A once-in-14-years opportunity to put better books in South African classrooms. Daily Maverick investigated what happened when a group of educators tried to seize it -- and who is driving the narrative against them.

Joyce Nompumelelo Makutsoane has spent her working life watching a language die.

Agonisingly, classroom by classroom, year by year: isiXhosa vocabulary quietly replaced by English, children arriving in high school unable to read fluently in their mother tongue. As a writer, editor and proofreader, Makutsoane has witnessed this happen and felt largely powerless to stop it.

"I saw our children struggling, or unable, to read in their own language at high school level, and I realised that something drastic had to be done at the Foundation Phase," she told Daily Maverick.

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So when she was invited to join a team building something that might change that, she said yes -- even though there was no guaranteed income, only a royalty agreement paying out if government orders arrived.

"It was a dream come true. I finally had the chance to be part of meaningful change."

Makutsoane is one of 135 people who spent four months in 2024 building what would become the most contested educational publishing submission in recent memory. The company behind it is called Lighthouse Publishers: registered just days after the Department of Basic Education (DBE) published terms of reference for a potentially lucrative new textbook contract.

In April...