HGSE News: Building a Culture of Reading in South Africa

When the history department at Salem State College was weeding its library to make room for office space in October 1992, history professor Julius Wayne Dudley, Ed.M.'85, recipient of Greater Boston's 1999 United Nations Leadership Award and Paul Harris fellow of the International Rotary Foundation, recalled a recent account by an African Methodist Episcopal bishop in Cape Town of the dire book shortage in post-apartheid South African schools.

Dr. Julius Wayne Dudley with South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Dudley contacted the bishop (a former college classmate of his) and arranged to send 6,000 books to South Africa. With that shipment, Dudley got his start in what would become Collaborative Education with South Africans (CEWSA), a nonprofit enterprise that now takes up practically all his extra time and has already absorbed $33,000 of his personal income.

In the seven years since founding CEWSA, Dudley has collected 3.1 million books, of which over 2 million have been distributed to disadvantaged schools in South Africa. Today, OceanAir provides free warehousing of contributions from publishers and 375 American schools (CEWSA's largest donors) and arranges the shipping of huge crates of textbooks and teachers' manuals, from grades kindergarten through university level, from the docks of Boston and New York City. "We have been shipping the books in 40-foot containers since the second year of the program," he says. According to Dudley, each container contained as many as 70,000 books.

"Having sent a majority of the books to schools in townships, I am now trying to help build a culture of reading in rural schools," says Dudley. His most recent efforts have concentrated on the farm schools, each of which, he says, could be turned around with a $300 donation for pencils, paper, and chalk.

Shaping Young People's Lives
Sixty percent of South Africa's population is under the age of 25, and many of those young people, if things go as planned, will be shaped by CEWSA's donations. As a native of Atlanta who spent three years in the rural schools of Georgia, Dudley likes to think that a student, inspired by one of the donated books, may look into South African history the way he did into U.S. history to transcend the evils of the past. His University of Cincinnati dissertation focused on Americans in the 1930s and 1940s who waged an educational and legal campaign to eradicate the epidemic lynchings of black men and women in the South.

"Living in a country that comprises 5 percent of the world's population while consuming 30 percent of its resources, we can afford to work with those who have been systematically excluded." He continues, "We become a better people when we decide to share with others."

For More Information
Information on Collaborative Education with South Africans is available on Dr. Dudley's web site.

P7 MenuMagic dwt Control Layer -Do Not Alter