South African Rural Literature

I am one of the typists/editors of stories written by rural children of all ages.

A very sad fact is becoming evident to me. These young authors come from one district. This district encompasses many schools. The race spread of these young authors reflects the race percentages in our country. The children are free to write in English or the language of their instruction. In this region that language is Zulu. I type and edit the English stories. As I open up a bundle sent by the school, I read the first paragraph or two before starting to type and this is where some disturbing facts become evident.

• All the learners from some of the schools write very well necessitating minor editing.
• All the learners from some of the other schools cannot string together a coherent sentence.
• And then we have the schools where some of the learners write excellent stories, others write imaginatively with a few grammatical or spelling mistakes and some do not write that well. This is to me reflects the norm.

How can our English education differ so much in schools where all things should be considered equal? Why has this escaped the powers that be? Instead of griping about all sorts of issues we need to get down to grass roots level and give these children the best education in English that is humanly possible. They need to be understood in a language that is generally understood by many people world wide and that language, according to many sources, is English. It saddens me that we are allowing this lack of knowledge to perpetuate in the modern world.

But something very positive is evident in these stories – some of the children display incredible imaginations.  I am transported to other worlds, the text may be faulty but the gift of storytelling is there. Please give these children the gift of knowledge so that they can become amazing citizens in this crippled country of ours – these children are the ones who can lead us to greener pastures if they are given the power.