Mother Tongue Wednesdays: A backyard afterschool library in Joburg is reclaiming language and learning
ORANGE FARM: The chatter of children’s voices rises from behind a corrugated gate on a Wednesday afternoon in Drieziek 3, Orange Farm. Inside a small backyard building that was once a storeroom, rows of plastic chairs and low desks fill the space. Here, Abantu Literacy League hosts its weekly ritual: Mother Tongue Wednesdays, a day when English gives way to the languages of home – isiZulu, Sesotho, and to a lesser extent Sepedi, Tshivenda and Xitsonga.
Bridging Home and School: Why parents matter
ORANGE FARM: Experts have long held that a key to reading success is not exclusive to the classroom, but in the everyday learning that happens at home. “Learning does not begin when children walk through the school doors, nor does it end when they exit for the day. It takes place all the time, everywhere.”
These schools are turning language barriers into learning success
ORANGE FARM: At Laus Deo Primary and Lehae Primary School, teachers are demonstrating that language should never be a barrier to learning. In classrooms where children speak Isizulu, Sesotho, Tshivenda, Xhosa and Xitsonga at home, these educators are finding creative ways to turn challenges into opportunities and to build a lifelong love for reading.
The struggle is real when it comes to the language of learning in classrooms
NORTH WEST PROVINCE: Setswana-speaking Oarabile from rural Kgabalatsane Village in the North West, struggles with a lack of resources and qualified mother tongue teachers at her school. Xitsonga-raised Tsakane, from urban Soshanguve in Gauteng, navigates a complex multilingual environment and the dominance of English as a language of learning and teaching (LOLT).
Makhanda shows the way with home-language literacy
MAKHANDA: The extent of South Africa’s literacy crisis has been laid bare with the Department of Basic Education’s new early learning reading benchmarks, covering 11 official languages. The benchmarks, which will be tracked over years to come, are the result of a R50-million survey that took seven years to develop and research.
Some of the solutions are not in the classrooms
MAKHANDA: In November 2025, the R50 million Funda Uphumelele National Survey (FUNS) delivered the first comprehensive measurement of early-grade reading in all official languages. The findings confirmed what researchers suspected but could now prove. Only 31% of Grade 1 learners can identify 40 letter-sounds per minute – the minimum threshold for reading readiness. By Grade 3, 15% cannot read a single word.
Why mother-tongue education is failing our children
MAKANDA: In Makhanda, children taught in English outperform those taught in their ‘mother tongue’ by more than two to one. The data doesn’t prove mother-tongue education is wrong — it reveals the gap between policy ideals and classroom realities.
How funding apartheid fail young library users
MAKHANDA: When Grade 11 learner Sipho Mthembu arrives on Monday afternoons at Duna Library, his local facility in Joza, Makhanda, he’s not looking for books to borrow. He needs something more basic: a quiet place to study with working electricity. Yet the library closes at 5 pm, soon after school ends.
New data points to solutions for SA’s child literacy woes
ORANGE FARM: New research has highlighted both the depth of the problem with child literacy in South African schools – and pathways to solutions. The results were released in November and they are far from fun. For example, 15% of children could not read a single word by the end of grade 3. That means that in a classroom of 40 children, there could be six who cannot read.
Sandpits and Story Circles – How Lenasia South and Orange Farm pre-schools are rewriting their own literacy story
ORANGE FARM: In a country where less than half of Grade 4 learners can read for meaning, educators in Orange Farm and Lenasia South are demonstrating the power of community initiatives to close the gaps.
In the heart of Orange Farm Ext 1, a group of preschoolers sit cross-legged around a sandpit, tracing letters in the dust. “B + A + L + L = ball,” chants their educator, Dimakatso Mbele in English. She then repeats the exercise in isiZulu and Sesotho.
Consider the 19%: What happens to those who can, in fact, read for meaning?
MAKHANDA: Much attention is paid to the 81% of South Africa’s Grade 4s who cannot read for meaning. Leanne Kelly and Rod Amner consider the stories of those from the “other 19%”.
If unfixed, new school language policy could derail SA’s literacy
Teachers in KwaZulu-Natal warn that without proper terminology, books, training and classroom support, SA’s Mother Tongue-based Bilingual Education policy may deepen the literacy crisis.
Give children high-quality books from Grades R-12: they will likely read them
MAKHANDA: Lucky Xaba, the Humanities librarian at Rhodes University, arrives at a no-fee school in Makhanda to check on the colourful classroom library she and her team built a few months before. The teacher is absent, but the Grade 1 children are all there, books in hand, reading independently on cushions. On her second visit, they eagerly recount every plotline they’ve read.
20 books make all the difference in a home
MAKHANDA: In the Masete household in Ghost Town, Makhanda, a young girls holds both a baby and a book, confidently reading aloud to her siblings and cousins. It wasn’t always like this. It was a transformation that began with a simple parcel of books dropped at their gate during the height of COVID restrictions.
When home tongues clash with classroom words
MAKHANDA: In the move to have children learn literacy in their home language in their early school years, the many who speak dialects other than official languages are losing out. This may explain why many do worse in “home” language tests than those testing in English.
How a broken city doubled SA’s literacy rate
MAKHANDA: Makhanda embodies contradiction. The Auditor General rates Makana Municipality’s performance in the bottom 2.8% of South Africa’s local governments. Yet, amid poverty and dysfunction, 41% of its public school Grade 4 learners can read for meaning – more than double the national average of 19%.
SA spends 1.8% of its education budget on pre-schoolers: the damage shows
MAKHANDA: Early childhood development (ECD) is a term that is being bandied about a lot these days. Minister of Basic Education Siviwe Gwarube has allocated a substantial amount of additional funds for ECD centres to register through the Bana Pele Mass Registration Drive and receive an increased subsidy. A good start. But much more needs to be done.
R5 billion withheld: The EC school funding crisis
MAKHANDA: Since 2020, the Eastern Cape Department of Education has retained about R5 billion from the budgets of its poorest schools, ostensibly for “centralised procurement”. Some of that money could have funded teacher support, classroom libraries, and access to abundant free digital resources – multiple times over.