Issued by Department of Education
Midrand, Gauteng 26 June 2000
Premier of Gauteng, Mr Mbhazima Shilowa
Honoured Guests
Ladies and gentlemen
Today is 26 June, a date with historical resonance in our country. On this date, in 1952 the Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws was launched. On this day education found powerful expression in 1954, when a boycott of Bantu Education was organised against inferior and segregated education. Only forty year after that, in 1994, did our own constitutional reality catch up with our needs.
Again on this date, June 26, but this time in 1955, the historic Congress of the People was held in a football field in Kliptown, and the Freedom Charter, beacon of our own freedom struggle and example for so many others, was adopted. On education, the Charter was succinct and aphoristic in the manner if a magus: the doors of learning shall be open to all.
Now we hope, on another 26th of June—our own here today—to do something befitting of these illustrious predecessors. Today we launch the first ever truly national literacy drive.
It is a pleasure to announce that the Deputy President, Mr Jacob Zuma, has with great enthusiasm agreed to be the sole patron of the Initiative. He is unable to be here tonight because he is leading the South African delegation at the United Nations Conference on Social Development taking place in Geneva.
I will not take up your time with the detail of the Initiative or our initial target to reach half a million adults over the next 9 to 12 months as information to this effect is available in the information kits as well as from my staff present here tonight.
Over the last century and a half great democratic and social movements and reformers have given the battle against illiteracy a central focus. In the period of reconstruction in South Africa we too need to give substance to this task.
As I told Parliament on International Literacy Day last year, in our country 3.5 million adults over the age of 16 have never attended school; another 2.5 million adults have had some schooling but were ill-taught or lack practice and so have fallen out of their prior ability to read or write. That makes 6 million South Africans barred from the written word, from the whole universe of creativity and of humanity that books hold; and also from the more mundane everyday empowerment that written language gives – in jobs, travel, even constitutionally.
Article ten of our Bill of Rights, as enshrined in our Constitution, affirms that "Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected." The prison of illiteracy is an immediate affront to this right, because language is a vital compass for intellectual navigation, for meaningful movement, within a constitutional order. The state issues its instructions—and confers its benefits—in written regulations, statutes and correspondence. Illiteracy, placing citizens outside this world of law, forcing citizens to depend upon third party translators, is almost a form of serfdom.
Apart from the right to dignity, which is the wellspring of all the other constitutional rights, illiteracy denies citizens those other rights themselves:
"Everyone is equal before the law." But you cannot access the law if you do not understand it.
"everyone has the right to choose their profession freely" But if your are illiterate, you will draw water or hew wood,, as Bantu education intended; you will work with your hands rather than writing with them. You will lag even further behind in the literacy- driven digital economy of the internet.
Everyone has the right to privacy". But how do illiterate citizens read—let alone challenge—the search warrant.
"Everyone has the right to freedom of expression." But free expression reaches nobody, has little weight in the real world of authorship and the circulation of ideas, if not written or read.
"every citizen has the right to choose their profession freely." If slavery is the lack of choice, then illiteracy enslaves.
"Everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing." Bonds, leases, bank loans, housing subsidy forms – the entire apparatus of conveyancing and of low cost housing—all this is a world of words in which the illiterate must depend upon others who can read.
"Everyone has the right to freedom of movement." How do you even read the train timetable?
"Every citizen is free to make political choices." But you rely on gossip and hearsay if you cannot read the newspapers yourself—and critically.
"Everyone has the right to use language and to participate in the cultural life of their choice."
"Everyone has the right of access to any information of the state"
"Everyone has the right to just administrative action."
"Everyone has the right to access to the courts."
"everyone has the right to basic education."
No illiterate person may directly access any of these rights — they must remain dependent on literate guides to lead them; their citizenship is rendered almost vicarious; their autonomy is compromised. They are in important respects unable to leave behind the dependency that ought to end as childhood wanes; they become ashamed, shy, deferential.
This is why, from the first Emperor of China, who sought to destroy all records of the Chinese civilisations before his own, to Hitler and apartheid censorship in our own century—let alone the sacking of Rome and the burning of the library at Alexandria—tyrants everywhere have warred against the written word.
The reason for this is not simple; there is indeed such a thing as an erudite tyrant. Hitler fancied himself an artist, and Martin Heidegger was a great philosopher and yet a Nazi fellow traveller, whilst Verwoerd was a Professor of Sociology. So it cannot merely be that art, that literature, that writing are edifying in and of themselves—or that evil and illiteracy are one. If that were so, democracy itself, in a context of mass illiteracy like ours, would fall into question. Literacy requirements in voting as in the old so-called liberal Cape are a notorious tool of those who wish to limit politics to the privileged few.
So as we launch the National Literacy Initiative, we should not come to glorify literacy so much as to democratise it. In a normal society, literacy would be nothing special — it would be a mere and obvious tool for living that all citizens possess as of right. It should be nothing special and yet it remains a thing of privilege, in our new country, even now. Literacy is too special; we must normalise it.
And yet, even as we make literacy a less special thing, we will find ourselves in the odd position of needing to cherish it again. We must avoid, in Nadine Gordimer’s phrase, a situation in which words are like kitchen utensils. When language becomes a mere tool, simply a useful thing, it is again endangered. The idea that literacy is a mere tool interposes propaganda where truth should be; separates literacy from self-expression, reduces our vocabulary to that of technical manuals and textbooks. Think even of the great religious passions that so often turn and return to texts (Koran or Bible). These passions, which have caused and still cause wars and untold bloodshed, these are not the cherishing of language but the reduction of it to a mere tool or pawn of sectional strife.
So much for the book-burners, the zealots. But there is also such a thing as a flameless fire: apartheid burnt not only the books that it banned, books which it feared might destroy its evil political culture. By maiming minds apartheid also pre-emptively burnt future books, those that ought to have been in the process of being written now, by those whom apartheid deliberately under-educated. It also burned the future books of those it exiled, like Nat Nakasa who snuffed out his own life in despair, in cold exile. It burnt the books we should have now, in an efflorescence of indigenous languages. It imprisoned these languages in formulaic grammar and "fanagalo’ dictionaries—reducing indigenous languages to tools of manual labour, a medium of communication fit only for the imperative, for the bark of master and the simpering of slave. It is this we must undo.
So we must understand—and it used to be unfashionable to say so—that language is always political. It is no cliché, in South Africa, to say that language is power. It is a complex fact that we see having every day having actual impact on all sorts of issues: from access to water in the lowest reaches of deprivation, through access to finance among informal aspiring entrepreneurs.
So indeed language is power. Sol Plaatje, after whom I recently named the education building in Pretoria, was not only among our earliest novelists, he was also a founder of the African National Congress. He was not only a writer-politician, he was also a translator of Shakespeare into Setswana and he was a collector of Setswana proverbs. He was not merely a novelist, politician, literary translator, anthologiser—he was also a translator in the law courts. He took language to the very concrete outer limit of its intersection with power. He served in court itself, where power has its day, trying to make it serve all people with equity. We are the privileged inheritors of this legacy, yet so many of our people will never have heard of him, because they have no way into books, into writing—into, as Nadine Gordimer calls it in the title of her 1994 lectures, Writing and Being. Let us not let Plaatje and all those others who wait for us in books, looking up at us from the page as if wanting to speak from beyond the grave—let us not allow them to slide into the void, the silence of incomprehension—that guillotine of illiteracy that apartheid built for them. Let us follow his example and acknowledge the stubborn linkage of language and power; of literacy and politics.
But politics and our most intimate emotions are never far apart. Politics enters our most personal realities and few realities in fact are as personal as the basic ability to read and write. So if a "National Literacy Initiative" sounds like a grand political and impersonal project, a bureaucratic rather than an intimate endeavour, I would like to remind you of a poem by the Angolan Antonio Jacinto, about an unwritten love letter, a letter that Jacinto’s young man wants to write to his beloved so that she might, as young girls do, hide it from her father and conceal from her mother; a letter that would inscribe the young man on the memory of his beloved; that would impress upon her the worthlessness of all others in her home town, Kilombo.
I wanted to write you a letter
But, my love, I don’t know why it is,
Why, why, why it is, my love,
But you can’t read
And I—oh, the hopelessness—I can’t write.
As he asks why, why, why—this most intimate lament—the answer is unambiguously political: the couple cannot write because politics has made it so. The next time you read a Shakespearean sonnet, or remember some or other of the bard’s characters reading some or other passionate missive next to some or other burbling brook — pause to think, pause right now – to think of the countless blank pages from which intimate ink holds back unspilled as we speak, because so many millions of lovers in South Africa tonight do not know how to read—or their partners how to write.
We hold our collective humanity in our hands tonight, ladies and gentlemen.
We are rebuilding the gift of reading and writing which is the faculty of our humanity itself.
But let us move from intimacy to economics; from sighs and groans to bricks and mortar—for the unromantic tough men—and women—among you. Let us count the cost of a workforce without words. Derek Bok, former President of Harvard University, has said: "if you think education is expensive, try ignorance." You will not build a better mousetrap on the back of a dumbed-down population. You will lose in the great globalisation race. And you will incur all sorts of collateral costs on the way. Education raises self-esteem wholesale; it creates people who are more health-conscious, who can comprehend public health warnings, who are more likely use condoms and to eat well, to be fit; it lowers health costs.
Literacy means employment so that it broadens the tax base and allows the Finance Minister to lower taxes so that the miracles of your entrepreneurial energies can soldier forth a bit less cramped than before. Illiteracy slows everybody down: think of the semi-literate person ahead of you in the ATM queue, who fiddles until someone helps. If the productive time lost across the length and breadth of the economy were calculated, the cost to the economy would run into billions of Rands. All this is commonsensical, so I will not dwell on it: literacy, both directly and indirectly, is an engine of economic growth. And economic growth is the foundation of our future.
When is say this, that economic growth is the foundation of our future, some of you will think that tiredness has set in, near the end of my speech. How else could I voice such a banality with such a straight face? Economic growth is the foundation of our future. But pause to think about that—about our human ability to conceive of and plan for a future. How could we even begin to do that without the fundamentally human invention and achievement of grammar itself? Just as there can be no past and no memory without the grammatical past tense, there can be no future nor any forward looking projects – such as a National Literacy Initiative — without our ability to subdue time itself within the irresistible harness of our future tense, of our language.
And language can bring us together, in the future, as assuredly as it was used to divide us in the past. Like a dusty pane or warped mirror, illiteracy separates us from many of our fellow citizens, who do not behold or command the world in quite the way that the literate do; we inhabit separate realities. So the eradication of illiteracy is also a project integral to nation-building, to the abolition of the two nations, black and white, poor and rich, of which President Mbeki has spoken. Alongside the equal respect now accorded our eleven official languages, the removal of illiteracy is a basic pillar of national reunion. It is integral to the move away from the violent division and incompatible tongues of the past. We are now in our own time, as the critic Steiner puts it in After Babel, in which we must come together, out of the splintered and divisive legacy that apartheid imposes. Steiner reminds us that:
The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it. Thus Babel was a second Fall, in some regards as desolate as the first. Adam had been driven from the garden; now men were harried, like yelping dogs, out of the single family of man. And they were exiled from the assurance of being able to grasp and communicate reality."
Although our future is unlikely to be heavenly, we can nevertheless reach for Eden, for an ideal of effective communication, beyond the warped mirror of illiteracy. And when we fall short of Eden, as surely we will on mere human earth, we may nevertheless find ourselves in some tolerably green pasture nearby, where people relax quietly. And read.
The word must triumph. It will only do so if we mobilise every part of our country to fulfil the dream of a literate South Africa.
Siyabonga