By: Lorato Trok
14 September 2018
Under the auspices of the South African Book Development Council, all provinces in the country, through the provincial Sport, Art and Culture departments, celebrate National Book Week in various places across the country. The 2018 National Book Week in the Northern Cape was held in Kathu, a small mining town more than 200 kilometres from Kimberley, the Northern Cape capital on Tuesday 4 September.
The event was held at Siyathemba Community Centre, a new residential development on the outskirts of town. The event included oral story-telling, open mic poetry sessions, book review workshops and many more literary events.
Ikageng Book Club has more than sixty members, with members ranging from fifty years and up, the oldest being a seventy-five- year old grandfather. The book club use Mapoteng Public Library as their meeting space and the librarians train them on how to run their book club effectively. The group choose a Setswana book every week to read and discuss together. Their library does not have a lot of books in Setswana, but to make up for this, they share Setswana oral folklore and riddles. In the next quarter they will be reading Setswana stories to children who visit the library after school.
To start off the Book Review workshop, a young learner from Mapoteng Primary School read The Day Gogo Went to Vote by Elinor Sisulu in Setswana. Coincidentally, this book was a good choice as there were many gogos in the workshop who voted for the first time in 1994! After reading the book, there was a robust discussion on the text, the language and the illustrations of the book.
The Puku Review workshop was welcomed by all, especially by the elderly members of the Ikageng Book Club. During the discussions to evaluate the workshop, the club members indicated that their reading sessions and book discussions were richer with what they had learned from the workshop.
The more than twenty young learners from Mapoteng Primary School and Olifantshoek High School who attended the workshop said that they would pass on their newly acquired skills on book reviewing to their peers who were unable to attend the workshop. The Northern Cape Department of Sport, Arts and Culture’s, Mr Phenyo Modise, commended Puku for its wonderful work in documenting children’s literature in South Africa, a much needed resource in the country.
