‘Johnny come lately’ on Books

Until the age 12, I hardly read anything that wasn’t compulsory at school. In the holidays we played soccer all day hoping to be the next Diego Maradona.At night we watched TV and marvelled at the exploits of Hulk Hogan and Michael Hayes in the ring. You have to be of a certain age to appreciate being glued to the TV watching wrestling. That was fun 1980s style! We even went as far as trying out the moves the next day!Little did we know that our heroes had the foresight to choreograph and rehearse the moves before Showtime! We learnt the hard way; with broken ribs and clavicles. That was when I knew a career in wrestling was not for me.When I joined high school, I discovered that there was more to life than a kick about in the park and rolling each other on the grass. For the first time, I was expected to own things called text books. My parents had to buy them and entrust them in my custody for the entire time I was at school. This turned out to be a more daunting task than I had anticipated. I quickly learned that some of my fellow students loved books so much that they went as far as to steal other people’s books!This was all new to me. I had to find out what was in these books that attracted humans like bees to nectar.I remember taking about four books to school when I started senior one. Among them were an Atlas, a biology text “introduction to biology”, a physics text “ordinary Level Physics” by A.F. Abbott aka “the Abbott” and a Good News bible. Apart from the bible, all the rest were stolen in the first term of school.I guess that experience of losing three quarters of my small collection of books inadvertently taught me that books are valuable and today I guard my slightly bigger collection jealously.All was not lost with that initial set back that I suffered. I was left with one option; to make maximum use of the school library. It is here that my love affair with books began.The school calendar ran on a tight schedule. So tight was the schedule that we actually had an 80-minute double period pencilled into the weekly time-table as a “Free Period”. And that was about all the free time students got all week to do what they pleased albeit in the confines of the classroom or the library!I hated the confinement of the classroom. I thus made a habit of spending my “free period” in the school library.At first I just browsed the shelves and waited for the eighty minutes to elapse. That was until I landed on the section marked “African Writers’ series”. I was instantly hooked! It was as if a switch had been turned on. My thirst for the written word could not be quenched.Week after week I went back to the library to read some more. I started to skip lessons to finish off books! That soon got me in trouble and my grades suffered but for some reason I didn’t seem to mind much at the time. One week I would be lost in Chinua Achebe’s “things fall apart” and the next it would be Jules Verne’s “twenty thousand leagues under the sea”My taste in books at the time was so eclectic that to this day I look back to that period of my life with nostalgia.It was as if I was travelling the whole world by way of books. I imagined life in England from Canterbury to Dickensian London and those cold winters on the Yorkshire moors all captured in Charles Dickens’ “Great expectations” and Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering heights” respectively.I had a taste of the Caribbean easy going life in VS Naipaul’s “Miguel Street”. Even Russia did not seem that distant once you flipped through Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago”Many hobbies abound but in the pursuit of a broader mind, your best bet would be to pick up a book.The entire world and all its aspirations seem to be captured one way or another in literature. By way of example, as a young man growing up I took a lot of solace in learning from various authors that the anxieties of the teenage years are quite similar across cultures the world over.Books like Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist” and Mongo Beti’s “mission to Kala” although set in disparate lands and cultures capture this social phenomenon equally well.Last week, the Kigali public library was officially opened by the first lady. Outside of the universities and a few schools, it’s the only library available for use by the general public in Rwanda. The Library was built with support from the Rotary Club of Kigali – Virunga and the government of Rwanda.I hope that this will be the first of many such initiatives to bring books closer to the people. It’s often said that a people that do not read are doomed to obscurity. Rwanda wishes to come out of the shadows and take centre stage on the global arena. We need to see the world in its entirety to figure out what our place and role is in that world.It would be great to travel to the ends of the world but only a few have the means to do so. The next best thing is to experience that world through books.

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‘Johnny come lately’ on Books