Someone recently posted an article on The Archive Project that showed 15 photos of bookmobiles. The photos certainly point to the central role bookmobiles, and libraries, played in bringing books to communities and to developing contemporary book cultures. However, what stood out for me is how all the photos, except one, were of white children—which says something about the book culture that was being built in North America.
This got me thinking. How did mobile libraries function elsewhere in the world? In South Africa, the developing a book culture among urban Africans in the early twentieth century was often tied to the work of white American philanthropists and philanthropic organizations, like Caroline Phelps Stokes, the American Board Mission, and the Carnegie Foundation/Commission. The Rev. Ray Phillips, an American Board missionary, wrote in 1930 that the solution to discontent among Africans was to “moraliz[e] the leisure time of natives in the city and country alike”. A joint effort by these individuals and organizations led to the establishment of the Carnegie Non-European Library that ran out of the Bantu Men’s Social Centre in Johannesburg.
How successful were these efforts? Eslanda Robeson remarked in her African Journey (1945, John Day Company) that the “Africans making up the membership of this club [BMSC]” were “quite European”.
Herbert Dhlomo, who was to become a prominent literary figure and whose writings offered inspiration to, among others, Peter Abrahams and Bessie Head, was appointed as the native librarian at the Carnegie Non-European Library. He worked there between 1932 and 1937 when, disillusioned by the project, he left. Here he is (on the right), inspecting books at a mobile library in the townships of Johannesburg. Photo reproduced from Tim Couzens, The New African: A Study of the Life and Works of H.I.E. Dhlomo (Ravan Press, 1985).
