Kolbe’s love for knowledge recalled

THE ones who die, whose love and affection we cherished, are often resurrected in heart and memory.

Especially when remembered on occasions when they are celebrated, not only for what they were and did in life, but how their presence in our lives made us feel about ourselves; the difference they made in the world.

Juliette Kolbe Bourne spoke this week at the renaming of a section of the University of Cape Town’s library to the Vincent Kolbe Knowledge Common. She detailed the lay-out of the facility: students would be able to sit in pods of four or five instead of on their own; there were meeting rooms for discussions to plan and collectively work on projects; the knowledge common would be the starting point for any research project.

“And all these ‘things’ are what I experienced growing up as a child of Vincent, a constant source of information, even if it was just a new knock-knock joke. Our house being a haven for musicians (who I know as family friends), scholars (interesting people coming and going) and artists (always wrapped in brightly coloured scarves). A place to meet, to chat, to create and to make joyful noise,” she said.

Vincent Kolbe ensured the township libraries under his care were restorative retreats for those who sought the fellowship of books and the world it opened to them. He was sensitive to how people who belonged to the land had been alienated from it by the Group Areas Act. They were bereft of familiar rites that marked grief, celebratory feasts and general terms of engagement within a context of linguistic, faith and cultural diversity.

He would often say: “The Land Restitution Act deals with people who were thrown out of their homes. What we need is something to deal with people who were thrown out of their souls.”

Professor Archie Dick located Kolbe’s particular pedagogical approach in his early association with Districts Six’s Hyman Lieberman Institute. Its founding curator in the 1940s, Chris Ziervogel, created a space where the artistic and intellectually astute residents of the area could meet. It was here that Johnny Gomas and his conspiring confederates, James la Guma and Cissy Gool, would cross verbal swords with their ideological nemesis in the Trotskyite-aligned sectors of organised political life.

“The phrase ‘silence in the library’ was never heard of there or in any of Vincent’s libraries,” laughed Dick.

Trevor Manuel, the keynote speaker, continued along this line and underscored his reflection on the life of Kolbe with Pablo Neruda’s poem, So is my life. Manuel observed that the Chilean poet saw his life’s purpose as to “attend to the pain of those who suffer: they are my pains. For I cannot be without existing for all, for all who are silent and oppressed. I come from the people and I sing for them... you will not find me among books but with women and men.”

When it came to Kolbe, the only variant on this theme, said Manuel, was that he was also always among books. “Ordinary people taught him the infinite, but his curiosity took him to a vast array of books that he read and encouraged young minds to engage with,” he said.

Manuel referred to his Kensington librarian as “a conscious eclectic”, premising this view of Kolbe on the definition of an eclectic as “a person who derives ideas, style or taste from a broad and diverse range of sources”.

This perspective informed Kolbe’s self-awareness.

“Cape Town is a port city like Luanda. Like Havana,” was his insistent riposte to any suggestion that his home town was not an African city. He defied any limitation on the way he loved, and who his friends should be. He refused to be limited to a singular way of being African. He was a flowing river filled to the brim with life.

Juliette ended her succinct, elegant talk with a challenge that we as South Africans cannot ignore: “What are we doing with our privilege? It doesn’t take a government or a large organisation to make an impact or to leave a legacy. My dad is proof of that.”