Going through my “to do” list on Friday morning 16 April I see that I have to soon get started on an article for a scholarly journal that will have a special issue titled “Brennende Bucher” (“Burning Books”). Due date approaching. I agreed some months ago to write about the occupation of the main Timbuktu archive in 2012 and examine the claims of book burning. I am not panicking about the due date because I have written and spoken on the subject for some years and have a growing list of references to library and book destruction; along the way, I discovered the word “libricide” to describe such activity. 

Shamil Jeppie. (Photo: Supplied)

This subject and my commitment to the article disappears from my mind. Until Sunday around noon. I then start to pick up WhatsApp threads from multiple contacts and begin to see images of a building from its inside, books burning. I watch a nightmare unfold. 

I can rattle off dates and names of libraries that were destroyed in different parts of the world in the 20th century and to date in the 21st century but never dreamed I would have to include a library a few metres from my office. 

For nearly 30 years, since my student days, I have used the African Studies Library and Rare Books collections in all their displacements as the larger library building was restructured and interiors renovated at different periods in time. 

I have been a fan of the fantastic professionals that have maintained high standards and efficient service to users like me over the years. I went overseas for six years and came back to more or less the same professionals who just continued to serve. It was always my favourite place at UCT, where one goes to work on materials not available in the open stacks, use private collections, and work on one’s laptop, always in a serious and impressive setting. 

It was also a great place to work in when needing to escape students or colleagues, only to meet other colleagues, sometimes from other universities or overseas, or whom one had not seen for what often appeared to be decades, sitting with files or books. A “hello” then perhaps an exit for a bit of academic gossip to respect the silence of the reading room. On a few occasions when I had the strange request to have my photograph taken or a film clip made of me at the university I always opted for this venue, and for the past few days I have been going through these images daily to remind myself of that now-vanished space.

As far as I know, at this point, only the Reading Room and adjacent rooms have been totally destroyed. The Daily Maverick (from GroundUp) image depicting a close-up of what could be from a major war. This burnt down Reading Room is bad enough. 

On the two floors that made up this space were a fair number of published works, reference volumes, and atlases, as I recall. They appear not to be the irreplaceable older books and special collections donated by individuals and organisations and other volumes accumulated by the specialist librarians over the decades. An exact assessment will take some time. In the meanwhile, an initial report sent from the Vice-Chancellor’s office said:

“The team at UCT Libraries can confirm the archival and published print collections kept within the Reading Room were consumed by the flames. These include the vast majority of the African Studies Published Print Collection (approximately 70,000 items), the entire African Studies Film Collection on DVD (approximately 3,500), all the UCT university calendars, some of the heavily used Government Publications documents from South Africa and across the continent, and manuscripts and archives kept in the Reading Room for processing or digitisation or awaiting transfer after being digitised. A significant institutional loss is the original card catalogues for the Manuscripts and Archives repositories, the history of UCT Libraries, and the Special Collections Archive Office and administrative records.”

What a loss, and the details to follow will only deepen that feeling as we learn of specific collections that were destroyed or so badly damaged as to be useless. Modern library design takes into account the possibility of fires spreading between sections and levels. If the major storerooms in the basement levels were not penetrated by the spreading fire then there might still be water damage from all the water that was used to quell the fire. Water seeps through and damages paper. However, water damage is better than the destructive force of fire.

Are there any lessons from this destructive event of Sunday 18 April? 

There is still too little information but such a force of nature was unstoppable. As far as I know, there was nothing that could have been done to prevent the fire from spreading so quickly down the mountain and attacking this particular building, apart from the others that were destroyed. 

During the Second Sino-Japanese war, 1937-45, several large private and university libraries were destroyed and the Japanese military also stole parts of the remaining collections from the Universities of Nanjing and Shanghai. 

Looking at other periods and places we see that the tragic loss of book collections and archival materials happens more frequently than we care to remember. 

In previous centuries, manuscript and book collections were often part of the loot of a victorious army, a weaker party dispossessed of their books and objects, or private owners were tricked into parting with their books by unscrupulous intermediaries for ambitious European collectors. This is part of the story of some of what is now the grand European manuscript libraries. The most egregious of this kind in recent times is the American looting of millions of documents from the Iraqi national archives after the invasion of 2003 and then using a naval vessel to ship the materials to the US. The 20th century is quite special for the destruction of books, as the by-product of conflict, and then also by natural disasters such as flooding, hurricanes and fires. 

An example of unintended destruction is that of the Public Records Office in Dublin in June 1922 when two factions of the nationalist movement engaged in a long siege around and inside the archives building that eventually led to the burning of virtually the entire collection. 

In an unfortunate experience for the University of Leuven library, 300,000 books were destroyed in 1914 by a fire started by German soldiers during World War 1. An international campaign after the war sought to reconstitute the collection and did so fairly successfully. When the Nazis invaded Belgium in World War 2 the same library was again the object of assault and the same and more books and manuscripts were destroyed. 

The most infamous 20th-century case is, of course, Nazi book burning when, after coming to power in 1933, at least 10% of the holdings of public libraries were destroyed and thousands of other books burnt based on lists of “undesirable” literature. Then the Allied attacks on Germany led to massive book losses while the Nazis were killing citizens and burning books in places like Poland. 

During the Second Sino-Japanese war, 1937-45, several large private and university libraries were destroyed and the Japanese military also stole parts of the remaining collections from the Universities of Nanjing and Shanghai. 

A fire at the Academy of Sciences building in Leningrad in the late 1980s seriously damaged nearly four million books apart from those completely destroyed, and in 1993 the National Library of Sarajevo lost about 90% of its books. There are other examples of this kind from all over the world. War is bad for people and for books too.

Then there are the natural disasters, the earthquakes, hurricanes, and of course, the fires for the past century.

From the images I have seen, everything in the Reading Room is now little more than waste. There is nothing left to salvage. It will be exceptional to find anything to restore that suffered from the effect of the fire. The water damage is what the conservation professionals will be focusing on. But what does the university have by way of its own “conservation department” on the main campus? 

Let’s not raise any of the D-words (decolonisation, decoloniality) if we cannot talk and insure that at our institutions we have libraries where we can be really productive, find pleasure in books, and that are inspirational to visit and work in, for this generation and the future.

From the 1990s and into the 2000s, “outsourcing” became the mantra of university managers and as the consultants roamed campuses to kill off ever more components of our institutions. One area strangled and eventually killed was “the conservation department” within universities. If it does now exist, it is a slimmed-down skeleton of what “Africa’s best university” ought to have — from what I know, certainly no model for any other university in the country or on the continent. I do not know if UCT has a single qualified, specialist paper conservator, for instance. Yet, with this disaster, “restoration,” “preservation,” and “conservation” will be on everyone’s lips. 

Libraries and the whole inner structure of the modern complex institution that is the modern research university cannot afford to skimp on a serious, robust and highly qualified and fully resourced conservation department. In my experience with the South African conservation team from the National Archives that trained Malian conservators over many years in the early 2000s, it is possible to make paper and book conservation an attractive area for young people and train them to a level appropriate to work on materials from their context. 

If Malians in Timbuktu, and beyond, can be trained over several seasons of workshops then this could be done here. But the conservation profession in South Africa appears to me to have a “gate-keeper” approach to their profession. If Malians can be trained — people who in fact will be working on an old paper record, much older than most paper here in South Africa, why can’t that same model be applied here? Instead, there are stumbling blocks and entry barriers to keep it small and select. 

All South African university libraries and each municipality ought to have a solid, functional conservation section. Japan supplies the world with the highest quality paper and especially conservation paper used throughout the world and I could not find a “conservation programme” there the way I imagine it to be conceived here (and in some other places in the world).

In Japan, conservators are trained “in-house”; virtually all library assistants at the university libraries at Kyoto University, for instance, can also do the basic book and paper conservation even while sitting at their front desks. For the higher end paper conservation done, for instance at the prestigious Institute for Historical Studies, the main conservator trains others on the job. They work with really old paper manuscripts.

So perhaps one lesson for UCT and all South African universities and the broader conservation profession is to undertake serious reflection and see that they have well-resourced departments to ensure the future of the usable, living book. Without a library there is no university; without books, no library.

The service at the African Studies Library was always efficient and the staff welcoming. Archival users know that each library archive has its own “culture” and “ritual” and can take some time to get used to and often unhelpful staff impede one’s progress. One’s initial few hours there can be spent just figuring out how to order a book or where to collect files. I have had experiences where there was an active attempt not to have me use or even enter libraries. 

And then there are libraries that haven’t had any new stock since the 1970s or an archive where the only catalogue, if lucky, is a well-worn ledger book from the 1960s. We have a lot of these strewn over the continent. Libraries and archives are of the least importance for governments; often it’s outside donors who keep some of these institutions on life support. Yet, there can be no revival of the humanities in Africa without investment in real libraries with real books and manuscripts and other materials. 

Let’s not raise any of the D-words (decolonisation, decoloniality) if we cannot talk and insure that at our institutions we have libraries where we can be really productive, find pleasure in books, and that are inspirational to visit and work in, for this generation and the future.

It will take up too much space to get into that other D-word (digitisation) which is only a partial solution to some of our problems, especially on a continent with all kinds of infrastructure challenges, not least consistent electricity supply, as we know all too well. DM