Athol Williams, author, academic, award-winning poet and Read to Rise co-founder, reflects on the profound impact reading had on his life while growing up in Mitchell’s Plain during Apartheid, and the emergence of local authors writing about their lives and sharing their perspectives.
I haven’t lived in Mitchell’s Plain for over 30 years, but I still consider it my hometown. I am now a lecturer at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, but I will never forget starting out at primary school and high school in Westridge, and the life-lessons I learned playing soccer, whether in Rocklands or Lentegeur, and baseball in Woodlands or Strandfontein.
An amazing recent development in Mitchell’s Plain is the emergence of local authors writing about their lives and sharing their perspectives. I believe fully that we should be telling our own stories. For many years outsiders have been telling the stories of our lives and distorting them. This is why I wrote Pushing Boulders in 2016, to tell my own story and that of my community.
Today, we have growing numbers of poets, novelists and non-fiction writers emerging to tell the world who we are and show the world what we’re capable of. I’m excited to see this development. Schools, libraries and individuals must support these authors by buying their books.
Of course, we also need readers. I was sad to see that so many young learners struggle to read and don’t have access to books. I personally know the great benefit of reading. Through books I became more curious to know about how things worked and to understand the world around me. Through books my imagination was widened till nothing seemed impossible. While in primary school and high school I read as much as I could, which prepared me well to study at university and then go on to build a career that took me across the world where I could fulfil my wildest dreams.
Wanting to inspire young children in Mitchell’s Plain to follow in my footsteps, I founded the organisation Read to Rise in 2013 along with my wife Taryn and brother Roscoe. Every day, for the past 11 years, the Read to Rise team has visited Grade 2 and 3 classrooms in Mitchell’s Plain to deliver reading lessons.
Every year we visit every single primary school in Mitchell’s Plain, all 47 of them, to present children with their very own new story books. The books are part of the Oaky series, currently consisting of nine books. I write the books; Taryn illustrates them, and Roscoe and his team ensure the children of Mitchell’s Plain get to own them at no cost. A Mitchell’s Plain problem solved with a Mitchell’s Plain solution.
I was overwhelmed in 2019, when Read to Rise presented the annual Cape Flats Book Festival, which was the first festival ever to showcase our Mitchell’s Plain authors and bring authors and publishers from around the country to our area. This is what I believe we need, acts of hope like this festival in our community.
I want to see our community produce some of the best authors in South Africa. There’s no reason this can’t happen. Many great people have emerged from Mitchell’s Plain. We just need to believe in ourselves like the young girl in my youth novel A Girl Called H. She is the hero who saves the city of Cape Town. And where is she from? Mitchell’s Plain of course!
