Let Us Learn (Kha ri Gude)

Let us learn / Kha ri Gude
words of great promise
prompts the radio reporter

Halving illiteracy
our Dakar commitment
to Education for All

Illiteracy – another legacy
of our apartheid past
never mind the colonials
leaving us infrastructure

Illiteracy – a planned disaster,
to keep us down and out
unlike today’s calamities
due simply to incompetence

Let us learn / Kha ri Gude
empowering ourselves
our lives and communities

Let us learn / Kha ri Gude
and not just exist
in lives of standard grade

Let us learn / Kha ri Gude
to express ourselves freely
(like our constitution wants)

Let us learn / Kha ri Gude
knowledge is the power
though the power
is not always with us

Kha ri Gude
Let us learn

Fingers poised on the keyboard, during a Saturday SAFM news bulletin mentioning our biggest ever Literacy Campaign (as the April 11-17 Mail and Guardian article “Huge push for literacy” calls it) – but pausing to ask young Belinda and Samantha (out here at Eerste River Senior Secondary) whether they knew anyone who couldn’t read and / or write, and what they’d do if they themselves could not.

Penned, eventually, on Sunday morn, 04 May 2008, during a longer report of the Campaign on SAFM’s Weekend AMLive, featuring an interview with Campaign CEO Veronica McKay, who the M&G informs us ‘wants to bring the three R’s to 4,7 million adults’. They tell us also that Kha ri Gude is “let us learn” in Tshivenda.

- David Kapp, davidkapp@webmail.co.za