Shaping young minds in a rural library with an eye on the future
The Ponelopele Reading Club Library is more than just a place where village children learn to read. By Lucas Ledwaba
On a Saturday afternoon, a group of children take turns reading from books in the shade behind a tiny brick building located at the edge of a massive boulder hill in Dipateng village.
One girl reads fluently from a Sepedi book. Her peers listen intently to the story of Sepatikana, a poor boy who wins the jackpot at the races, but mistakenly destroys his winning ticket in a fire.
“How many hands does she deserve?” a woman not much taller than some of the children asks the gathering.
Some say five hands, others say three and another says seven. The children clap five times to show appreciation for their peer’s reading skills.
This is the first meeting of the Ponelopele Reading Club Library after a long break forced by the lockdown imposed in March.
Every Saturday morning, Lerato Shotholo boards a taxi from her home in Mokomene to travel to the tiny building in Dipateng, 14km away. The teenager is among scores of children who gather at this building housing the Ponelopele Reading Club Library every weekend at noon, to polish up on their reading, play board games, dance and learn valuable life skills.
Lerato’s dream is to become a writer and businesswoman. When she heard of the library at the beginning of 2020, she asked her parents if she could join. She has since become a regular with more than 40 other children.
The library was established by resident Makgatla Thepa-Lephale in 2015. It is open to all children from her village and beyond, free of charge. An avid reader and academic, she often spent weekend afternoons under a tree at home in Dipateng, a village in Limpopo, reading quietly. Her reading sessions caught the interest of children who asked to join her. In no time the group grew from six to more than a dozen. Thepa-Lephale, 36, who recently featured in the Mail&Guardian 200 Young South Africans, moved the sessions from under the tree to her family garage. As numbers swelled to about 60 children, she knew it was time to expand.
As word of the meetings spread through the village, Thepa-Lephale decided to establish a reading club. She and her husband, author and attorney Matome Chidi, bought material to build a zinc shack that housed the Ponelopele Reading Club and Library (Ponelopele means looking ahead, in Sesotho languages). But growing hordes of knowledge-hungry youngsters soon outgrew the shack so Thepa-Lephale approached the local traditional authority to ask for land to build a proper structure on.
Now the building occupies pride of place in Dipateng, a sub-village of Mphakane, which according to the 2011 Census had 5,348 households and a population of 20,439. Only 8.6% of people older than 20 have a tertiary education. She wants the library to be more than just a place where children come to learn reading skills.
“Ponelopele is more important than the books that they read. I would want to see the children that I groom grow into responsible men and women who would come back and invest in this library,” says Thepa-Lephale. She works as a procurement officer and lectures part-time in local government studies.
She helps the children, who range from three to 18, to read in Sepedi and English. They recite poetry, play chess and Scrabble, and practise dance moves. They master reading in their mother tongue, Northern Sotho, as studies show that mastering one’s language is important for development.
Unesco has declared the decade beginning in 2022 as the Decade of Indigenous Languages, recognising their importance to social cohesion and inclusion, cultural rights, health and justice. Unesco says 40% of the 7,000 languages used worldwide are at some level of endangerment.
The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study report, in 2016, found that 78% of Grade 4 pupils in SA could not read for meaning. It placed SA last out of 50 countries, with Limpopo and Eastern Cape the poorest with scores below 300 points.
Thepa-Lephale, who has no sponsor and relies on book donations to keep going, has taken the children to visit libraries in Polokwane and Johannesburg. Some of the children had never travelled beyond their village. This heightened her drive to ensure that her intervention went beyond mastering the written word. She has taken courses on basic life skills to help her deal with issues affecting the children.
“Some bring issues that are beyond the library. Some kids don’t have food at home. I must step up as a parent. But it is difficult to run [this] when you don’t have funds,” she says.
The shelves of the library are packed with books donated by volunteers who learnt of it through social media and word of mouth. But Thepa-Lephale says they need more books, especially those written in Northern Sotho.
The library, which is not connected to the electricity grid, has no ablution facilities or running water. Some of the children relieve themselves behind rocks or ask to use the toilets in neighbouring houses.
Thepa-Lephale, whose love for reading was ignited by the mini-library in her grandparents’ home while growing up, now has 45 children on Ponelopele’s books. She hopes to grow bigger and get other like-minded volunteers to assist in grooming the next generation.
She is on the lookout for donations of books and other reading material. But the aim is beyond having a state-of-the-art facility: “We should have a library in each village. Our aim is bigger than having resources. They should not be able to see the world through the lens of others. We have a serious leadership vacuum in the country; these children should be able to question decisions, apply common sense, even when they start their own businesses. They should be unique. They [need] to see the world differently, through the eye of a reader,” she says.
Reading time at Ponelopele Library, which was started by Makgatla Thepa-Lephale (right).
Photos: Lucas Ledwaba
Ponelopele is more important than the books they read. I would want to see the children that I groom grow into responsible men and women who would come back to invest in this library.