The country has just bin-bagged English literature as a core subject. In its place, they have installed Development Studies, organised around patriotism, while literature itself has been embedded into the English language syllabus. It’s being sold as streamlining. I’m calling it a stealth lobotomy of the national imagination.
I teach literature. I know what this looks like on the ground. When literature stands alone, it’s a glorious, messy gymnasium for the mind. You spend months inside a single novel. You watch a character’s moral anchor snap. You feel the stomach-churning gulf between what a person says and what they actually mean. You learn, through the sheer, exhausting duration of a book. why people do the terrible things they do.
But when you embed it, Macbeth becomes a comprehension exercise. The question is no longer “Why is this man’s soul collapsing into a dark, murderous abyss?” but “Can you identify the prepositional phrase in this monologue about regicide?” It’s turning a heart-stopping encounter with human darkness into a technical manual. It’s like trying to learn about love by reading a divorce settlement.
The result will be a generation of students who will identify a simile while half asleep but have never spent enough time inside a book to understand how betrayal actually feels. They can parse a sentence, but they haven’t practiced inhabiting a mind unlike their own for long enough to change how they see the world. And let’s be honest: societies don’t fracture because of a deficit of grammar.
No one ever started a civil war because they misplaced a semi-colon. Societies fracture because of a failure of imagination. They break because we lose the ability to perceive the interior life of someone who disagrees with us.
Take Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. If you study it deeply, you don’t just learn about colonialism, but you feel the bone-shaking terror of watching your world’s logic become illegible. You feel the chaos. You can’t get that from a two-page excerpt analysed for themes between a lesson on tenses and a lecture on national duty.
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The logic here is clear and, frankly, a bit depressing: the problem with young people is not unemployment or inequality but insufficient national loyalty. But you don’t build a durable love for a country by mandating it. That’s not loyalty; that’s just a lack of alternatives. Real patriotism comes from understanding a place’s wounds, its jokes, and its unfinished business. It comes from the ‘But,’ and literature is the only place where the ‘But’ is allowed to live.
Eswatini is making a choice about what kind of literacy it values. The consequences won’t show up on a standardised test tomorrow. They’ll show up in twenty years, when public discourse has the depth of a saucer and disagreement concludes with a fist instead of a conversation. By then, it’ll be far too late to teach a generation what it feels like to spend a month inside someone else’s mind.
And that, my friends, is a tragedy we won’t even find in Shakespeare—mostly because we’ll be busy mining him for adverbs.
