Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 3 | The National Library of South Africa, page 4

Timbuktu and Beyond

John Tsebe is quick to point out that while South Africa may be at the forefront of creating libraries meant to serve African needs and both promote and preserve African knowledge, the country hasn't been developing these concepts in isolation. Under the aegis of the National Library, Tsebe has initiated regular meetings among librarians across the continent to brainstorm ways to improve and upgrade their institutions. One such conference, held in May 2005, which the National Library helped to organize, was entitled, "From Papyrus to Print-Out: The Book in Africa," and focused on an ambitious set of topics that ranged from the preservation of books and oral literature to the impact of information technology on book development and on literature.

But perhaps no undertaking better illustrates the continental vision that underpins the development of the National Library than the story of the Timbuktu manuscripts. These materials, some of which date back to the 13th century, are primarily housed in private collections in the city of Timbuktu, in Mali, and have been estimated to include some 300,000 texts. For hundreds of years, Timbuktu was a traditional center of Islamic learning and scholarship; works on law, theology and science, along with poetry, biographies, dictionaries, Qur'anic studies and other materials have already been catalogued. This treasure house of knowledge highlights the fact that Africa has a vital and deep-rooted written record of its culture and history that can stand beside its many oral traditions.

In 2001, during a state visit to Mali, South African president Thabo Mbeki offered his nation's help in preserving the Timbuktu manuscripts. An international effort is now underway to build an environmentally stable library to house, preserve and digitize these materials, efforts that also aim at making them accessible to scholars across the globe. As part of this project, the National Library of South Africa has helped to train Malian conservators and worked with South African architects, engineers and builders who are involved in conceiving and constructing the new building.

In launching the project, President Mbeki hailed it as the start of "our challenge to reclaim and embrace the rich African heritage which we were denied for centuries by Eurocentric perspectives, colonial racism and racial domination."

Reclaiming South Africa's "rich African heritage" is very high on the National Library's agenda in light of the long years of segregation that afflicted the country. Through centuries of colonialism and continuing on through apartheid, officials of South Africa's national library system were not focused on cataloguing and preserving literature, artifacts and other materials relating to the history of the nation's nonwhite population. In that context, Mandla Hermanus, a program assistant at the National Library's Cape Town campus, explains that the choices made about library collections have far-reaching cultural, historical and social effects. "There is no such thing as neutrality," Hermanus says. "Every decision made about what to keep and collect, what to display and highlight, or what to discard are all substantive, even political decisions that reflect power realities at any given point in time." Until very recently, Hermanus says, these power realities included "the story of how one group of people were regarded as deserving of a particular status and the others would be relegated to the background."

Next page: One example of the library's historical marginalization of black Africans is a long-forgotten collection of 19th century sketches of the first inhabitants of South Africa, the Khoi San people.

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