It would be on Monday, April 18, 1988, according to my diary and the perpetual calendars I consulted, that I first walked into the Jagger Library at the University of Cape Town. I would spend a week there feeling my way into the chosen subject of my master’s thesis: The relationship between author, ideology, and publishers in post-1960 South Africa.
It was the librarians at the Jagger who not only pointed me to relevant materials in their special collections, but who facilitated introductions to key figures in Cape Town’s publishing scene—during that week, thanks to several Jagger librarians, I met David Phillip and Mike Kantey of David Phillip Publishers; I met James Matthews, director of BLAC (Black Literature, Arts and Culture—the first Black-owned publishing house in South Africa); I met André Odendaal, who would a few years later found Mayibuye Books and the Robben Island Museum; I met Annari van der Merwe from Tafelberg and Koos Human from Human & Rousseau. Each of these individuals took a risk talking to a clueless white boy they did not know about the politics of publishing in treacherous times; and yet they did, as generously as they could. I was overwhelmed by the enormity of the task they laid out. And enthralled.
As often happens, thesis topics drift, and I ended up focussing only on a single Press, the Lovedale Mission Press, whose archive had recently been rescued from a fire at the Lovedale Institution. It was in the research rooms at Rhodes University’s Cory Library that I found the haven so many others found at the Jagger. Lovedale has never left me, and publishing has never left me. It started at the Jagger: that week in the African Reading Room and among those publishing professionals changed the trajectory of my life. I learned then how literature shapes the way we think and act, and how we cannot understand those shifts without the archives that preserve those materials and record those ideas. I learned that the decisions publishers and copyeditors make have real-life consequences. No editor should make decisions lightly or without an awareness of their ramifications beyond the publishing house and the pages of the books we prepare for public consumption. These stories and the people behind them matter. Those who write, those who publish, and those who preserve those efforts depend on each other. The loss of a single pillar is a loss for all.
This weekend, the Jagger Library and the African Reading Room burned. The Jagger contained some of the most significant and rare South African manuscripts. The pictures are devastating; rumours swirl that some of the collections may have survived. We don’t know yet.
Maybe one day, a few years from now, a clueless young individual will walk into an archive, be it the rebuilt Jagger Library or the Cory Library, and smell the smoke lingering among the pages of manuscripts. Maybe their life will change, too.
But first, we need to ensure that there are books and histories, and institutions to preserve them in. And for that, we need governments that value the arts and education.