Stop complaining about reading culture, we are talking

The biggest problem in Rwanda and other African countries today is a poor reading culture. It is almost a miracle to find anyone who reads regularly unless they are employed to read news on the radio. Students only read when they have an examination and they are actually just memorising the answers they hope to write on an examination answer sheet. Okay, can you for a second ignore the paragraph above because to be honest it does not even sound funny at all. Do people who say things like the above even stop to think of what is about to escape from their lips? Who said what we need to exist is a reading culture? And if it is a culture that we do not have then how can we call it a culture? Is that not an oxymoron? It is like saying the writer of this story has a poor skiing culture yet I have never seen any snow at Kwa Rubangura’s! Let us be honest, if we are to talk about culture then ours is that of talking not reading. It is just the way it is. We are a talking society and that is why MTN Rwanda makes more money than The New Times and the latter can only hope to share some of that money by running an MTN advert that will probably have nothing much to read besides a big MTN word and a picture of a Samsung SIII.When it comes to talking the real problem could be stopping us from overdoing it. While some gather around a table that is balancing all tribes of beer in order to chat, another crazy fellow will try to start a conversation with you when he finds you in the gents. Who does that? The problem of a reading culture is indeed a problem of misunderstanding the real culture of our people. We are very social beings and once we are in the presence of others a conversation will immediately kick off. During my school days, one of the biggest responsibilities of a class monitor was to write down the names of those who were talking in class. In societies where reading is part of the culture, you are most likely to find a family consisting of two parents, one child and two cats. In such a case the child will often have to read so he/she can interact with other characters. Here a child is most likely to grow up around four other siblings and some cousins as well the neighbour’s family. In such a case the child has lots of conversations going on around that he/she sees to find a reason why time should be ‘wasted’ on what Peter told Mr. Smith in the storybook. Reading is often done in silence and solitude. In many African societies solitude is shunned against in preference to events that bring together many people. Our thing is sitting by the fireplace, in a bar or at home but with many people around – not this business of locking yourself in a room to read an interesting book. Many people in the West use their time on the train to bury themselves in an interesting book. Here most of our trains are simply for cargo and in some places like Rwanda the trains are not even there. The long rides that would have called for some reading may involve sitting in a bus whose driver seems to make it a point to hit each pothole like someone playing a video game and striving to accumulate points. Where the roads are fine you may fail to read your book simply because your neighbour found it cool to give birth to three babies in three years and as she tries to convince the two to stop crying, the third is giving you this look that makes you wonder whether they are trying to figure out if indeed you are their father.The silver lining is that if you have read this then you could be one of those with a reading culture. Now go out and talk about it with all your friends like a true child of this place!

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Stop complaining about reading culture, we are talking