Dear government: ALL books are educational

Dear government,

ALL books are educational. ALL of them, every single one.

We hoped that you would allow the safe delivery of physical books under this new stage of lockdown. But I wasn't too optimistic: it's been clear from past official responses to pleas to drop VAT on books, and your position on the new copyright bill, that you consider books either to be worthy but dull necessities (as in school textbooks) or idle frivolities, luxuries we can easily do without.

Never in my lifetime has South Africa had a government that really understood the purpose of books, what they make possible. Although perhaps the apartheid government recognised the inherent power of books by banning so many of them.

Of course you read: position papers, research briefings, media reports. But increasingly I wonder if you ever read for enlightenment or pleasure. And if you know what books are actually for. Because if you did, you would understand that there is no distinction between "educational" and "other" books. And also no way to make that distinction.

You might feel that some kinds of books are not educational. But all books contain role models, even graphic novels (what you might call comic books) and thrillers. Almost all fiction deals with the struggle between good and evil, order and disorder. This is why reading is so comforting: stories set the world to rights. Obstacles are overcome. As internationally acclaimed poet and performer Lebo Mashile has pointed out, it is artists and writers who do the work of processing of black pain and trauma in this country — in our stories, our plays, our poems, our memoirs, our explorations of history.

And right now, the entire world is traumatised and grieving. We are going to need every resource possible to survive what lies ahead, and those resources are not just material. Fretful children at home, teens wondering how to research a school project, a stressed single parent needing to spend a few minutes after the children have gone to sleep escaping into a world of happily-ever-after, scholars, academics and the scientists we’re relying on to save us, elderly people who are not tech-savvy and who are in anguish at the prospect of months of self-isolation: we all need books.

Of course ebooks are important, and will become more so. But they require hardware, software, data or modems — and all of that translates into cash, along with a simultaneous supply of electricity (let's not go there, shall we?). I don't need to tell you that the majority of South Africans cannot afford tablets, laptops, e-readers.

Reading physical books is going to be critical in the months ahead. Unlike an electronic copy, a single book can serve an entire family. As author Thando Mgqolozana once famously said, books in his street were read by so many that the pages became tissue-thin from handling.

Here’s a story about a “non-educational” book. In Grade 11 History, my niece studied Black Consciousness. Tutoring her, I dug up my treasured and stained copy of Steve Biko's I Write What I Like. It arrived in my life over 30 years ago, when an activist friend arrived at my door with an armful of books that needed hiding (she and her partner were picked up and slung into detention at 5 the next morning). That stash also included books by Hugh Lewin, Breyten Breytenbach, Mongane Wally Serote and others: all banned. I read them hungrily, afraid that the Security Branch police would come and take them away. Those books were profoundly educational; they still make up part of my mental furniture.

My friend returned for her books one day, but she let me keep Biko's. And twenty-five years later, I met Biko's son, Hlumelo, and he signed my battered copy. My niece's eyes widened as they fell on his handwriting: the people, the history, immediately came alive for her. And so Biko’s book became deeply “educational” for a second generation of my family.

To move onto another book, almost at random, this morning a friend posted a review of the latest Avbob poetry collection, I Wish I'd Said…. This is a collection, in all the official languages of South Africa, sponsored by Avbob to increase resources available to bereaved South Africans. It features poems on the subjects of death, loss and hope, and as the reviewer writes: “It achieves precisely the goal it sets out to: it consoles, enlightens, nourishes the grieving soul.”

Every single one of us is going to lose someone we love, someone we know, to this horrible virus — a few of us already have. Some of us are never going to be able to say goodbye to our parents, to visit them one last time. And yes, loss is part of all our lives, but right now it is cruelly exacerbated by the necessary restrictions on funerals. Author Khaya Dlanga's account of how, a few weeks ago, he agonised over whether to sit next to his mother and rub her back as they buried her son and his brother, would wring tears from a stone. At a time of social distancing, he had to choose between comforting her, or possibly putting her life at risk. We are all going to be faced with these agonies, these impossible choices. And to have a book like this one, which offers empathy, provides words for our losses and grief, in the languages we speak in the intimacy of our homes — it could be a life-raft. But are you going to consider poetry "educational"?

Books, especially as physical objects, comfort even those who cannot read. Book Dash, an NGO that makes books in every SA language free to children, has published over a hundred titles, some of which are "wordless" — the stories are told in images only. This means that a grandparent who cannot read can still cuddle a whimpering child on their lap, pointing at pictures on the pages, both of them absorbed in following and telling a story they make uniquely their own. Book Dash is eager to deliver free books to South African children under lockdown, and to partner with feeding schemes to do so. But do you consider their books educational?

A clue here: ALL books for children are educational. Every single one of them. At the VERY least, lift the ban on delivery of children's and YA books.

As I often point out, the private prison industry in the US calculates how many inmates to build for in 15 years time by counting the number of ten and eleven year-old boys who cannot read for meaning. Now stop and think of our prisons, bulging with young people. Longitudinal studies have shown (they really have, Google will update you) that the earlier children start interacting with physical books, once they become young adults, the lower their rates of petty crime, early pregnancy, illicit drug use, incarceration, mental illness, and many other social challenges. Likewise, their chances of completing education, getting employment, starting families later also improve with exposure to books — exposure to television and online content does not have nearly as dramatic an effect. More startling research shows that it's not textbooks that make this difference (within four years, the average learner has lost almost all memory of facts learnt from “educational books”): but fiction.

This is because the mental leap necessary to read fiction and memoir, anything that involves entering a world created by another, teaches empathy. EMPATHY. The one thing we will need in massive amounts, for others and ourselves, if we are to survive the frightening new world in which we live. What’s more, this empathy is not didactically taught: it’s created by the actual neurological and imaginative process of reading.

Fiction teaches us patience. It comforts and soothes us. It enables us not only to imagine, but to inhabit other worlds, countries, societies, minds. It teaches us to travel in time and space and history, a lesson I learned from reading fairy tales and legends to children with severe developmental disabilities many moons ago. In a fictional world, not only do we learn to stand in the shoes of others, the playing fields where we do these imaginative exercises are level. Those children who hung on every word of the stories I read of knights and dragons and spells and talking animals could all access those worlds equally, regardless of whether they were rich or poor, whether they needed a wheelchair to get around or not. That’s not a luxury.

And it seems that you have forgotten our history. That one of the greatest fights by political prisoners, especially those serving life sentences, was for the right to get books and study materials. That when people were detained, and were allowed only religious reading material, even the atheists called for copies of the Bible, so that they would have something to read. That almost every person subjected to that cruel manifestation of apartheid, a banning order that restricted them to their own homes and the company of their immediate families only (sound familiar?), ended up with a vast library: the one solace in their time of trial.

Finally, even if you persist in clinging to the idea that books are a luxury for the wine-swilling book-club classes, surely takeaway meals are a luxury too? I’m delighted that exhausted frontline workers are now able to call for a pizza. But then for the love of your fellow citizens, allow the delivery of books. There isn’t even space to point out that if this isn’t permitted soon, the trade publishing industry in this country will die: regardless of the sterling work it does in providing us with truth, beauty, comfort, escape.