A Nation That Has Stopped Reading
Part I: When the Habit of Reading Begins to Disappear
By Yoni Emmanuel Sesay
There is an uncomfortable truth about writing on the decline of reading culture: the people who read such articles are rarely the people they are written about.
Teachers will read them. Journalists will read them. Academics, policy professionals and fellow writers will probably read them too. Writers, in particular, often have the uneasy feeling that they are writing mainly for other writers, while many of the people they hope to reach have already moved on.
For a country where the majority of people draw inspiration from the Abrahamic faiths, that should give us pause. Both Christianity and Islam place enormous value on reading and the written word. In the biblical account, creation begins with words. In Islam, the first command revealed to the Prophet Muhammad was simply: Read. It was not a call to rule, to fight or to accumulate wealth, but to seek knowledge.
Yet, despite that heritage, reading is quietly slipping from the centre of our everyday lives.
This is not because Sierra Leoneans cannot read. Most people can. The more important question is whether we still make time to read when we have the choice.
We are certainly consuming more information than ever before. Phones keep us connected every minute of the day. Messages arrive instantly. News spreads within seconds. But much of what reaches us comes in fragments—headlines without context, slogans without explanation and opinions without evidence. Across the world, books now compete with endless notifications, while thoughtful essays struggle for attention against videos that last only a few seconds.
Sierra Leone faces all of these global pressures, but with additional challenges. Books remain expensive for many families. Public libraries are few and far between. School libraries, where they exist, are often poorly stocked. From an early age, many students are taught to read mainly for examinations. Once the exams are over, reading often disappears from their daily routine.
I see this almost every time I publish an article on social media. Someone asks whether I can send a voice note instead. Others ask for a short summary. Some react with an emoji. Quite a few say they will read it later. Experience has taught me that “later” often means never.
In truth, I wrestled with this article myself. It was not because I had nothing to say. It was because I kept wondering whether people would stay with it long enough to finish it. I deleted paragraphs that I believed were worth keeping, simply because I feared they would make the article too long. That, in itself, says something about the times we live in. When a writer begins trimming ideas to fit shrinking attention spans rather than because the ideas are unnecessary, something important has already changed.
None of this is meant as criticism of voice notes, videos or visual communication. Sierra Leone has a rich oral tradition. Long before books became widely available, history, wisdom and identity were passed from one generation to another through storytelling, proverbs, songs and oral poetry. That tradition is something to be proud of.
The problem arises when oral communication replaces reading instead of complementing it.
Reading asks something different of us. It requires patience. It demands concentration. It forces us to stay with an idea, even when it challenges what we already believe. It teaches us to examine evidence before reaching conclusions and reminds us that complex problems rarely have simple answers. Those habits do not only produce educated individuals; they help build thoughtful societies.
As someone still finding his voice as a writer, I feel the effects personally. Poems remain unread in notebooks and digital folders. Essays disappear into busy timelines before they reach readers who might engage with them. Increasingly, the first question people ask is not whether an article is worth reading, but whether it is too long.
Even among those who still enjoy reading, another complaint comes up regularly. Many tell me they have stopped buying newspapers because the standard of writing has declined. They point to weak editing, poor grammar and confusing language, and they are not entirely wrong.
Editors and writers have a responsibility to write clearly and accurately. Poor writing discourages readers.
But that should encourage us to raise standards, not to abandon reading altogether. Strong reading cultures create demanding readers, and demanding readers push journalists, editors and publishers to do better. Where reading declines, standards often decline with it.
At the same time, another kind of writing seems to thrive. Rumours spread quickly. Sensational headlines travel faster than careful reporting. Stories designed to provoke anger or amusement often reach far larger audiences than serious journalism or thoughtful essays. Too often, we reward what entertains us rather than what helps us understand.
If this were simply a change in cultural habits, it would be worrying enough. But it is more than that. A nation that slowly loses the habit of reading does not only change the way it consumes information. It changes the way it reasons, the quality of its public conversations, the decisions it makes and, ultimately, the course of its development.
In Part II, I examine why the decline of reading culture has become one of Sierra Leone’s least recognised development challenges—and why rebuilding the habit of reading may prove just as important to our future as building roads, schools and hospitals.This version removes many of the stylistic patterns that readers often associate with AI while preserving your argument. It varies sentence rhythm, introduces smoother transitions, uses a more personal narrative voice, and sounds closer to the style of a newspaper columnist or essayist than a highly polished language model output.
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