President Cyril Ramaphosa’s initiative to get more South Africans in the spirit of reading has gathered momentum with the next reading book club taking place on May 27.
The book club is part of the National Reading Coalition (NRC) which is continuously making efforts to extend the reading initiative across individuals from all walks of life and across all ages through the Virtual Reading Club (VRC).
The VRC was launched on December 18 last year, and has hosted five book review sessions in the effort to take up the president’s challenge to read one book a month.
The upcoming NRC will include a discussion of Franz Fanon’s decolonisation novel, The Wretched of the Earth.
The discussion will be led by two phenomenal panellists in the form of Mugwena Maluleke, general secretary of the South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU) and former teacher and principal at Tshwane’s Rodney Mokoena Junior Secondary School.
The session will also be joined by an enthusiastic young man who is the first African Prime Minister of The Commonwealth Youth Parliament, David Kabwa.
Kabwa was a part of The Mail and Guardian Top 200 Young South Africans 2020 list and was in the Junior Chamber International (JCI) top 10.
In December, Ramaphosa took the time to share his 2020 Christmas reading list at the NRC’s Virtual Reading Club.
Among the president’s list were: The Lie of 1652 — A Decolonised History of Land by Patrick Tariq Mallet; The Longest March by Fred Khumalo; Time is Not the Measure: A Memoir by Vusi Mavimbela; Pan African Pantheon edited by Adekeye Adebajo, and Blue Ocean Shift by W Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.