A NOVELIST has bemoaned what she sees as a declining reading culture in Zimbabwe, saying young people now prefer watching television than reading books.
BY PRECIOUS CHIDA
Lilian Masitera made the remarks at a Zimbabwe Women Writers workshop to assess the place of the novel as a cultural and educational resource on Saturday at Belvedere Teachers’ College in Harare at the weekend.
“Pertinent observations that we made were that young people now prefer to watch a 30-minute film, rather than grapple with a 500-page book from which the film came,” she said.
“Students of literature turn to the internet for book reviews in order to concoct an overdue assignment overnight and this preference for literature in digital form is justified as saving time in a somewhat hectic world.” Masitera, like most artists, bemoaned piracy, saying this had caused writers great financial losses, as books no longer sold as they once did.
She said middlemen, who purport to convert novels to film or video form tend to abridge or alter the work until it loses resemblance to the original novel and instead recommended audio and e-books as a reasonable alternative to the physical novel.
Zimbabwe Women Writers founder member and acclaimed novelist, Barbara Nkala underscored the need to preserve the novel.
“It will be decades before Zimbabwe and Southern Africa are dependent on digital literature, therefore, local writers must keep on writing, and writing material that is relevant and captivating, so as to promote interest in the written word,” she said.
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Educators, who participated at the workshop, said students have become slaves of electronic media such that they communicate almost exclusively via WhatsApp and Facebook, media which has no regard to rules of grammar, spelling, punctuation and as a result the quality of their essays and written work continues to deteriorate.
The writers said, in particular, students of literature, who rely on digital texts and social media commentary lose the chance to hone their powers of imagination and the ability to empathise with the author and his works.
