After apartheid ended in South Africa in 1994, the new government needed to change racist systems like the “Bantu Education.” And the leading educational theory at that time was Outcomes-Based Education (OBE), so it became the basis of South Africa’s first post-apartheid curriculum “Curriculum 2005” introduced in 1997. But new curricula needed new textbooks. So, in the same year, Zain and Jane Coombe (who’d taken over as MEP’s Head after Chris Breen) invited Yusuf to join MEP and start writing new textbooks for Grades 7 to 12.

Therefore, Yusuf returned to UCT in March 1997, and much of his initial work was researching and writing. And, the writing style he liked was to be “very exploratory and abstract,” but his colleagues weren’t a fan of that approach and felt his ideas were “too esoteric,” meaning too much in the air! So, the final textbooks blended his concepts with compromises across the team.

Now, each grade needed both a Learner’s Book and a Teacher’s Guide. So, for grades 7-12, Yusuf had to work on 12 books in total. And, every time the curriculum was revised or a new one introduced, they had to prepare new editions. So, this became a massive undertaking.

And, combined with limited freedom to include his preferred material, Yusuf eventually stepped back from writing for later revisions and instead chose to work as a content editor. And this allowed him to spend more of his time on PGCE and ACT courses, school visits, workshops, systematic testing, and other programmes.

But the first editions which were published by Macmillan under the title “Maths For All” “topped the best-selling list each year” in early 2000s. And now the series are sold by the name “Solutions For All Maths!”