Lack of readers and buyers in Papua New Guinea

A Caucasian once said: “If you want to hide something from a black person, put it in a book.” (or “write it down”). There’s long been a stereotype that black people don’t like to read.

The thinking behind this is that we, black (including chocolate brown and light brown) folks prefer to rely on oral communication to document history and to communicate, in general. We supposedly don’t like to write and we don’t like to read.

What this  means in both symbolic and practical terms is that, something precious in terms of content or physical object might be hidden in a book, but because the average black literate person doesn’t like reading anything beside his school materials for examination purpose, that useful material will elude him.

In the past, before formal education came to the erstwhile Australian colony, when our ancestors had no knowledge about books, pens or papers, much less read a book, such a dictum was not a surprise.

We now live in the information age. The dictum is fast becoming a travesty.

Basic formal education has been made free and mandatory in Papua New Guinea. But it must be pointed out that, “you can force a horse to the riverside, but you can’t force it to drink”. In order to reap the optimum benefits from a most efficient formal education system, it is a combination of various factors such as good financial standing from parents, reading, writing and research by students, and a massive investment in infrastructure, teachers and teaching materials by the government. So with the swiftness with which we have enacted policies to make basic education mandatory, measures to inculcate a reading culture among students and all the other components should be the same.

Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything. There are books readily available on amazon, not to mention our local libraries, books shops, street vendors and even some second-hand clothing shops but few read consistently, if any at all.

Today, if you upload a selfie on social media, you are sure to attract lots of comments, but if you post a reading material or article with the same medium and audience, far fewer comments will be attracted. People spend more time on crap than acquiring priceless knowledge about life issues through reading.

Writing is equally important. In spite of this, books written by our local writers don’t sell like hot cakes. To me, literacy is not a problem. With more than 25,000 grade twelve school leavers every year, that’s a lot of potential readers and buyers. Some of my books go as low as ten kina on Amazon.

Ironically, Papua New Guineans can blow over fifty kina every day on cigarettes, buai and flex cards but can’t afford a book that costs ten kina!

On the flip side, our experienced Papua New Guinean writers are not mentoring and guiding upcoming writers. We are left with no other option but to go back to our former colonizer to mentor, guide, edit our writing and control us. Albeit, that is a topic for another day.

In sum, for every learned Papua New Guinean, that dictum should be taken as a slap in the face, because we have the capability to read and write. We also have the ability to critique, edit and publish our own writing.