Last night I was reading one of my favourite poems from the Anthology of East African Poems. It is called No Roots No Leaves No Buds, by Jagjit Singh. As always, every time I take a book off my shelf, I am upset by how little the holiday making youth at my house want to read. If you get them to flip through the pictures in the magazines, you are lucky.

I hate the saying about how if you want to hide something from an African, you should put it in a book… but sometimes I have to wonder. Our reading culture is decidedly poor. One big indicator of that fact is that we let our media get away with publishing and airing a lot of substandard rubbish. From grammatical atrocities to huge factual errors and a total lack of research – anything goes. It doesn’t help that in large part, journalism consists of people waiting for press releases from government agencies and large corporations.

I appreciate the fact that the African way to record things was oral – but we are losing even that. When is the last time your kids sat round a fire to listen to tales and songs from their grandparents? The end result is that Hannah Montana is more popular than the well-loved tales of Wakayima the wily hare. I doubt there are many parents in my generation who even know a Wakayima tale.

Our education system also makes reading books a chore. In fact, apart from secondary school literature classes, I cannot remember when I was ever encouraged to read a book for the simple enjoyment of one. We were just bashed over the head with text books and revision guides. Now there are some who are of the opinion that reading is a hobby for a select few people. That may be true to a minimal extent, but the fact is that we all need to read – be it novels or manuals or reports from the workplace. The words we put into our brains become the way we express ourselves and present ourselves to the world.

As I keep saying to my reading-impaired holiday makers: if you can read, you can teach yourself anything. If you train your mind to take in words, interpret them and find out their meanings and various uses, you can do anything you want. Marketers and advertisers need words; writers and counsellors need words; even musicians need words – where are you going to get them if you do not practise reading?

Let your children read. The toy guns, cars and dolls come and go, but the skills they can develop from reading at an early age will stay with them always.

Published on Sunday January 10, 2010