Librarians and readers in the South African anti-apartheid struggle
Posted by Celia Walter | 7 Sep, 2010Archie L Dick
Historians of reading generally agree that it is more challenging to uncover how and why people read than what they read, and when and where they read. They identify times of social upheaval and political turmoil as productive contexts for examining these elusive dimensions of reading. In this way, they show the centrality of reading in times of social, cultural and political change. I focus on South Africa’s Western Cape region during the Apartheid era as another locale for investigating these questions about reading.
I include in my analysis the roles of professional and on-professional librarians that acquired, circulated, hid, and sometimes helped to produce banned reading materials, and that used their libraries as spaces for readers to debate anti-apartheid strategies. I also include in my analysis the roles of readers who used these materials in their reading circles and study groups with the help of, and sometimes in spite of the help of librarians. My focus is on librarians and readers because their stories tell how ordinary South Africans stood up to an authoritarian and racist regime. Their stories are also at risk of being forgotten.
Take the story of the librarian Mogammad Dollie. I worked with Mogammad in a Cape Town public library in the early 1980s. But I learned only recently that he had been an operative for MK (Umkhonto weSizwe), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC). He was a political intelligence recruiter, and the library was often used for clandestine meetings. School students planned street marches at such meetings, and when security police searched the library, the students sat on their school blazers and read books to avoid detection. Library work, according to Mogammad Dollie, was good preparation for becoming a member of the ANC’s underground spy network...[More]
From: CANGONET