Make every effort to fight demise of our city libraries

I was passing by the Newton Park library recently, and decided to stop and take my daughter in to browse for some reading material.

At the entrance, we were told we could not come in due to load-shedding.

I was staggered. In the past, when the systems were down, the librarians would take our books in and issue us others by writing down the details.

They would then update it on the system later.

That was when libraries were still busy places.

Today they are lonely, empty halls — all the more reason for librarians to be able to write down the details and keep the library functioning during load-shedding.

While I was there, some seniors stopped to pop into the library but had to turn away.

That is sad. It might not be very often that they get the chance to visit the library, only to be told that it is closed.

This ties in with a gripe I’ve had for some years now.

In an environment where reading is fast becoming a lost art, the libraries in Gqeberha have not opened on a Saturday in years (with some negligible, isolated instances).

Apparently it was over a pay dispute.

It seems mind-boggling that this corporate dispute could not have been resolved over the years.

Added to that is that they close early on a Friday.

That’s giving the younger generation who attend school even less of an incentive to visit the library.

I cherish the memories of spending an enjoyable few hours on a Saturday morning browsing through the tomes and discovering new literary delights.

That might be a dream for my kids.

It appears that we are resigned to reading being a skill that the next generation will not have.

To compound it, we seem hell-bent on doing everything possible to hasten its demise.

All the rhetoric of empowering the youth seems hollow when the powers that be don’t seem too concerned about preserving the storehouses of literature.

Many a library card now sits forlorn in a wallet or forgotten in some cupboard.

We are fortunate that we don’t have to start from scratch with establishing libraries.

There are many excellent literary havens in our metro.

My challenge to our mayor and his team is to make the preservation and the upgrade of our libraries a priority.

In an environment where reading is fast becoming a lost art, the libraries in Gqeberha have not opened on a Saturday in years