This thesis examines the spread and impact of the universal of literacy in rural Malawi, through the lens of globally circulating Anglophone children’s story books and the emergence of village libraries. While Africa in the twenty-first century is being seen as an emerging global player, many African countries are, however, still struggling to provide the basics of a quality education for their children. One approach to solving this problem taken up by many development organisations and governments is the heavy promotion of literacy programmes in primary schools. Within this framework literacy acts as what Anna Tsing calls a ‘universal’ – historically and socially contingent ideas which are elevated to the category of a universal good. The spread of universals in a world marked by asymmetrical power relations creates both deep aspirations and desires for the promises of the universal of literacy (education, economic and social progress, status) whilst simultaneously producing often violent marginalisations and exclusions (hegemonic school systems, new elites and hierarchies, failures of access and achievement, epistemological erasures). In looking at these processes through rural African libraries and the reading of fiction in rural Africa this thesis explores two areas of study that have received very limited anthropological attention: rural libraries and fiction reading. The work is based on eighteen months ethnographic fieldwork in a village conglomerate on the northern lakeshore of Lake Malawi. In my quest to find Anglophone children’s books in these villages, I encountered six-small scale local village libraries. In the first section of the work (Chapter 1), I ask how these libraries got to these villages, who built them and why? Drawing on extensive time spent in the libraries, chatting with librarians, readers, teachers, villagers, well-wishers, volunteers, and heads of charities, and following the trails of the libraries’ construction, I show that they did not emerge through large-scale macro-coordinated development projects, but rather through many individual and personal relations between local villagers and international well-wishers - offering a different picture to the usual marco-oriented development projects. Using the work of Tim Ingold, I suggest that one can understand how these micro-practices and relations are able to unintentionally contribute to the desired outcomes of the development agenda through the lens of entanglements and meshworks, which are underpinned by the expectations and requirements of universals as globally desired norms. In the second section of the thesis (Chapters 2 & 3), I explore the ways in which the universal of literacy facilitates the production of knowledge hierarchies, new elites and epistemic inequalities and how people contest these through claims about local oral literature (nthanu). From these discussions I posit nthanu as a key didactic tool for the ethical formation of the social-self that acts as a vitally important intellectual and ontological technology. I look at the ways in which schooling fails as a platform for engaging with nthanu and how the exclusions of literacy are exacerbated in Malawi through what I call an ‘English Myth’. I also discuss an old book, Nthanu za Chitonga, in which local oral literature was written during the colonial period, as an example of the intermingling of orality and literacy and an artefact of intellectual history and (post)colonial entanglements. I suggest that people’s ‘nostalgic’ discussions about ‘disappearing’ oral literature can be understood as a way to mark the limits of the universal and make claims for epistemic justice and recognition. In the last section of the thesis, I ask what happens when the universal of literacy brings fantasy-fiction books into communities where witchcraft and magic are part of everyday reality. By speaking to readers of fantasy books such as the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson series, I explore how readers make sense of the worlds they encounter in these books, incorporate them into their own ontological understandings and imagine an increased global affinity based on shared discourses of magic and witchcraft. Through the lens of libraries and literacy, the first dimension of the thesis contributes to understanding the transnational social and political history and contemporary relations in an area of northern Nkhata Bay considered the home-region of an ethno-linguistic group called Tonga. The second dimension of the thesis contributes towards a general analysis of the ways in which literacy acts as a universal which spreads through global connections and produces aspirations and exclusions in rural African spaces. By examining small-scale ‘development’ projects that are locally and globally co-constituted through entanglements, my research contributes to debates on the anthropology of development and the global-local encounter. By showing the contestations that form around literacy and orality, and the ways in which people navigate the aspirations offered and exclusions produced, the thesis adds to debates on literacy in rural Africa, universals and epistemic justice.