JONATHAN JANSEN | It’s easy to wail over burnt libraries when there’s no-one to blame

Oh the rank hypocrisy of the Cape Town liberals, but let me first say this.

Like many lovers of books, a deep sadness came over me on Sunday morning as the mountain fires first fell on a favourite eating place, that restaurant with the best pickled fish and scones, and then made its way onto the grounds of one of Africa’s most distinguished universities. My heart sank as I saw the Jagger Library, more accurately, the Jagger Reading Room, go up in flames.

The reactions from UCT staff and affiliates tugged at the heartstrings. “UCT’s intellectual heart ripped out after Jagger Library burns,” wrote the country’s thought leader in philanthropy, who once raised funds for campus infrastructure including libraries. A UCT academic spoke of “a visceral sense of horror and loss” among staff and that, according to one of her colleagues, “it felt like they had lost a family member”.

That silence is cowardly and hypocritical, and must be exposed for what it is.

I share that sense of grief. As a researcher, the library is the lifeblood of my work and the foundation on which an academic career is built. That sense of awe inside a library still grips me anywhere in the world, whether it is the majestic Library of Congress in Washington DC or that small library I used to frequent as a child next to the Retreat swimming pool on Joe Marks Boulevard. As the fire came down on the African Studies Collection at UCT, there was a knob in the throat.

This week the Academy of Science of SA made its biannual book award and, on this occasion, I asked the nation’s foremost historian for his reflections on the library fires at UCT. He reminded the webinar audience of our strange relationship with campus fires and the hypocrisy of the hand-wringing elites who carefully choose their public laments when cultural artefacts are destroyed on campus. His critical comments got me thinking.

Where was this heartfelt lament when UCT students burned 23 works of fine art in the middle of the campus? I did not see the same deep angst about the torching of the UKZN law library, around the same time (2016), when campus and country “lost priceless material, including rare books dating back to the foundations of modern-day SA law in the 17th century?”

Dare I suggest that we lament the loss of cultural assets due to nature’s fires because there is no fear of political or personal repercussions that would come from blaming foreign invasive species or powerless vagrants roaming the mountainside. But when anarchists on the same English campuses burned artworks because they were “insufficiently uplifting”, many of the same voices were tjoepstil. That silence is cowardly and hypocritical, and must be exposed for what it is.

The anarchists among us have not disappeared and were quick to make their voices heard as the devastating fire swooped down on the campus and what was once the main library of UCT. A prominent voice – followed by some very senior people at UCT – let loose this sarcastic gem on Twitter: “He (the supposed vagrant) did well to burn down UCT. I congratulate him, white people LOVE black African illegal immigrants and write multitudes of articles accusing us of xenophobia when we highlight & condemn their deeds. Well done African brother #uctfire #capetownfire.”

Here you have a toxic mix of racism, xenophobia and institutional hatred that is hard to explain but vitally important to pay attention to, for this social media activist is not alone. As those who follow social media would have noticed, there is a significant group of young voices who would celebrate the incineration of the university campus without an inkling of conscience. I have warned before that we fail to distinguish a radical activism around transformation from this kind of violent, vengeful anarchy often dressed up in the progressive language of decolonisation when it is nothing of the sort.

The only way to counter these pseudo-radical voices is to speak out against all fires, whether they be from the mountains above or the streets below, if they threaten the cultural assets of a campus or community, whether those be books, artworks, archives or special collections and so on. In this regard it is important that UCT learn not to buckle under the pressure of anti-democratic forces by covering up artworks some students do not like or hiding them in the basement for fear of the fire. A university that does not resist all destructive fires, literal or symbolic, does not deserve the name.

We rightly mourn the damage to Jagger, and I will make my contribution to the fundraising efforts to restore and repair the damage done. But we need to equally mourn the lack of civic courage to lament and condemn, in public, all fires that undermine the quest for higher learning.