The instruction was simple, and Matete Lesele had given it many times. Choose an article on the English Wikipedia, he told the students in front of him, and translate it into the language you grew up speaking. Most reached for the wiki in their mother tongue. This student reached for Afrikaans; not her mother tongue. When he pointed her back toward her own language, she told him she couldn’t write it — the school she had gone to never taught her how.

Lesele, a librarian at the City of Johannesburg and a board member of Wikimedia South Africa, repeats some version of that exchange to almost everyone who asks why he does this work. It was the moment a vague worry turned specific. A language can live in conversation, in songs, in the things a grandmother says that no one writes down. But a person who cannot write their own language is unlikely to add it to the places people now go to look — and the largest of those, by a distance hard to overstate, is the one he spends his evenings inside.

That worry is the engine behind the campaign he launched this month. Through September — Heritage Month in South Africa — Lesele is running a translation drive across all ten of the country’s indigenous and Afrikaans-language Wikipedias, asking volunteers to carry articles about South African heritage from English into the languages those articles are missing from. Thirty days, ten wikis, one simple mechanic: translate rather than create, so that no one has to compose from nothing. He chose September because Heritage Month already gathers these languages, and the cultures behind them, under a single banner.

The scale of what he is pushing against is easier to feel in numbers. As of writing this, the English Wikipedia holds 7.2 million articles. Afrikaans has around 130,000. Zulu, the most-developed of South Africa’s indigenous languages online, has about 12,000. Sepedi has 9,000; Xitsonga, roughly a thousand, kept alive by 41 active editors. Ndebele has 330 — the written record, in a country of eleven official spoken languages, that a schoolchild searching in their own tongue would find waiting for them.

Lesele came to this by a route he did not plan. He opened a Wikipedia account in 2014 and left it untouched for six years, until a 2020 campaign for African librarians called 1Lib1Ref pulled him in during the first hard months of the pandemic. He finished among its top 50 contributors across the continent, the only South African on the list. He kept editing, then started teaching others — at library meetups, at universities where he sometimes arrived to assist and ended up leading. On the side, he is building the case for a Wikipedia in Sepulana, his home language, which is not among the official eleven and which, he says plainly, no one else is likely to carry if he sets it down.

The campaign began in an in-between moment, the way a surprising number of them do. At Wikimania he met an editor from India writing one article a day for a hundred days, each in her own language. Her project was one person and one language. South Africa has ten wikis, all of them short of hands at once. A thirty-day, ten-language campaign had come from nothing more than two Wikimedians in a queue, telling each other what they were working on. 

At midnight on the first of the month, the tracking began. Lesele had set up a campaign on the Wikimedia Programs & Events Dashboard (the movement’s own tool for tracking impact in the country, movement and world), which records every edit contributors make across the ten wikis. He checks it each morning the way other people check the weather; on the third day it showed 39 articles from 23 people, a figure he expects to look quaint by the thirtieth. Before the launch, he spent a Saturday walking volunteers through the translation tool by translating a whole article together, English into Sepulana, so they would leave having done the thing rather than heard about it.

One of those volunteers is Lindani Sikhakhane, a librarian from KwaZulu-Natal now based in Johannesburg, translating into Zulu. He has been editing since 2024, and describes the hardest part as staying consistent — and hunting for the Zulu meaning of an English word that doesn’t have a tidy one. The most rewarding part is simpler: finishing an article and knowing the content of a place like his own will now be readable anywhere in the world. To anyone hesitating at the edge of it, he offers the argument the whole campaign rests on. “Focus on your own language,” he says. “It doesn’t mean you have to understand English. Join, and learn as you go.”

What Lesele hopes other affiliates across the continent take from the month is not the campaign so much as the reasoning under it, which travels better than the specifics. The languages are worth the trouble of digitising. The smallest wikis are held up by one or two people who cannot hold them up forever. And nearly every country has a period in its calendar heavy enough to gather volunteers around.

On the thirtieth, he wants a larger number than the one he started with. But pressed on what he is really after, he reaches past the dashboard for something harder to count. He wants his son to be able to read about their heritage, in Sepulana, long after he is gone — and his son’s children after that. The world he is working toward is one where a Zulu speaker can speak Zulu to him and he can answer in Sepulana, and neither has to retreat into English to be understood. It is not, he says, the kind of thing a person builds alone.