My Little Tribute to Books and Reading
In this debut of “Claire on Books” (her monthly column), Ms. Gasamagera crafts a compelling ode to the written word. “There is no excuse for being functionally illiterate,” the writer emphatically declares.
“If you haven’t read hundreds of books, learning from others who went before you, you are functionally illiterate—you can’t coach and you can’t lead.” These are the words of United States Retired Marine Corps General James Mattis. An unyielding pronouncement on many people I happen to know.
Among us Africans, there’s a well-known joke of this variance: “If you want to hide something from [Africans], all you have to do is hide it in a book.”
It’s too sweeping to be universally true. But as a joke, it’s a self-deprecating one, and it underlines a mindset that has no place in 2025.
The world is changing at a rapid pace. Artificial Intelligence is here to stay, and it is disrupting industries as we know them—AI is taking over many jobs human beings were paid to do.
To outpace the machine, we Africans—especially the African youth—have a long way to go in seeking knowledge and applying it through the development of skills. Venturing beyond the classroom into the depths of books is a call we can’t afford to ignore.
To put things in perspective, the post-colonial generations are ageing. The knowledge and skills that once worked for them are no longer up to date—they are out of touch with current times.
The only way for us to remain relevant, at home and on the world stage, is to make an unwavering commitment to reading books. For books introduce us to new ideas.
And new ideas give us different mindsets; they expose us to diverse perspectives, which—in turn—help us make better decisions for better outcomes.
The alternative to books is direct experience. But we only have one lifetime. Besides the fact that direct experience may be costly, we simply do not have enough time to reinvent the wheel as often as needed. This leaves reading as a practical necessity.
Books prevent us from learning the hard way through mistakes we could have avoided; they help us learn at minimal cost from the wealth of human experiences—from both the living and the dead.
“Books, in all their variety,” Winston Churchill once said, “offer the human intellect the means by which civilisation may be carried triumphantly forward.”
Churchill knew what he was talking about.
When King George VI gave his royal assent to form a government amid the war, Winston Churchill was 65 and had been written off due to political and military failures.
He could have focused on his dismal circumstances and sabotaged himself. But Churchill had been a devoted reader. Beyond his own record, the new PM could draw from ideas, perspectives, and experiences he had gleaned from a million pages.
ALSO FROM CLAIRE
Books made Winston Churchill the right person at the right time when his country was in dire need of an inspirational leader. Books served the British wartime Prime Minister well.
We may be no Churchill, and our circumstances may have nothing in common with leading a country through a Nazi blitzkrieg. But the principle remains—reading is formative, it’s character-building, it shapes destinies.
So, though every up-and-coming African leader may face a multitude of challenges, they can confidently rely on the knowledge that a commitment to reading will make them the right person at the right time, in the next chapter of Africa’s development. Provided they allow no excuses.
Personally, I am a super busy working mom of three young kids under seven. I have committed to reading 12 books a year. Not really a daunting challenge—the current state of technology presents us with multiple ways of reading books.
I consume audiobooks while doing house chores or driving around. And that’s me. You can come up with your own innovative ways to read books.
At any rate, this is the bottom line—there is no excuse for being functionally illiterate. “You will be the same person in five years except for the people you meet and the books you read,” Charlie Jones tells us.
And there is in Jones’s words a practical piece of advice that you would do well to take to heart.
