My name is Mbali Dipuo Kgame. I was born in Zola in Soweto, but grew up in a small, isolated township called Poortjie in the Vaal. As a teen, I moved back to Zola, so both places have influenced my writing and creativity. I have written two stories for Nal’ibali, Hair Magic for Radio Stories Season 5 and The Djembe Drum for Season 6. Hair...

  Storytelling is an essential forerunner in children’s literacy development and an important way of preserving culture and language. Yet many of the same stories appear in different parts of the world: passed down from generation to generation, retold in various languages and with different cultural adaptations. These classic fairy tales contain important moral lessons and universal human truths.    As part of Literacy and Heritage Month,...

Khumo Tapfumaneyi is a co-founder of Ethnikids, a specialist online bookstore sourcing and selling children’s books that feature characters of colour in different South African languages. Tapfumaneyi has made it her mission to ensure that as many children as possible can fall in love with reading by seeing children just like themselves reflected in the stories they read. The Nal’ibali reading-for-enjoyment campaign caught up with...