Pretoria - To mark SA Library Week (March 16 to 21), authors are showing off their books to ensure that people not only get back to a culture of reading, but have relatable, original and local content to read up on.
The City of Tshwane’s Es’kia Mphahlele Library will be hosting authors to show off their inspirational offerings to youngsters visiting the information hub.
Author Paballo Makhetha said she believed it was important for people to resurrect the long-forgotten culture of reading as they’ve allowed social media to take over from the hard copy most grew up reading.
Makhetha said that as technology advanced, it was important to produce books in a way that enabled the youth to take up the crucial skill in the manner they were accustomed to absorbing information.
One way she said this could be done was by ensuring books were available in electronic copies, but also moving towards audiobooks.
Through her book titled Mountains and Hills to Overcome, she said she hoped to give young people an idea of how to deal with the many social challenges that all are faced with in their communities.
Makhetha said the inspiration for her book came on realising that decades later, young people in schools were still reading books such as Maru.
“I tried to write something that has current relevance to what we are experiencing at the moment. What we have now are social challenges as opposed to the political challenges Bessie Head was addressing at the time.
“My dream is for it (the book) to end up on learners’ desks, and be prescribed for school-going children, because we want to ensure that there are options for the youth so that when we look back after a decade they aren’t still stuck on reading books like Maru.”
Brightwell Dube said his book was what he regarded as a “much-needed vaccine to the scourge of gender-based violence”.
Dube said the book provided a good balance as it gave centre stage to both the perpetrator’s and the victim’s stories.
“Most of the time when we approach abuse we attach connotations, and we keep on writing titles such as women or child abuse, but that has a very disturbing psychological effect as we then start thinking that abuse is something that happens predominately to a particular group of people.
“So I wrote this book to start changing the narrative, and rather say we have a problem of human abuse, as we all go through some form of abuse at some point in our lives, whether you are straight, gay or transgender.”
Dube said the most important message he wanted to send through the book was for people to understand that defeating gender-based violence would need South Africans to look at ways of not just cutting off the leaves, but pulling up the problem at the roots.
“By starting off at the roots, it starts with how we raise our children. Black people don’t make that effort of reminding their children that they are loved, but we need those simple things as they make a big difference in the long run.”
Lastly, the author of Life Lessons of a Cattle Herder: Reflections from the boardroom, Dr Nomvuselelo Songelwa, said her first offering was a memoir of sorts as she felt she wanted to inspire young people who were still finding themselves stuck in certain situations.
“I wanted them to know through this book that if you are determined, you will reach your dream. I want them to know that your background does not determine your destiny, as growing up I was a cattle herder in a rural village with absent migrant labour parents.”
Songelwa said she was able to steer her way through academically to become a doctor and professionally to ultimately become a CEO of a company, and wanted to share some of the tricks that helped pave her way despite humble beginnings.
“I feel it is very important to have role-models. It is our responsibility and it’s our time as Africans to be in the books to tell our own stories, so that people don’t only get to hear about the good things that are happening from the West.”
Pretoria News