I hated it when I first heard it decades ago. It seemed like racist stereotyping of black people. Besides, it didn't appear to be borne out by my reality, growing up in Soweto.

People around me, including tsotsis, seemed to be reading newspapers, magazines, struggle poetry, books, novels and journals.

Small wonder that even Joseph Mahlangu, the notorious Lovers Lane serial killer, had been reading James Hadley Chase's You Find Him: I'll Fix Him when he was caught in the late 1970s.

Admittedly, some of the books were not particularly good, mostly falling in the crime-fiction genre, but, hey, they were books .

There are also times when I think anger and revulsion are not the appropriate responses to such an unflattering adage. Maybe it would be more helpful to take it as the proverbial kick in the rear needed to ensure that it can never be true of you and yours.

Anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that the expression is not entirely off the mark. The Exclusive Books branch at the new and imposing Maponya Mall, the only general book store in Soweto, has closed because of poor patronage. Meanwhile, cellphones, music and expensive clothing stores keep doing roaring business.

That's why my heart sank when I saw the unflattering saying being dramatically lent some credence in the Sowetan of Tuesday, April 20. One Cleo Bonny, a self-styled reading ambassador, heard a school principal in Soweto repeat the damning statement about the supposed aversion to books of black people and decided to put it to the test.

He hid a R100 note in a novel in January to see if anybody would find it. When he returned to the school, four months later, lo and behold, the money, a princely amount to your average township child, was exactly where he had left it. Nobody had opened the book.

It is not as if there were something wrong with the book's aesthetics. The reporter, Penuell Dlamini, says that the book, The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan, was not the only one that lay unopened. All the pupils he spoke to told him that none of them, or their schoolmates, read the books in the school library.

This story should worry every parent. Elaine Ntlailane, a head of department at the school, bemoaned the scant interest in books.

"The culture of reading should start at home, when kids are young." I couldn't agree more.

The chaps at Sowetan would be justified in heaving a loud, collective sigh of relief when they ran the story. At least, they can no longer be accused of complicity in discouraging reading among their readers.

The newspaper was harshly criticised recently for dumping its book review section. One critic flayed the newspaper's current leadership for having betrayed its educational role. The section was reinstated.

One thing I can say, though, is that lack of interest in reading books is not an exclusively black problem. Self-induced ignorance is a national problem. The dominant pop culture considers books to be uncool and nerdy.

I'm reminded of author Sihle Khumalo's scathing and provocative column in the Sunday Times of September 13 last year, headlined "It's a fact: Darkies just don't read."

Khumalo wrote: "In this country, with almost 50million people, a book has to sell only 5000 copies to be regarded as a bestseller. That can only mean only one thing: South Africans - of whom almost 90% are black and about 95% of those African - just do not read."

He added: "The lack of reading is a black thing, irrespective of where you live. It is way more fashionable to have loads of music than to be truly knowledgeable. But then again, would it suit the ANC government all of a sudden to have a vast number of broad-minded, knowledgeable black South Africans?"