The reason for this necessary intervention is that our children no longer read. Everyone says this. Even fathers and mothers who never put a book in their children’s hands complain that their children don’t read.
We have been inundated lately by campaign slogans that attempt to entrap our minds and make us do the bidding of our politicians. So, very likely, reader, you are familiar with Trump’s ‘Making America great again’, and Atiku’s ‘Making Nigeria work again’. Well, this week, we have something to trump them all, which is what everyone should be singing anyway: Making our children read again!
The reason for this necessary intervention is that our children no longer read. Everyone says this. Even fathers and mothers who never put a book in their children’s hands complain that their children don’t read. Now, I ask myself, who could be responsible for that? Anyway, I remember the many times I have bemoaned the fact on this column that the reading population in Nigeria is thinning faster than the balding head of a vulture. Yet, no one is batting an eyelid, except to join me in complaining.
These days, what you are likely to find in the hands of a child is a mobile phone complete with internet facilities and every other facility. With it, they can surf every site available, good or bad, and ‘widen their horizons’. Of course, some horizons get too widened in the process. Even children who are not able to master their letters are given phones by their indulgent parents because they believe their children are such geniuses they can take apart the morality of the phone on their own. Such parents are not interested in putting books in their children’s hands; that’s too slow. The parents wake up soon enough though when the consequences come calling.
‘Books should be tried by a judge and jury as though they were crimes, and counsel should be heard on both sides’, says Samuel Butler, that 19th/20th century satirist and novelist. Well, he knew what he was talking about, seeing he was a writer and all. In Nigeria today, dear reader, we dare not put books on trial, because they will lose, hands down. To start with, whereas politicians are commanding two hundred counsels to defend their economically insalubrious ways, books will probably command counsels we can count on only one miserable finger. That is the strange way of the world seeing that counsels became what they are courtesy of them books. So, rather than put books on trial, we will just attempt to speak up for them.
According to Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th century statesman, ‘the best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.’ That does sound like taking things from the rear end, rather than the beginning but I’m sure you get the spirit of the man’s words, dear reader. It means that if I wished to know more about banana eating habits of the human specimens called Nigerians, all I need to do is write about it, not eat it. Writing impels you to read.
Charles Colton, another 18th/19th century writer, says of reading: ‘some read to think, these are rare; some to write, these are common; and some read to talk, and these form the great majority.’ We might well add that some read to take action such as sharing innovative intelligence, wisdom, knowledge, understanding and findings and thus increasing technological knowledge. That is where we are going because we are celebrating World Book Day and the theme for this year is ‘Share a story’.
Sharing a story necessarily implicates sharing a dream. In a story, characters move deftly and nimbly across the pages to illustrate for us the beauty of life or the futility of inordinate ambition. The characters speak to us words of wisdom to let us know the true facts of life: no good deed goes unrewarded; no bad deed goes unpunished. They teach us that love never grows old or out of fashion, and hate always eats itself out. Above all, stories illustrate to us the futility of self-worship and the richness of other-service.
Reader, when you share a story, you share a world. Stories have ways of taking you by the hand and leading you over many oceans, rivers, vales and valleys, mountains and hills from where you look down and see the world in all its glorious smallness. Then you discover you are actually not the most important thing that has happened to this planet after all; there is always something more spectacular than you. In story books, you open the shutters of your minds and widen their boundaries to be able to take in all the different worlds and different cultures. We discover new worlds.
I quite believe that one of the outcomes of the government’s programme of shutting the people’s mind is corruption. That programme began in the seventies and eighties when the government began to shut down the tools and materials of book production – killing off paper mills, strangulating newspaper industries, imprisoning the book work force, etc. The natural consequence of this action is that books became scarce, the people had no credible, selfless models to mentor them, except these wild kleptomaniacs around us, and imaginations dried off. What has come off from all that has been this culture of crazy kleptomania gone mad and wild. Nature hates a vacuum.
I believe when people begin to read, then they can truly begin the fight against corruption. It is not enough to mouth the fact that the war against corruption must be fought without people being involved. The entire populace must be involved in the fight. There is no better way to marshal the populace to be embroiled in that bustle than through books. The government cannot fight the battle alone; it is a grave error for her to think so. To win that war, we must begin the book revolution which will lead to a cultural revolution.
Finally, the country must adopt a plan of action to make her citizens more responsive towards books, stories and reading. A situation where the people are kept perpetually in the dark because of the government’s self-serving plan cannot hold perpetually either. Something must give, and it has to be this dark veil of ignorance. The people should be given the chance to own their own thoughts.
For this last one to happen, the country must attempt to catch readers, book lovers and story tellers young. Let every classroom in the land in the primary and early secondary schools make an hour in the day to read a storybook to and in the class. Let families read story books together. This way, imaginations can be primed to do some serious innovative thinking and increase our national intelligence in order to improve our technological drive. Many parents fight each other over phones and who is hiding or not hiding passwords; they hardly fight over books. Children pick up most of their habits from home and school. It is time to go #makingourchildrenreadagain right from home and school.
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