Mourning the great loss of a repository of knowledge
Last Sunday my son, aged seven, discovered the joy of reading. He could read before that, of course: he’s been coping fine with foundation phase literacy, and he has been an avid consumer of the text of consumerism — shop signs, Lego manuals, the packaging on groceries. His book-loving parents and grandparents (and his sister, whose bibliophilia is even more enthusiastic) have been reading to him since he was an infant.
But last Sunday, for the first time, something distilled in his mind; a connection was made in his brain. He picked up a battered Ladybird copy of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves ,a book that had lain neglected in boxes and on shelves for almost four decades since his father read it as a boy. He found a quiet place to read it undisturbed. And he emerged, triumphant, delighted, telling us all about the story’s setting, the twists and turns in the plot, the character arcs. He had initiated himself. He was now a Reader.
It should have been a day of celebration: one more human joins the expanding universe of text, with its almost infinitely rich past and future. Almost, but not quite. Even hypertext is finite, and it is precisely because the analogue precursors of the digital — manuscripts, books, journals, typescripts, magazines — are a limited resource that they are so valuable. Texts can seem ubiquitous, but the long history of reading and writing is a tale of scarcity as often as one of abundance.
In Down Second Avenue ,a memoir that is ultimately about the process of becoming a reader and a writer, Es’kia Mphahlele emphasises how difficult it was for him as a boy to access words printed on a page.
On the one hand, this experience might seem very particular to his situation as a black South African growing up in the 1920s and 30s.
On the other hand, we know that many young people today
— around our country and around the world — battle just as much as young “Eseki” did to become literate and to practise literacy. Hypertext is no panacea; the digital divide replicates the social and economic divisions that Mphahlele’s book describes.
Ask any educator, or any student who has limited resources at home, what helps to ameliorate this gap. They will tell you: libraries. We need more (better funded, better stocked, better wired, better used) libraries. School libraries, community and public libraries, university libraries.
Since I was my son’s age, I have constantly sought them out. Libraries are repositories of knowledge, places to which we make pilgrimages, places in which we can share in something approximating a collective human experience. They are places of rest and refuge and escape. We visit libraries to immerse ourselves more deeply in the world, and also to take a break from it. They help us to understand the passage of time from past into future — the story of how we got here, and where we are going — even as they bring time, ever so briefly, to a standstill.
For all these reasons, I couldn’t celebrate my son’s entry into the realm of reading. Because last Sunday, we lost a library. When the fire raging on the slopes of Table Mountain hit the University of Cape Town campus, and chose among its victims the library building that housed one of the university’s greatest treasures — the Jagger Reading Room, and the African Studies Collection — we all suffered an incalculable loss.
Over time, the texts that have been destroyed will be counted; the special collections items that were salvaged by fire protection doors will also be tallied. Digitised holdings and fragments kept by scholars around the world who had previously used the collection will be compiled to create a new archive. Yet we will never be able to measure fully what has been lost.
I was lucky enough to conduct research using the African Studies Collection when I was a postgraduate student. I loved the Jagger: its ornate floors, its soaring columns, its
lofty roof, its uncomfortable chairs, its dull benches, its brilliant librarians, its rows and stacks and shelves, its obscure
volumes, its hidden gems.
There will be a time to rebuild. But let us take time to mourn.