Librarians and readers in the South African struggle

Librarians and readers in the South African anti-apartheid struggle

Archie 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.

Or take the story of prolific reader and activist Neville Alexander. Neville was sentenced to imprisonment on Robben island from 1964 to 1974, after being charged and convicted of ‘conspiracy to commit sabotage’ as a member of the Yu Chi-Chan Club and the National Liberation Front. He was a brilliant scholar, and he fought constantly with prison censors. But the censors were not very sharp, and many ‘subversive’ books of economic and political theory with fairly innocuous titles were let into the prison unwittingly.

Neville admitted that, as a result of this, he read books in prison that he would never have had the time or the chance to read outside. He read classics of European literature, Gibbon, Shakespeare, Dickens, African history, international law, economics, languages and lots of German literature, and adds: ‘I had more banned books inside prison than I ever had outside.’

Mogammad Dollie’s and Neville Alexander’s stories begin to uncover a hidden history of librarians and readers in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. I hope that more librarians will add their stories from other parts of the country to mine from the Western Cape region. There are also anti-apartheid stories from librarians abroad that need telling. One can, for example, compare the ambivalent position of IFLA on apartheid and the South African Library Association with the decisive stand taken by small library associations.

The Finnish Library Association, for example, participated in running the library of the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College (SOMAFCO) for South African exiles and refugees in Tanzania that developed from humble beginnings to become a fit-for-purpose modern library building in the 1980s, with a dedicated library staff. Marjatta Lahti was one of the Finnish librarians who worked there.

In South Africa, of course, not all readers read against the grain and not all librarians resisted apartheid either. The struggle was instead characterized by complexities, subtleties and nuances. In instances where librarians did speak out against censorship, for example, they were sometimes more obsessed with questions of arrangement and order. When banned books were routinely burned at state furnaces and incinerators around South Africa from about 1955 to 1971, a group of outspoken young librarians in Cape Town insisted that the government’s lists of books destined for the flames should be published ‘in accepted bibliographic style’. This is like saying that if we are going to burn books then let us at least do so in alphabetical order!

When separate library associations, racist library legislation, threats of subsidy withdrawal, racially zoned or group areas, and ethnic homelands entrenched library segregation in the 1960s and 1970s, activist readers used the walls of the whites-only JPL to express their disgust. This racially restricted library ironically became an open book for all to read of library racism.

But there were groups of librarians like LIWO that later took a principled stand against apartheid. And there were individual librarians who had to pay a high price for their political connections and views. Tanya Barben, for example, who is currently the rare book and special collections librarian at the University of Cape Town, is the daughter of deceased communist and trade union activists Ray and Jack Simons who went into exile in Zambia in 1963. Tanya combined her own student political activities with librarianship studies in the early 1970s.

She was banned by the South African government from 1971 to 1981, on the suspicion that she was a conduit for information to the banned South African Congress of Trade Unions, with which her parents were associated.
During that period, she was not allowed to continue working as a librarian, and the SALA did not protest on her behalf in spite of her being a member. Her subsequent return to the University of Cape Town library was not easy, and certainly not made any easier by some of her library colleagues.

In spite of similar kinds of harassment by the South African security police, anti-apartheid activist readers developed inventive ways of reading and sharing political ideas with fellow activists. Reading aloud in a group was one example of this. Looksmart Ngudle was a literate young man from the Eastern Cape. At probably South Africa’s first MK camp at Mamre, just outside of Cape Town in 1962, he read aloud to new political recruits from Jéan Paul Sartre’s short story, The Wall, and from Ché Guevara’s writings.
These public readings were followed by discussion to inspire the recruits, and to teach them about the worldwide struggle against oppression.
Sadly, Looksmart died in detention in 1963. The search for his unmarked grave came to an end only a few months ago.

Reading selectively was another example. Cecyl Esau, who is now a member of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, was once a student leader and member of the Elsies River public library. He tells how members of his activist reading circle used that library’s so-called ‘safe’ anti-communist books to actually learn more about communism. They did so by concentrating solely on the communist passages quoted in these books, and that were singled out for ridicule by their anti-communist authors.

Reading cryptically was a further example. The overwhelming need to maintain contact with the outside world drove political prisoner Ruth First (wife of the late Joe Slovo) to hoist herself up to the solitary confinement cell window and crane her neck to read whatever letters that she could make out on news posters wrapped around electric lamp posts outside the Marshall Square police station in Johannesburg. From these isolated letters she pieced together the daily headlines, and she called this ‘reading my daily newspaper’. Ruth, who was studying to become a librarian when she was arrested, was killed by a letter-bomb in 1982.

Reading cynically and critically was still another example. Political prisoners on Robben Island read government propaganda magazines like SA Panorama, Fiat Lux (from the Indian Affairs department) and Alpha (from the
Coloured Affairs department) by simply standing ‘the news on its head’.

If an article argued that Bantu Education was being widely accepted, they concluded that it was in fact being roundly rejected. More astutely, one political prisoner read in the business section of a smuggled newspaper about the huge financial losses of a subsidiary company of the state-owned Sasol. He inferred from this that rumours of a successful armed attack on this oil refinery plant were in fact true. That night political prisoners on Robben Island celebrated with mugs of coffee.

Reading tactically sometimes had dramatic results. Tim Jenkin used Henri Charrière’s Papillon – a story about a prison break out – to plan his successful escape from Pretoria Central prison with two fellow political prisoners on 11 December 1979. He says that this book taught him a number of valuable lessons that guided his thinking and actions.

These reading strategies recalled a Cape library tradition that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s when self-made intellectuals and book collectors like James La Guma, Johnny Gomas, Cissy Gool, and Christian Ziervogel introduced young men and women from the townships to books and music at social events. Many political factions like the Lenin Club, the Spartacus Club, the New Era Fellowship and several other Trotskyist groups had taught reading and writing, and distributed the books of the Left Book Club.

A central idea in this Cape library tradition was that ‘the books were just the props’, and implied that oral debate and discussion of South Africa’s political and cultural conditions were of primary concern especially for young people. At the Hyman Liberman Institute in District Six where Christian Ziervogel was the librarian in the 1930s, progressive intellectuals would come to the library not to look for a book but to look for an argument. And Ziervogel would, for example, invite members of the Lenin Club to debate coloured nationalists in crowded meetings in the
library.

The Cape library tradition operated both inside and outside of the library itself, and sometimes involved even the production of reading matter. Robert Kriger tells how Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the oppressed was translated and
typed in Afrikaans on a battered old typewriter, and circulated secretly to activist reading circles in the 1980s. The typewriter, fruitlessly sought by security police as evidence to lay charges, still lies buried today under a palm tree on Moravian Hill, the site of a bed and breakfast motel in Cape Town.

The librarian, Vincent Kolbe, grew up in this Cape library tradition and used the library in Bonteheuwel and Kensington townships as a marketplace for ideas and opinions in the 1980s. The library was a contested but shared space so that young people debated and discussed alternative strategies at meetings held in the library. These meetings were usually held under the guise of ‘the chess club’, ‘the dove club’ or the ‘cultural society’. A young Trevor Manuel, who is South Africa’s
Minister of Finance today, was a member of one such reading group at Kensington public library. There is a rumour circulating that he still has outstanding fines for overdue books there.

Banned books and trade union materials fed and fueled these discussions. They were often supplied by a few brave librarians and activists. South Africa’s censorship laws had become quite bizarre by the 1970s and 1980s when titles like Black beauty – a children’s book – was banned. French writer, Stendhal’s The red and the black combined the two most subversive colours in the eyes of South African officialdom, and was also banned. Joe Slovo lost three copies of this book in as many police raids. Freda Matthews, librarian and wife of the acclaimed writer Z. K. Matthews, recalls that sometimes, anything ‘with a red cover’ was regarded as suspicious and confiscated by police raiding her home.

But a few librarians risked arrest and police harassment in order to supply readers with banned material. Vincent Kolbe used an inconspicuous sports bag under a library desk to hide materials that activists would use discreetly. During police raids of course no-one knew whose bag it was or how it had got there. But these banned materials were also used for discussions and debates in libraries.

The library space like any ‘lived space’ was one of continual meaning-making and conflict among various groups. It was constantly made and unmade, claimed and disclaimed by communities. The reason was that the anti-apartheid struggle was not fought by a happy band of brothers and sisters, and the library was often drawn into bitter conflicts.

Some township libraries became places for rival political groups to meet and to plan awareness programs and to discuss political strategy. These groups included teachers and students from schools where a view of ‘liberation before education’ prevailed, and those from schools where a view of ‘education for liberation’ dominated.

The New Unity Movement, which opposed the views of the UDF and the ANC, also had its own library – the South Peninsula Education Fellowship (SPEF) library – which was run from the home of Dawood Parker, a non-professional librarian. As a travel agent, Dawood was able to frequent book shops in London and other cities where he placed orders for books banned in South Africa. He used a contact person at the South African customs office to intercept the books and deliver them to his home.

He also scooped up hundreds of books dumped on Cape Town’s Grand Parade book stalls by nervous members of the public when the government’s list of banned books grew longer and visits from security police became more indiscriminate
and frequent. This collection gradually swelled to 15 000 items. He kept book borrowers’ records in old telephone directories stacked under the new one so that raiding police could not discover the identities of readers
and what they were reading.

Although the SPEF collection was universal in outlook, the political books and reading kits from the library’s underground section were used for discussions in study groups, which met secretly but in quite unusual places, such as a farm house directly opposite the notorious Pollsmoor Prison, or in the caves of Devil’s Peak, which flanks Table Mountain in Cape Town.

Well-known personalities like deceased Minister of Transport in South Africa’s first democratic government, Dullah Omar, led some of these discussions. And Dawood reminded me that the current Minister of Trade and Industry, Alec Erwin, still has Nehru’s book on the unity of India outstanding since the 1970s.

Librarians like John Jacobs also accommodated rival political groups in the townships of Bishop Lavis and Hanover Park. The Bishop Lavis Action Committee (BLAC), which was aligned with the Cape Action League and the Unity Movement used the Bishop Lavis Public library regularly for meetings, for exchanging banned materials and for producing protest placards and newsletters. The Hanover Park library hall was used by a youth cell of the Pan Africanist Congress-aligned Muslim political strand called Qibla, which met under the leadership of the activist Ahmed Cassim. Qibla drew on ‘an uncompromisingly revolutionary interpretation of the Quran’, and also opposed the UDF’s strategy.

There were also occasions when reading material like newspapers was a source of cooperation between PAC and ANC political prisoners. At the end of 1965, when the library in the General Section of Robben Island prison became
operational, it was organized and run by PAC members Stanley Mogoba, Canzibe Rosebury Ngxiki and Dikgang Moseneke, who is a High Court judge today. Ngxiki used his freedom as library assistant to move from cell to cell in order to spread the word of an impending 100 hour hunger strike that involved all the other political prisoners.

Klaas Mashishi and Sedick Isaacs later continued the work of this library. Rivonia trialist, Ahmed Kathrada, ran the tiny library for the segregated senior political prisoners that included Nelson Mandela. Kathrada’s library assistants were Khela Shubane and Sbu Ndebele, who is the premier of the Kwa-Zulu province today. Kathrada also used his position as librarian to communicate information and have discussions with General Section political prisoners when he delivered, collected and took stock of library books. The prisoners therefore shared a kind of democracy of books and reading.

Kathrada and Isaacs earned qualifications in librarianship from the correspondence University of South Africa while they were on Robben Island. They ran both official prison library services and subversive library services to other political prisoners. Isaacs, for example, taught speed reading techniques to fellow prisoners in order to hurry up the transcription of banned and limited circulation materials. Until their interventions, library services were in the hands of the prison warders, often with hilarious results. At Pretoria Central prison, for example, very little could be traced in Chief warder Du Preez’s catalogue of purchased books because most books were filed under the letter ‘T’ since so many titles started with the definite article ‘The’, which any respectable librarian will tell you is not a filing element.

The catalogue also described Shakespeare’s The Tempest as science fiction, and Romeo and Juliet appeared as ‘author anonymous’. On one occasion, when prisoner Hugh Lewin was given a book by Edwin Spender instead of the poet Stephen Spender as he had requested, he was asked by a mystified prison warder if Edwin Spender would not do since it was still Spender after all.

Women distinguished themselves both as librarians and as readers in the liberation struggle. When state prosecutors in Quentin Jacobsen’s trial tried to show links between his political activities and the contents of banned books seized during his arrest, Jill Ogilvie, an unassuming Assistant City Librarian of the Johannesburg Public Library read out in court a list of library titles similar to those found in Jacobsen’s possession.

The charge of obtaining information that could be used to further the aims of communism was subsequently dismissed because the same information could easily be found in the reference section of JPL. This left Jacobsen wondering why he had gone to such trouble for his books when he could just have gone to his local library.

Another remarkable librarian who defied apartheid library regulations was Letta Naude. She was a white librarian who supplied Neal Petersen, a young aspiring Coloured yachtsman, with books on navigation and other aspects of sailing. She secretly slipped books to him through the back door of the Wynberg Public Library after he had read all the books on yachting available at the Coloured libraries (which probably amounted to one or two). Letta Naude’s risks paid off when Neal eventually became the first black man to race solo around the world.

If I had more time, I could add more examples but I end with three features of the anti-apartheid reading culture. First, it was survivalist – reading practices mixed silent reading, reading aloud, intensive reading, extensive reading, and speed reading, and united readers and non-readers to survive a bleak and oppressive reading environment.
Second, it was substitutive – The immaterial texts and ideas could substitute for the material book and circulate undetected in reading circles study groups. And third, it was subversive – the role of bringing banned books and anti-apartheid activists together was fulfilled either by professional librarians, or in spite of them.

I recently heard an outspoken critic of the present government acknowledge that F.W. De Klerk and Roelf Meyer were no intellectual match for Nelson Mandela and Cyril Ramaphosa during the historic negotiations in the early 1990s. But Mandela and his comrades were members of a wider circle of well-informed readers and committed librarians like Kathrada, Mogoba, Isaacs and others. And behind many activists and ordinary readers in South Africa’s townships and suburbs who fought the apartheid regime in their own small ways there were some extraordinary librarians supplying and sifting reading materials.

Their roles in the South African anti-apartheid struggle remind librarians everywhere of the intellectual and cultural politics that is also librarianship. Thank You.

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