This paper discusses an attempt to establish community literacy procedures in an Eastern Cape community school. The school hosts the Additive Bilingual Education (ABLE) project, a cooperation between UK and South African universities and the school trust. The community literacy strand of the project encourages family members to contribute oral texts in Xhosa to the school (for example, "ntsomi" or traditional stories, biographies and procedural texts such as recipes). These are then turned into print and electronic text through shared writing, and act as reading resources through paired reading, a cross-age peer-tutoring procedure. This is an attempt to deal with the shortage of reading material in Xhosa, while at the same time enhancing community involvement in the school by producing "culturally relevant" materials. In discussing the problems I encountered in attempting to establish these procedures, I seek to link factors operating at the micro level of school practicalities and community attitudes with those operating at the macro level of national policy and international cooperation.