Elisabeth Anderson is passionate about books and reading, which is perhaps no more than one would expect from the head of Cape Town’s Centre for the Book.
But she also burns with an almost missionary zeal to infuse this passion into others.
And if there is for this champion of the written word a force of darkness that has to be beaten back, it is South Africa’s massive illiteracy rate.
A staggering 12-million adults in this country, she says, are functionally illiterate.
Of those, says Anderson, six million ”can’t read or write anything”.
She cites a study of grade-three pupils, showing only half of them could read, and going back to the same children three years later, in grade six, to find that there had been no improvement.
A survey of homes in rural areas showed that most households, though they included at least one literate person, usually a schoolchild, had no books at all beyond the occasional Bible.
”It’s quite scary,” she says.
Her solution — or rather, part of her solution, for she bubbles with ideas — is a sort of literary equivalent to the barefoot doctors who revolutionised health care in Cuba.
She proposes using each of South Africa’s 1 240 public libraries as nodal points for 10 satellite ”reading spaces”, which could be after-hours classrooms, churches, back rooms in shops, or even in someone’s home.
The spaces would not only lend out books, but also provide the venue for a range of other services, such as a safe and supervised place for children to do homework, literacy classes, or local history workshops.
And for each space, the professional librarian in charge of the central library, together with the local community, would choose an iindelzana — a gender-neutral Xhosa word, but in Anderson’s vision very definitely a woman — who is deeply respected and liked in that community.
”The iindelzana would be given the position of running the satellite reading spaces,” she says. ”The nodal librarian would mentor and train them, and work with them on how a space would be most effective for its community.
”It would be the iindelzana who would know the community’s needs. There might be an area with very little literacy, which might need particular kinds of books.”
Books could be distributed from the central library to and between the reading spaces using the taxi network, she suggests, giving taxi owners an opportunity to ”appease their social consciences”.
Anderson’s imaginative proposal is being given the chance to prove itself in the Eastern Cape’s Mdantsane, which though the second-largest black township in South Africa, is served by only one library.
The national Department of Arts and Culture has given approval for the Centre for the Book (which is a specialist unit of the National Library of South Africa), working together with the National Library for the Blind, to construct a second library in the township — with 10 satellite reading spaces as part of the plan.
Building is expected to start next year.
Anderson, who describes it as a ”very good pilot project”, is already thinking beyond it, with a view to slotting into the formidably named integrated sustainable rural development programme that the government has launched in some of the poorest rural areas of South Africa.
”What I’ve suggested is that after Mdantsane, we should use the municipalities in these areas as the nodal points for professional librarians, because in most of them there won’t be libraries at all — and try to get the reading spaces going that way,” she says.
The cost of implementing the project in 11 municipalities would be a mere R2,17-million over three years — money which she envisages would come from the central government.
This would cover the cost of 11 professional librarians, 110 iindelzana, a ”good supply” of books and furniture.
”That’s all you need,” she says. ”Of course there will be glitches, but it’s perfectly feasible: you’re not building great big structures.”
The benefits, she says, lie in the fact of job creation, in the skills that the iindelzana will acquire, and in the long-term economic benefit of giving communities access to books.
”Access to books means access to literacy, access to information and, to me, most of all it’s access to the world of the imagination.
”I think it was [poet William] Blake who said nothing in this world was invented without having been imagined first.” — Sapa