The Café des Arts in Franschoek was abuzz with literacy personae enjoying ginger beer and cupcakes at the launch of Nal’ibali, a national initiative to promote reading enjoyment and storytelling for children, as part of the recent Franschhoek Literary Festival.
The Café des Arts in Franschoek was abuzz with literacy personae enjoying ginger beer and cupcakes at the launch of Nal’ibali, a national initiative to promote reading enjoyment and storytelling for children, as part of the recent Franschhoek Literary Festival.
The Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA) and Avusa Media have joined forces to create a model of reading clubs, accompanied by newspaper supplements, that will be distributed in The Times, the Daily Dispatch and the Herald.
Phylicia Oppelt, editor of the The Times, said she was looking forward to being associated with an initiative that would bring the joy of reading and stories to even the most disadvantaged children.
The exciting eight-page weekly supplement will include stories and a number of other activities, such as cut-out story books, opportunities for children to write their own stories, puzzles, activity ideas, poems, riddles and competitions in all languages, to “open magical worlds to our children”, as Oppelt said.
In addition, the newspapers will run columns and opinion pieces written by educationists, NGOs and members of the public. Even Ricco, of Madam and Eve fame, is on board and providing his services free of charge for Nal’ibali.
Witness his characteristic style in the quirky and colourful posters promoting the initiative. The initiative is an effort to encourage people to revalue stories in their own language. “Nal’ibali is about changing conditions on the ground and in the media for all children,” says PRAESA's Carole Bloch.
“We need to stop seeing African-language-speaking children as needing something different, something packaged, something reduced from what middle-class English speakers and some Afrikaans speakers have.”
David Harrison, of the DG Murray Trust, a major funder of the initiative, believes that because literacy has been equated with schooling, there is a sense of parent disempowerment. “We’ve placed so much attention on trying to get the functional school system running that we haven’t focused on the parent,” says Harrison. “What we’re trying to do is to strengthen the interaction between the parent, or caregiver, and the child.”
Harrison also highlighted the fact that literacy campaigns often tend to fizzle out before they’ve achieved what they set out to do. Nal’ibali aims to be sustainable over at least the next decade by engaging with cultural change and encouraging involvement from writers, publishers, community movers and shakers and the public as a whole, who can enter into the debate and promote the initiative.
In short, it’s a national grassroots campaign to create a culture of reading in South Africa. “People don’t read to their children because you tell them to. They will follow if they see it happening and having an effect,” Harrison said.
Nal’ibali (an isiXhosa word meaning ‘Here’s the story’) will work on multiple fronts. In addition to the newspaper supplement and articles, it aims to equip ordinary people to establish reading clubs, reading at aftercare centres, opening reading centres in local libraries, as well as reading in clinics and churches.
PRAESA will support these aims through hosting three to four workshops per year in each province. They will also provide online resources and materials that can be downloaded free of charge. SIDEBAR (Large print) Reading project training workshop Project Read, under the auspices of the Comprehensive Literacy Outreach Programme, will be co-hosting a Nal’ibali training workshop in Grahamstown on Saturday 2 June.
Reading club facilitators, literacy organisations and individuals who want to start up reading clubs are invited to attend. Please contact Cathy Gush on gush.cathy@gmail.com to reserve a place.
