Programme Director
MECs, Councillors
Chief Operating Officer: Ms Nontsikelelo Jolingana
Eastern Cape Regional Commissioner: Mr N. Breakfast
Chief Deputy Commissioners, Regional Commissioners and Deputy Commissioners Other Members of the Correctional Services Family
Our Partners: The Department of Arts & Culture and the South African Book Development Council
Members of the Media
Distinguished Guests
Reading statistics reveal that only 14% of the South African population are active book readers, and a mere 5% of parents read to their children. National Book Week is an important initiative in encouraging the nation to value reading as a fun, and pleasurable, activity, and to showcase how reading can easily be incorporated into one’s daily lifestyle. This year we commemorate our literary heritage, during National Book Week from 2 to 7 September, under the theme The “Books of Our Lives”.
As the Department of Correctional Services (DCS), we are extremely encouraged by the partnership between DCS, the Department of Arts and Culture as well as the South African Book Development Council (SABDC) - custodians of National Book Week. We also wish to convey our gratitude to the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality for hosting us, as well as the media, including Umhlobo Wenene FM, for their efforts in informing the public about our programmes, national heritage and this symbolic event.
As we commemorate National Book Week, during Heritage Month here in the Eastern Cape, we should recall that this province is rich in Literary Heritage. It was here that the very first publishing house, the Lovedale Press, was established in 1824. The establishment of this publishing house led to the first translation of the Bible into an African Language in South Africa.
The complete version of the isiXhosa Bible was published in 1859, thus standardising the written language and unleashing a flurry of publications in isiXhosa. Newspapers such as Imvo Zabantsundu, founded by John Tengo Jabavu as the first black-owned newspaper in 1884, created platforms for writers to tell the stories of their people.
National Book Week, and Heritage month, also allows us to reflect on the lives, and legacy, of the courageous, honourable, founding architects of the liberation movement. These individuals appreciated the value of education, and the culture of reading. Solomon Tshekiso Plaatjie, for instance, apart from establishing, financing and editing a number of newspapers, is credited for writing, between 1919 and 1920, the novel Mhudi which was published in 1930. Mhudi became the first English novel written by a Black South African.
In 1930, Dr John Langalibalele Dube, founder and editor of Ilanga Lase Natali and Ohlange Institute, also succeeded in publishing the first isiZulu novel, Ujeqe Insila kaShaka, later translated into English as Jeqe, the Body Servant of Shaka. As South Africans, we are proud of the rich literary heritage built by many other authors including S.E.K. Mqhayi, A.C. Jordan, B.W. Vilakazi, Eskia Mphahlele, Mongane Wally Serote, Ellen Khuzwayo, Mirriam Tladi, Can Themba, Mazisi Kunene, Antjie Krog, Nhlanhla Maake, Don Mattera, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Chris Van Wyk, Breyten Breytenbach, Marlene Van Niekerk and our literature Nobel Laureate, Nadine Gordimer.
There has also been a huge output of fascinating literature, on contemporary themes, from authors including Angela Makholwa, Niq Mhlongo, Ndumiso Ngcobo, Kgafela oa Magogodi, Imraan Coovadia, Achmat Dangor, Farida Karodia and Beverley Naidoo. This impressive, national literary cannon is encouraging because as George Owell says, “If people cannot write well, they cannot think well; and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”
As the reading culture remains minimal, DCS is working towards promoting a culture of reading, and writing, in correctional centres. We want to project reading as a fun activity, which expands horizons of knowledge for both offenders and officials. Barely two months after our launch of the “Reading for Redemption” programme, here at St. Albans Correctional Centre on 17 September 2012, books, worth more than a million rand, were donated to correctional centres. Correctional Services is fortunate to partner with the South African Book Development Council, in order to achieve rehabilitation through the culture of reading and writing.
Ladies and gentlemen, research shows there is an inverse relation between knowledge, culture and crime. The greater the knowledge, culture and access to education, the less the crime. It is for such reasons that we have made education, skilling and training of offenders compulsory at DCS. According to the Freedom Charter, “Imprisonment shall be only for serious crimes against the people, and shall aim at re-education, not vengeance.”
Section 35(2)(e) of the Bill of Rights says, “Everyone who is detained, including every sentenced prisoner, has the right to conditions of detention that are consistent with human dignity, including at least exercise and the provision, at state expense, of adequate accommodation, nutrition, reading material and medical treatment. ”Reading for Redemption is, therefore, part of our efforts to deliver on this fundamental Human Right.
The transformation programme of our democratic government necessitated that prisons shift from institutions of humiliation to institutions of new beginnings. The White Paper on Corrections represents the final fundamental break with a past archaic penal system, and ushers in a start where prisons become correctional centres of rehabilitation. Offenders are given new hope, and encouragement, to adopt a lifestyle that will result in a second chance towards becoming ideal citizens.
This is also in line with the National Development Plan (NDP), which supports a Human Rights culture and respect for people’s dignity. The NDP proclaims that, “We solve our differences through discussion. We refrain from being cruel, demeaning or hurtful in disagreement. We feel we belong. We celebrate all the differences among us. We are not imprisoned by the roles ascribed to us.”
We are mandated by legislation to deliver justice for victims, and ensure that offenders make restitution both to society for their crimes and leave correctional centres with better skills and prospects. During this Year of the Correctional Official, officials are also expected to begin to take their education seriously. Correctional Officials are the custodians of the Reading for Redemption Programme. Hence, they must lead by example by reading books.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is said that there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. It is for this reason that, as DCS, we are encouraging offenders to reflect on their lives, and write down their experiences. We have been successful, this year, to publish a collection of poetry entitled, “Unchained.” At DCS, we do not give up on anyone. We have faith, and proof, that rehabilitation works. We impact the heads, hearts and minds of offenders so that, upon release, they can leave with at least a skill in one hand and a certificate in the other hand.
By promoting a culture of reading, we affirm that it is “Better to Light a Candle than to Curse the Darkness”. More still needs to be done, and we thank the Department of Arts and Culture for not neglecting correctional facilities when they budget for library books. Corrections, ladies and gentlemen, is a societal responsibility. We want to thank those writers who have partnered with us in imparting storytelling, and poetry writing, skills to our offenders. We encourage other authors to do likewise. Society at large, including business, please donate books to our libraries. Ex-offenders must be fully integrated into society. They must be able to meaningfully participate in the knowledge economies of the 21st century.
Ladies and gentlemen, on Robben Island, apart from the nourishing solidarity, and counsel, from fellow comrades, books became the very cornerstone of our political maturity and personal development. Robben Island transformed you from being merely a “klip gooier” to a serious appreciator of ideas, and how, through knowledge, we could transform our society for the good of all. I found it extremely satisfying to be a librarian at Robben Island, which was intended to cage our development and crush our resolve. It was through books, and discussions, that we refused to be reduced by prison and its brute, authoritarian culture. Frederick Douglass once remarked, “knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.” A book, for Kafka, “must be the axe for the frozen sea within us”. Political prisoners read, and refused to be degraded by Robben Island. It was the hunger for knowledge, and books, in prison that produced a pan-Africanist thinker, and leader, like Malcolm X. He revealed that “[his] alma mater was books, a good library.... [and] could spend the rest of his life reading, just satisfying his curiosity.” He also remarked that “once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
Edward Said describes novels as the aesthetic objects that fill in the gaps in an incomplete world. In other words, it is this feature of plenitude of literature that allows us to imagine new possibilities and to dream afresh. Ben Okri reminds us that ”a dream can be the highest point of a life,” and that “the most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.” Books allow us to do that. While the subject of History is critical in all that we do, history as an epistemology, and discipline, bears some limitations compared to literature.
In the Political Unconscious, Frederick Jameson reminds us that, “History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis.” Arguing that reality is not a pre-given existence or asserting that reality is always negotiated, and is radically contingent, does not mean that we should erase the past merely to fit the present because a reality denied comes back to haunt us. No matter what our history has been, our destiny is tied to what we create today. Chinua Achebe, for instance, was dismayed by Joseph Conrad’s book, Heart of Darkness. Instead of responding by writing a history textbook to rectify the distortions in Conrad’s book, he wrote a historically embedded novel, Things Fall Apart. Achebe sees the role of the novelist as that of a teacher.
He argues that Things Fall Apart was able to show that African societies were “not mindless, but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity.” For Achebe, the writer’s duty is to help society regain its dignity, and self-respect, by showing readers, in human terms, what happened to them, what they lost.” Achebe achieves this successfully through plot and character. He is not didactic or preachy.
Successful writers respect their audiences, and know they do not need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of do’s and don’ts. Remember, though, shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.
Writers, including aspiring ones in our correctional centres, must also get into the habit of reading other author’s books. Samuel Johnson says that, “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make one book”. Stories conquer fear, and make the heart grow bigger. If we can succeed in becoming a reading nation, we can rise like the proverbial phoenix from the ashes of division, and conflict, which characterised our recent past. A reading nation is a successful, and progressive, nation.
At the centre of DCS rehabilitation, education and training of offenders, we have thus put primacy to the subject of reading by inmates. Ladies and gentlemen, the subject of books, and reading, is dear to my heart. By profession, I am a trained librarian. One cannot fully understand my personal make-up without making reference to my most sincere companions, books.
I look back during my childhood days that, while listening to the inspiring stories of the Bible at church, I was simultaneously in the habit of reading books. My sister recently reminded me that my strict, but loving and caring, father never chastised me for what she thought was an indiscretion, even when she alerted him. My elder brother also recalls, with fondness, how the elderly men of our village used to marvel as I read them stories after school. Trust me, “after nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
Frederick Douglass was correct when he asserted that, “it is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” Storytelling, and reading, to children are fundamental to building them. We are encouraged by the efforts of the South African Book Development Council, aimed at increasing the number of parents who read to their children. Research indicates that only five percent of South African parents read to their children. Maya Angelou reminds us that “any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him”. We should also develop the genre of graphic books, like comic strips, because they present the potential to attract readers who, either may not be cerebral enough or, are not keen to read short stories and novels. The publication of Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom into braille is commendable, since blind people are now able to access this book.
We can still do more, including recording many of our published stories into audio formats. We also want to encourage everyone here today to read the autobiography of Ben Carson, the world renowned African-American neurologist, where he explains, in detail, the role books played in his earlier life after his illiterate, domestic, single mother pushed him, and his brother, to read and go to the library instead of being absorbed by television. Carson’s remarkable, life-changing, story has also been well portrayed in the film Gifted Hands.
Parents must be reading role models, whose homes are filled with books. Horace Mann regards a house without books as similar to a room without windows. Cicero, on the other hand, likens a room without books to a body without a soul. For Jane Austen, there is no enjoyment like reading. She declared, “When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
Books, and reading, should be part of our national strategy to combat the scourge of drugs in our society. Books, unlike drugs and some destructive human beings, if you pay attention to them, will always love you back. They never disappoint, and indulging in them will never obliterate you. Instead, books will sharpen you and make you more humane. As Ben Okri puts it, through writing and reading, “we can re-dream this world and make the dream come real [and that in books we discover that] human beings are gods hidden from themselves.” Because a great book leaves you with many experiences, it is said that, you “live several lives while reading.”
South African writers, and publishers, should not neglect children’s stories. We should also do our best to infuse such books with an Afrocentric, local, content which will make all our children appreciate themselves, their country and fellow human beings. Let us increase publication of children’s books in African languages. Writers should not neglect the gold in their own back yard. Let us buy books, read them and share them. If you are a true friend to someone, you will start buying your friend a book instead of gifts such as fragrances and alcohol.
Abraham Lincoln defined his best friend as a person who will give him a book he had not read. Because of our love for our friends and our people, we should, therefore, no more just go pass a bookstore. Books connect all of us. It was James Baldwin who said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive”. The very fact that DCS, and our offenders, are part of this momentous, rehabilitating event means we will go a long way in re-humanising our offenders, and fight the stigma associated with ex-offenders.
Programme Director, please allow me to encourage our offenders to dream once more and capture these dreams in writing. This, I do by concluding with these lines from Maya Angelou:
“Out of the huts of history's shame I rise Up from a past that's rooted in pain I rise I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.”
Let us all remember to buy books, and read them.
Thank you.
