers are hard to find. Reading in African languages appears, if anything, to be on the decline which, if true, is a ter rible warning to us all. Poor matric results are attributed to the poverty of students' reading skills. University students - even those enrolled for the languages and the arts - have generally not developed the proficiency in reading required by internati onal standards, or for that matter by our own.
There is a dangerous tendency which we must vigorously combat. This is the suggestion that outcomes-based education can blithely neglect high order skills of reading, comprehension and communication. This is wicked nonsense, and a totally untrue reflection of our policy.
For this reason I am asking for a special focus on reading as part of the national literacy programme. It is gratifying that a South African NGO, the English Resource Unit from Durban, has been awarded an Honourable Mention in UNESCO's International Readin g Association Literacy Award. May South Africans win many more awards for the promotion of literacy and reading. The biggest award we can give ourselves is to see the radiant faces of those who have conquered illiteracy.
May we look back in not too many years, and I say five, and tell ourselves with pride that the back of illiteracy has in fact been broken.
I am convinced that the eradication of illiteracy is one of the most important tasks facing us today. The achievement of this goal is vital to the transformation of our society as a whole, and crucial to the realisation of the potential of so many individu als at present locked into a prison of illiteracy.
On International Literacy Day, I pledge to do all that I can in this cause. I invite you, Madam Speaker, and all honourable members to do the same.
I thank you.