Gouging the tarmac on the river of learning

SOME weeks ago the Stoep featured one Ntokozo, the go-getter who’s getting school libraries going. You might better remember him (if you were listening) for rising splendidly to his sudden brief job as guardian of 4-yearold blonde Afrikaans Emma.

Ntokozo’s library mission brought Mirna Lawrence of the Molteno Institute, promoters of vernacular literacy, into his world. She had books for him; brand-new untouched super-appropriate books. I had books too, old and random, looking for a home.

Which is not simple, hey. You can get high on the generosity of giving and overstretch the glories of receiving – “Where’s my thank-you letter for the 1974 Lawnmower Maintenance Manual that I sacrificed to fire up little Thandi’s taste for literature?”

You must sift and be brutal. And that’s hard, too. Here’s a statuesque 642pager on George Washington. I can’t imagine anyone might get to ever read- ing it. But sending it to the bonfire would be sinful. Pray that Thandi’s mother annexes it as objet d’art.

My car is a warehouse when I depart for Molteno’s offices, expecting to offload my books there for on-passing. But Mirna thinks I’m uploading her books for their on-passing.

I glimpse where this is going, and yes. When I leave, my exhaust gouges the tarmac. The headlights point at tower blocks. I have a new take on “heavy reading”. And a new take on literature in Africa.

Which, if Mirna will forgive my vulgar summarising, is:

The literacy industry has long known that the norm – Grade 0 to Grade 3 in home language with English from Grade 4 – is an educational train smash. Kids of eight can’t handle a curriculum in a language they don’t hear at home.

But try telling the parents. They know that in 10 years a tiny few will find jobs, the few with the smooth- est English.

What a weird slice of the African predicament – to do the best for your child you immerse him or her in English, which messes up their learning (and nukes your own identity issues).

Add this: Afrikaans kids learn Afrikaans way faster than English kids learn English. Why? Because Afrikaans is “transparent” – words read like they sound. English is the opposite, legendarily, as in the joke about spelling “fish” as “ghoti” – the gh of enough, the o of women, the ti of attention.

That hits English kids when they come to digraphs and trigraphs (the big words for “big words”). With plain cat and mat and dog and log they’re fine.

Now extrapolate a little. The worst language intake has been in African vernaculars. Why? In 2010 the Molteno Institute delved deep, Mirna and her colleague Jenny Katz coming to one of those eureka discoveries that are obvious from the moment after they are made.

Starter titles in Afrikaans and English titles were all short words, translating into vernaculars with prefixes and suffixes. Where the English kid saw four one-syllable words, the Zulu kid saw one four-syllable word.

In one culture, children were getting short words building up to bigger ones, like stepping stones across a river. In the other, it was long words from the start, implying “stand on this side and jump”.

Now, Molteno produces new vernacular books, titled with the “root” of a word that has never been seen without tops and tails. To adults it looks wrong, but the child now has stepping stones.

That’s some departure. It causes controversy. So does another Molteno pursuit – themes that are “not our culture”, like dad minding the baby. They challenge cultural roles.

Ntokozo’s mission has set a river rolling for me. Now if I can just get that boot emptied…