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William Gumede Spreads the Word Among the Illiterate
The worst thing about growing up a bookworm in a South African squatter camp wasn’t the dearth of books.
Reading was “un-African,” William Gumede remembers. It wasn’t manly, like sports or kite-flying. So if you did get your hands on a book, you’d better have a good place to hide it, or you’d get a beating and see your book ripped up.
The day he heard that a mobile library was coming to a nearby township in Eastern Cape province, he and a friend walked miles to see it, and the library card he was given changed his life.
“It opened another world for me, a world running parallel to my own world,” says Gumede, 41. “I read about boys my age doing all kinds of things in other parts of the world. It broadened my horizons.”
But every time he went to the library, his book carefully hidden in a plastic shopping bag, he had to brave the gangs of boys he’d meet along the way.
“To be seen with a book was to be seen as sissy, so I had many fights. I remember very clearly, one of the books got torn. It was one of the boys three years older than me. He said: ‘Why have you got a book? What’s wrong with you?’ Five or six others tried to grab the book, and in the struggle a page was torn out.”
Today, Gumede is a prominent political biographer who recently began writing children’s books. He is part of a chorus of writers and educators who are wondering how South Africa can attain its dream of a successful multiracial democracy if great swaths of the population don’t read books.
Book details
- A Kite’s Flight by William Gumede, illustrated by Maya Sereda
EAN: 9781770098046
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- A Kite’s Flight by William Gumede, illustrated by Maya Sereda
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