What sense does it make to punt a “world-class African city” without a “world-class African library”? asks Sipho J Mabaso.
Johannesburg - The garden has become a drug den masquerading as a skateboard rink, with fiends peddling hard drugs, even to school-children. Graffiti has begun to cover the walls and the City of Joburg emblem, the steps leading to the main entrance are covered in grime.
At night the doors are a headboard for homeless folk. The escalators cannot be called clean, bookshelves are largely empty and at one time there were no newspapers as the city had not paid the suppliers.
This, for a library which practically serves the entire world, since Joburg is a global capital, is not acceptable. The Johannesburg City Library must be an impeccable example of world standards for the biggest library in a so-called “world-class African city”.
If you compare it with the libraries of the world, for instance the New York Public Library, it fails to make the mark by miles.
What sense does it make to punt a “world-class African city” without a “world-class African library”?
The sad fact is that, in the apartheid years and before the three-year renovations that cost about R200 million between 2008 and early 2012, it was a world-class library. It was clean, inside and out, and you could feel it was and important place in the world and therefore in your world, before you even set eyes on a librarian behind the counter. In the democratic era since 1994 and after its official reopening in February 2012, it has declined below the global standard.
You don’t need to be an expert in the grading of libraries by the International Federation of Library Associations to see this.
Should democracy not have improved it to a standard much higher than in the apartheid days?
With the 2012 reopening, a black assistant director was appointed as head of the library after years of white librarians. About the same time, the City of Joburg library and information services gained its first black director. Our jubilation at the apparent transformation seems not to have been well-founded.
The shelves are largely empty, not because throngs of folks are borrowing books by the dozen, but because the books bought by the library and information services take far too long to catalogue. This is because of the services’ acute shortage of cataloguers and its failure to attract more young graduates and that of recent hires to learn the art and science of cataloguing books using the American Dewey system.
The shelves are empty – not only at the Johannesburg City Library, but at many others in the city – because libraries are not a top priority of the national government, much less the Gauteng government.
If the parents (the national and provincial governments) don’t take good care of their child (local government), he is likely to go astray (low staff morale) and decline.
The greatest share of the blame for the library’s decline should be placed at the door of the national Department of Arts and Culture, whose purview includes libraries. It is the minister, Nathi Mthethwa, who must fight hard in the cabinet to win big budgets for libraries and the advancement of a reading culture, a cause to which public libraries are indispensable.
No culture could be more important than promoting a thriving and enduring reading culture, in any language. This cannot be achieved with scantily funded libraries at any tier of government, especially at local government level. How the government expects to have a thriving democracy without well-funded libraries, heaven only knows.
Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, who is being touted as the champion of a reading culture – on the heels of a speech he made, at the opening of a new library in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, about the need to entrench a reading culture – should do battle for better funding and support from the government by providing bigger bucks for provincial library services to pass on to municipal library authorities.
This would improve local access and prevent unwarranted decline.
Yet it would be untrue to put the library’s decline down to money alone. The library is, quite frankly, badly managed. The wrong person was chosen for the right job. The arts and culture minister is as much a mismatch in his position. Why should it take the deputy president to make the need for a reading culture a national headline?
In the case of the Johannesburg City Library, why should it reach the point that a columnist decries its decline? Surely its top management is aware of the decline, if it is worthy of the positions it holds?
We must come to the point where we understand that a nation that does not prioritise its knowledge centres, such as libraries, has lost all sense of the value of its soul, is being led by the wrong people in the wrong way, has largely discarded wisdom as the greatest virtue in life, has endangered the present life and future prospects of its children, is unlikely to produce a great number of inventors and is certain to have rampant corruption as a perpetual albatross around its neck.
This is definitely not the nation we want or fought for all those years. We wanted a better republic.
For that, we must take damn good care of our libraries. Minister Mthethwa, do your job.
* Mabaso is former president of the Johannesburg City Library and now founding chairman of ReaderWorld, a not-for-profit company focused on the establishment and advancement of a reading culture worldwide. His views are not necessarily those of the publication or Independent Media.
Sunday Independent