During a gathering of advocates and activists who collected books from across the US for shipping to Africa, mainly to west Africa, I once asked, somewhat cheekily, of the good folk in the Upper Midwest: “What books are you sending to Africa?”
Were these books about defunct and discredited theories and histories? Were they orthodox religious texts? Were they texts that promoted state-funded propaganda to turn the world into a single way of thinking about the world using the written word (and art, in general) rather than through destabilisation, fomenting of civil conflict and financing the overthrow of political leaders?
Books carry messages and meanings, they tell us about ourselves, about where we have been, where we are and where we are going, I explained.
There were muted responses. A man in a suit and tie smiled, stretched out a greeting hand, and expressed his sincerity in a combination of regret about not being able to destroy the books, and charity towards “the African child”. He seemed sincerely disappointed by the fact that the books could not possibly be destroyed.
I referred, at the time, to a specific set of events, one of which, thanks to the internet, I am (now) able to present an example, here, from a 1977 New York Times report.
“In its persistent efforts to shape world opinion, the CIA has been able to call upon a separate and far more extensive network of newspapers, news services, magazines, publishing houses, broadcasting stations and other entities over which it has at various times had some control.”
I reflected over the past few weeks, following news about the neglect and imminent collapse of the Johannesburg Library, on questions about books and works of art, and whether they are for the sake of only art and for literature, or whether they serve a political purpose as propaganda to prop up some kind of status quo or ideology? Both things can be true at the same time.
My sense is that it is part of an overall either wilful destruction or neglect of archives and of state record-keeping in democratic South Africa.
I would argue that if the promotion and protection of written records and printed works are for the promotion of particular ideologies, allowing it all to deteriorate and collapse also serves someone for some purpose. For instance, a Nazi sympathiser might say don’t destroy Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and an anti-Fascist might encourage its destruction.
My personal beliefs notwithstanding, I always have difficulty promoting censorship and burning of books.
There are many ways to burn books
Having said all that, the decay and collapse of the Johannesburg Library carries heavy symbolism. We are forced to consider what meanings can be drawn, and the moral and historical implications of the collapse of that venerable institution of books, drawings, artworks and papers.
My sense is that it is part of an overall either wilful destruction or neglect of archives and of state record-keeping in democratic South Africa. This overall state of record-keeping is especially bad in some provinces and locales where, in places like the Northern Cape, there is a lack of legislation and of human and institutional capital; of professional staff and administrative systems and structures to preserve and protect written texts.
Seen together it may be considered as a type of book-burning, an erasing of history and memory by any and all available means – apart from actually setting fire to written or painted works from our past.
Libraries are not merely places that keep books by George Eliot, Charles Dickens or Joseph Conrad: they are repositories of written records of South African society over centuries – and over the past three decades. This loss of documentation could result in a failure to hold people to account for all the bad and good that has happened over the democratic era.
As written in this space nine years ago, colonial record-keeping was impeccable to sustain the empire’s dominance and control. The apartheid-era administrations were strict for reasons of security and human engineering. They may be records of those iniquitous times, but sophisticated reading “against the grain” makes these archives invaluable.
There has been a steep decline in archive management and record-keeping, in general, over the democratic era. Notable exceptions are provinces like KwaZulu-Natal, the Western Cape and the Eastern Cape that inherited reliable records and institutions from the previous era. Who or what is to blame for these losses and destruction, and the neglect of libraries and archives? What are the implications of these losses?
Necessary as this Africanisation as a vehicle towards the future may be, it cannot make chattel of us, docile bodies boxed in, stripped of memory, as offerings to the twin gods of competing nationalisms.
The easy, almost ready-made answers are about maladministration and rent-seeking. My colleague Ferial Haffajee’s reporting on the matter certainly points to these problems. I would suggest that it is part of an overall ideological project that considers “the past” as standing in the way of the future.
We should probably bear in mind that there have been library closures around the world for most of the past two decades (See one example from Britain). Public libraries have also become part of the culture of consumer capitalism. Libraries used to attract readers and patrons, and now “create markets” for “customers” who are often more interested in whether there is a coffee shop (a lifestyle) attached to the library. As this culture is becoming unstable, “customers” are turning away from libraries. These are for other discussions.
Denying memory and history
One of the more important processes that needs to be sustained in the democratic era is the Africanisation of South African state and society. For centuries South Africa has been (first) a European colony, then a dominion of the British Empire (both with colonial administrators), and then a settler colony of people who arrived from the metropoles, and whose descendants continued to “make” the country into the European image. Said Hendrik Verwoerd in 1960: “We call ourselves European, but actually we represent the white men of Africa.”
This latter administration was done mainly by Afrikaners. This, then, is the context of Africanisation!
Necessary as this Africanisation as a vehicle towards the future may be, it cannot make chattel of us, docile bodies boxed in, stripped of memory, as offerings to the twin gods of competing nationalisms tortured away from the stories of (crudely defined and othered) “non-Africans”, of everything “un-African” where everything that is insufficiently autochthonous has to be wilfully destroyed or allowed to deteriorate.
Our political leaders make the youth believe that everything that they know, today, and that they have learnt before today, is necessarily bad, wicked, cruel, evil and exploitative.
This is part of the communalisation of punishment because of communalised guilt (of all “non-Africans”) to which Octavio Paz referred. In this sense punishment has to be total. Removing people from state and society because of history is not enough, you also have to get rid of their written works and their art, and their cultural institutions.
And so the libraries and archival systems that we inherited from the (now communalised) criminals have to be destroyed, or at least allowed to lie fallow and eventually disappear. Along with this has been the neglect and destruction of written texts and visual records of the democratic era.
This is a rather blunt force directed at history and memory. You have to destroy the written word and the records that brought society into the present. If nothing about the past is right, then history is wrong, and the future has to start with destroying everything that has been written down or recorded.
Our political leaders, the “progressives” and the ethno-nationalists, manipulate and misuse the current generation, forcing the youth into ideological dead ends; making them believe that everything that they know, today, and that they have learnt before today, is necessarily bad, wicked, cruel, evil and exploitative.
Perhaps that is all true. Nevertheless, the current generation, the youth, is destroyed at the same time as the past, all of which does not bode well for the future.
It is somewhat ironic that South Africa, under the leadership of the past three decades and in the current passage, resembles Paz’s observation that the US was a country rushing into the future, and leaving behind an inconvenient past.
To have a future South Africans must destroy the past, including the texts and visual representations. We are a “root-destroying” people, unwilling to look at our past, as Norman Mailer wrote about the US.
It is in the libraries and archives where much of our pasts are housed; to destroy those pasts, and save our future, we have to wilfully destroy our libraries and archives, or simply allow them to deteriorate or degenerate.
Cover your eyes, and peep between fingers, at neglected record-keeping from the Northern Cape or Mpumalanga. Consider the fires that destroyed parts of the University of Cape Town library’s Special Collections; those that ravaged Parliament, and the awful neglect of the Johannesburg Library.
Now try to imagine the state making a concerted effort to invest in record-keeping infrastructure (hard and soft). Now ask yourself: how do we replace documents (from wills and testaments, to title deeds and birth, death and marriage certificates) that have been destroyed, and others that were never actually kept over the past three decades?
To destroy the roots which Mailer referred to, of our iniquitous (deep) past, we seem to have allowed the destruction of the more recent roots, too. DM