Mpumalanga MEC for culture, sports and recreation Lindiwe Ntshalintshali is on a mission to make books in indigenous languages available on online stores.
“We need our novels, short stories and poems to be digitised so that the young people who are mostly hooked on gadgets must be able to read them. Modernising the languages will keep them alive forever. There’s no heritage without language, hence the department is partnering with the National Library of SA to honour the living legends while still alive,” said Ntshalintshali.
During an event in Mbombela, which honoured writers of books in indigenous languages, Ntshalintshali said young people needed to be able to read and write their languages to keep African languages alive.
“We know that Mpumalanga has been given siSwati and isiNdebele as dominating languages, we know that this province is multilingual and we are saying let the legacy these writers left us live and be passed to generations to keep our languages and those old stories,” said the MEC.
Emma Mathunjwa, One of the authors who were honoured on the Day said: “Writing in our indigenous languages has taken me to places and now we are being recognised and for that, let young people come to us. Let them start writing in African languages because we cannot let these languages be taken over by other languages.”
