In a corner of Joburg, away from bureaucratic echo chambers, a grassroots literacy revolution is taking hold. It doesn’t march; it reads. And it reads in isiZulu, Sesotho, isiXhosa and Tshivenda.
At the helm is Nompumelelo Ngcobo, who has developed — and paid for — the uQamata Cultural Series, a four-part illustrated children’s book collection that aims to reimagine early childhood education through African languages, traditions and knowledge.
Ngcobo identifies the foundation phase — the first three years of school — as a time when cultural “erasure” begins, “when children form ideas about who they are, what counts as knowledge and whose stories matter”, she says. “If those stories are foreign, and if African knowledge is absent, erasure has already begun.”
The uQamata books are not translations. They are original stories rooted in African rites of passage such as umemulo (traditional coming of age for women in Zulu), amalobolo (bride price or wealth in Zulu), and utsiki (a traditional Xhosa ritual performed during the marriage process).
One of the characters in the books is Gogo, not a caricature but a knowledge holder. The books are illustrated by Ngcobo’s husband, Kwakhona Mahamba, a software developer.
Ngcobo prints the books through Jetline Midrand and distributes them via Pep’s delivery service, Paxi, and PostNet. The entire initiative is funded from her savings.
Ngcobo presented uQamata as a case study at the University of Toronto this year during a session on decolonising education.
The books are supported by the Amazwi kaQamata tutoring programme, which operates in communities using story cards, community-printed charts and the uQamata books to promote literacy in isiZulu and Setswana.
But can this quiet rebellion move the needle on South Africa’s literacy crisis?
According to the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study 2021, released in 2023, 81% of grade 4 pupils in South Africa cannot read for meaning in any language, up from 78% in 2016. Even more starkly, the proportion of pupils who cannot read at all has doubled from 13% in 2016 to 27%. South Africa ranked last among the 57 countries assessed.
We force children to decode meaning in a language not rooted in their identity. We break their confidence, then blame them for failing
— Nompumelelo Ngcobo
The 2030 Reading Panel, chaired by former deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, has called for reforms, including standardised assessments, access to reading resources in all classrooms and changes in how teachers are trained. Its 2024 report says children in the poorest 70% of schools are less likely to reach basic literacy benchmarks.
Data from the department of basic education (DBE) reveals an imbalance in home-language instruction. Only 50% of isiNdebele-speaking pupils are taught in that language, while 98% of English-speaking children are taught in their home language.
Ngcobo says the problem lies in the shift to English instruction by grade 4. “We force children to decode meaning in a language not rooted in their identity. We break their confidence, then blame them for failing,” she says.
She wants African languages elevated to core teaching status, a state-backed publishing fund for indigenous content and an approach to teacher training that includes pupils’ cultural backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. “African languages are not enrichment, they are infrastructure,” she says. “Literacy is not just about reading, it’s about memory, self-worth and liberation.”
Nkosikhona Sean Nkosi, a lecturer in education at Rhodes University, says the marginalisation of African languages isn’t just a policy gap but a “coloniality of knowledge”.
“Projects like the uQamata Cultural Series aren’t supplementary, they are critical,” he says. “They embody what decolonial theorists call ‘epistemic disobedience’, challenging the idea that valid knowledge must come from formal, often Westernised systems.”
Nkosi says the DBE should adopt concrete measures, sustained mother-tongue instruction, language equity targets, resourced teacher education and curriculum materials “that generate knowledge from African lived experience, not just translations of English concepts”.
Tinashe Mutero, who studies music in relation to its cultural and social contexts, says projects like uQamata can break isolation by “creating a union or some association of like-minded organisations” to build collective strength and then “finding innovative ways to introduce this in all spaces”.
He says cultural memory and indigenous storytelling already thrive informally, but “those spaces are not validated enough”. The real task now, says Mutero, is to push beyond celebration and demand change. “There is an opportunity to include the same in formal education through lobbying for policy changes or at least implementing existing policies in their entirety.”
Ngcobo’s background in public policy, including being a researcher at the KwaZulu-Natal legislature, informs her critique. “I’ve seen how policy is written and how it fails to reach the classroom,” she says.
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