A recent post on a forum that I belong to showed a maize garden in which the seedlings had withered as a result of application of herbicide. More likely than not, the garden owner did not follow the right instructions as he was applying the herbicide. The entire maize crop was damaged as a result.
Malawians generally skip any reading they come across. They would rather proceed via the route of improvisation than spend an awful lot of time reading instructions. It simply is not in our culture to read or write for purposes of retrieving or storing information, respectively.
Last year I asked somebody I had known to be a sprayer to spray a certain chemical over the mango trees at home. I had read the leaflet that came with the chemical before contacting the sprayer. I, therefore, knew the ratio of chemical to water that was recommended for diluting the chemical. When I asked the sprayer if he had used that chemical before and what the mixing ratios should be like, he told me ratios that bore resemblance to what had been published on the leaflet. His figures were such that the chemical would be many times more concentrated than was recommended. I told him the figures from the leaflet, to which he responded, “Amangolembapotu zimene zija (the information on leaflets is not to be taken seriously).”
I failed to comprehend why anybody would manufacture a product and carelessly put information together to deceive users of the product into believing that what is published are the proper instructions for use. What would be the motive for doing that? Search me!
What I know is that many Malawians dislike reading and by extension do not believe in published information. Our former gardener used to say “Za m’manovel zimenezo (that belongs more to books – which he called novels – than to reality)” whenever he suspected the information he was receiving was impractical. This is a perspective that creates two worlds: the real, practical world and the imaginary, impractical world of books.
Inexplicably, the same people that distrust books take the spoken word at face value. Orally given instructions to them would be more reliable than written ones. Stories told by word of mouth would be believed more firmly than anything they would read.
Orally delivered information is vulnerable to distortions as the truth easily perishes on the waves of sounds and is instead replaced by embellishment. Both the story teller and the listener get wrapped up in great excitement as the story telling progresses, courtesy of the heavy embellishment that is usually thrown in. Embellishment notwithstanding, the listener would not be persuaded to resort to written information as the more trusted source. Reading is synonymous with studying. And studying, as far as the book haters are concerned, is pure torture.
With the endless possibilities brought about by the Internet, oral information delivery has metamophorsized into digital delivery via social media platforms. This involves a bit of reading but people do not mind it as it carries the flagrant flavor of embellishment, the type that characterizes oral delivery. Social media is, to all intents and purposes, an extension of oral delivery. You rarely get lengthy and analytical content on social media.
Publishing, unlike oral delivery of information or social media, is, in comparison, a painstaking process that involves peer review, corroboration, expert consulting and sometimes even triangulation. As a result, information that comes through publishing will have been subjected to extensive checks. It is like a precious metal that has undergone the process of refining in intense heat. When such metal comes out, it is as close as it can be to its pure form. Books may not contain the whole truth but, compared to orally transmitted information, the information therein is as close as any can be to the truth.
I would propose to those who have decided to keep a yawning chasm between books and themselves to consider going back to reading. When Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1450, the invention ushered in the rebirth of knowledge, known as the renaissance by historians. Knowledge could spread a lot more easily than had been the case hitherto because printing made is possible for books to be mass produced.
In modern times, a gentleman by the name Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web (www), ushering in the second renaissance. We can now access all manner of published information over the Internet, courtesy of www. For most part, ignorance is purely by choice in this era of www. It is surprising that even with all these developments some people still cling to oral delivery.