Books are wings with which we fly to the freedom of story heaven
MY FASCINATION with storytelling began long before I learnt to walk or talk.
Despite being illiterate, my father was quite the storyteller. He would tell us stories every night, painting pictures of characters and places with words so vividly that they came alive.
Some were fairytales passed down to him by his mother and other village elders when he was a little boy back in what was Fort Johnston in Southern Malawi (now called Mangochi). He had a natural gift for dramatisation, and could mimic sounds of almost anything from animals to nature.
The fact that he still could not speak isiZulu properly and we could not speak his language, added extra spice to the stories.
Sometimes I wondered how my mother, a Zulu girl from kwaMadlala on the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal, ever understood what he was saying during their period of courtship.
When I started school and discovered books, I felt like I was in story heaven. I read anything I could lay my hands on. I would read stories to my father, but when he told the same stories back to us, they sounded much better than what they were written in the books.
Growing up in the villages of Umzimkhulane and Bhobhoyi in Port Shepstone was a source of daily angst as my siblings and I were continually taunted about not being “real Zulus” and often bullied.
Books provided an escape to a magical world where life was normal and beautiful.
Reading also introduced me to various peoples of the world, and I no longer felt something was wrong with us being “half Zulus”. By the age of 13, I was reading romance novels by English author Barbara Cartland, and I was introduced to the British world of dukes and duchesses. It was so liberating and comforting to know that the world was not only populated by Zulus. It was full of people who spoke and looked different. Through American novels I learnt about Italians, Chinese and Russians. African novelists such as Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe introduced me to villages of the Kikuyu and the Luhya, the Igbo and the Yoruba. I so much wanted to read about my father’s country, but books by Malawian authors were not available in South Africa.
When I attended As-Salaam Educational Institute, a private boarding school that had students from all over Africa, I was so eager to know more about the sameness in our difference.
If I had not read about the different people in the world, I would have not been open to making their acquaintance at school. I would have remained stubbornly insular like my people back in Port Shepstone, where a mere non-Zulu name was enough to cause consternation and elicit feelings of spite.
Books turned me into a child of the universe, where differences did not define people. Reading made me a citizen of the world. It is the cheapest way to travel, meet people and learn about the wealth of cultures the world has to offer.
Xenophobia can be combated through reading, because it is a misplaced fear of that which is perceived to be foreign or strange.
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity,” the late American civil rights leader Martin Luther King jnr once said.
Abdul Milazi is editor of Sunday World.
Reading and telling stories with children in their home languages provides them with a strong foundation for language leading and increases their chances if future academic success.