Be grateful to the teacher - if you can read this

THE now suspended public sector strike must have generated sufficient material to leave you with a photographic memory or two, good or bad.

If it wasn't the big fat mammas gyrating obscenely to the beat of the toyi-toyi, it must have been the disparaging remarks about President Zuma or Minister Baloyi.

Ever since I could read, slave to the written word that I am, I've always been drawn to any public display of writing - from billboards and graffiti to placards. The latter two, for the invariable violation of the rules of grammar, give me a high no other drug is capable of inducing.

It is thanks to this enslavement that I can almost always see with my mind's eye the atrocious prose and concomitant bad scrawl of the British coal miners led into the crippling strike by Arthur Scargill in 1984.

Those poor Pommie lines, an eyesore to the pedantic, were immortalised on the pages of Time magazine. Later in life they would serve me well as a rebuttal against mother-tongue speakers who misconstrued their lineage for an automatic ticket guaranteeing them proficiency in the Queen's language.

Our own home-grown piece of protest action has given me a few choice phrases. But for the purposes of this column, I'd like you to cast your mind back to one particular placard that implored us to be grateful to the teacher if "you can read this".

Let me state the obvious and remind you that, like all other forms of public scribbling, placards give those who can write bragging rights against those who can read. This exercise crudely leaves out those who cannot do either, write or read.

Forget the findings of a disturbing study conducted by the economics department at the University of Stellenbosch that says illiteracy is costing the country close to R550billion a year. For a moment, ask yourself the following: What sideshow of the strike gave those who can't read more fun?

The mamma who danced the manyisa?

My heart goes out to those who had to go without their medication during the strike but the placards were just the tonic for me. What, in the humour stakes, could be better than "Zuma, I'm your Standard Two teacher".

Hahahahaha ... Zuma behind the desk? What a phantom!

If you missed the hilarity of the placards, tell me you felt inspired by the recently concluded National Book Week -- our inaugural book celebratory shindig that ran from September 6 to 13. Everybody from the Minister of Arts and Culture to individual authors and scribes were one in the clarion call to engender a reading culture.

A friend, Sphiwo Mahala, who speaks for the Department of Arts and Culture, shared the following with me: "Literacy underpins development in various aspects of life and a heightened culture of reading is a fundamental ingredient in the creation of a prosperous society.

"With each reading initiative established, someone is bound to be converted to become a reader and this is important in our efforts to create a reading nation."

Let's hope the conversion began with the strike for, in the language of placard writers, this no-reading culture leaves me gatvol!