Johannesburg, South Africa — After years of informal conversations and meetings with friends to discuss books, Lorraine Sithole decided to make things official.
In April 2011, while picnicking under a tree at the Zoo Lake playground in Johannesburg, Sithole kicked off The BookWorms book club with two other women.
“On my arrival home, I googled how successful book clubs were run and added a pay-it-forward element,” Sithole said, “I drafted the constitution, which went back and forth amongst the three of us till we were satisfied with its elements, We chose a title, and three weeks later we had our first official book discussion.”
Eight years later, the club is thriving. Once a month, a group of 20 black women meet in a member’s home to discuss primarily books by South African authors. Members are required to buy the chosen book each month, read it, make a monthly financial contribution to the club for community-based projects and serve as a host for the club when it’s their turn.
The books the club has read constitute a who’s who in contemporary South African literature, including Zakes Mda, Nthikeng Mohlele, Angela Makholwa, Judy Dlamini, Niq Mhlongo, Dudu Busani-Dube, Mzi Khumalo, Mamphele Ramphele, Siya Khumalo and Sindiwe Magona, among others. This month the group is reading “The Gold Diggers” by Sue Nyathi, a native Zimbabwean who now lives in Johannesburg. The “God Diggers” is about eight Zimbabwean immigrants who embark on a treacherous journey into South Africa.
Over all, the club’s aim is to support a culture of reading for pleasure.
“We are all about getting everybody to read,” agreed Zanele Nodladla, a member of the book club for the past seven years. “If you take the initiative to read, it will instill that culture to the young ones.”
Sthembile Buthelezi, a member of the BookWorms for five years, said she has been a witness to four generations of reading in her home, beginning with her great-grandmother and continuing through to her own daughter.
“[Reading] is actually a ripple effect,” Buthelezi said. “If one person does it, a lot of other people actually start doing it as well.”
Sithole said the focus on black women in the club is deliberate.
“It is specifically for black women of a certain age, or a certain means,” Sithole said, “black women because we have the same issues, and I find that whenever we are in the company of, especially white women, we tend to censor ourselves. But if it is a group of 16 black women, we’ve all grown up in the townships. It is easier for us to talk about issues that bother us.”
The club also supports community-based organizations, with the help of monthly donations from members. Last year, BookWorms members collected and donated over 100 books to the Ekujabuleni KwaBadala Recreation Center for senior citizens in Orlando East, in Soweto, in addition to a monetary donation of 53,000 Rands ($3,543). This year, they are working to raise money for New BeginningZ, an organization that takes in and supports abandoned children.
South Africa struggles with low literacy rates in many townships and rural areas. According to the University of Pretoria’s Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, in 2016, eight out of 10 fourth graders could not read at an appropriate level.
Sithole said when she came across this statistic, she should have been shocked, but wasn’t.
“Although our kids speak a lot of English, they don’t know how to write it,” said Sithole, who grew up speaking Sepedi, one of the 11 official languages of South Africa. “They don’t know how to read it.
While The BookWorms Club reads books in English because that is a language all members share, Sithole said she is happy that an increasing number of books are being published in or translated into African languages. She said she believes this has led to an increase in the actively reading population.
“As hard as it is, what has been happening now is that we are taking back the languages because language is more than talking,” Sithole said. “It is also spiritual. It is about the ancestors. It is cultural. So now there is a huge movement in the reclamation of our languages.”
In the past three years, 20-30 new book clubs have emerged around Joburg, Sithole said. For Buthelezi, the number of black people who are connected to these clubs and the growth of reading is encouraging.
“A lot of black people are reading now and also having a voice,” Buthelezi said. “People have grown, and reading is not just a culture but a lifestyle.”
