Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 3 | The National Library of South Africa, page 5

But things are changing. Hermanus, for example--a young black professional--says he became interested in a career at the National Library when he realized the role it could play in redressing what he calls society's disrespect of indigenous languages. "This work has helped me in taking my own Xhosa culture and language seriously," he notes. "If you speak an indigenous language, even in the townships, people think you are either uneducated or not up with the times. You have to mix your Xhosa with a lot of English for people to think you are a learned person. I want to help change that and the National Library is a platform for me to be able to do so. If indigenous languages become respected in the National Library, they will be respected in the townships."

Hermanus cites one example of the library's historical marginalization of black Africans: a long-forgotten collection of 19th century sketches of the first inhabitants of South Africa, the Khoi San people. "They were just sitting there, in a back room, being stored," he says. "It was only when they were submitted to UNESCO and declared World Heritage Objects that they began to be properly catalogued and taken care of. What else is in the library that we don't know about?" Hermanus wonders, pointing to the many uncatalogued holdings in the National Library's storerooms. "What other treasures deserve our attention?"

Melanie Geustyn, the Special Collections Librarian at the National Library campus in Cape Town, is also troubled by this question. "I'm surprised at the things I discover we didn't know we had," she says. "Manuscripts, diaries, a lot of handwritten letters. We even found come Sumerian cuneiform, which is one of the earliest forms of writing." Geustyn has also come across other rare finds that are among the Library's holdings, such as a letter from Moshweshwe (ca. 1787-1868), a South African king, thanking French Emperor Napoleon III for sending guns to fight the British and a voluminous collection of photographs of many of the other South African kings as well as chiefs of the Khosa tribe who were confined in South Africa's notorious Robben Island prison during the apartheid years. The library is also home to the first written dictionary of indigenous South African languages.

In addition to identifying and cataloguing important materials already in hand, the National Library staff have dedicated themselves to, as Professor Ralebipi-Simela puts it, "going backwards in order to go forwards." What she means is making the effort to collect books and other materials by black South Africans that were published overseas by those who went into exile during the apartheid years or who simply could not have their work recognized at home.

It is unlikely that the library will miss cataloguing any publications in the future. Every book, magazine and newspaper publisher in South Africa is required by law to deposit copies of their products with the National Library in order to preserve the nation's culture. Of course, that also means that the library could quickly run out of space--but that's where technology comes in.

Library officials believe that much of what they hope to achieve depends upon information technology. Dr. Marthie de Kock is the Executive Head of Information Communications Technology for the National Library. She started as a librarian a quarter century ago and can recall the card catalogues that were then used to search for books on shelves. "But now," she points out, "you can do everything online. You can search the collection not only in your local library but in any library in South Africa. And because of our inter-lending voucher program, you can borrow a book from any library in South Africa." De Kock also has high hopes for digitization as a way of increasing access to books and knowledge. "Our vision," she says, "is that one day, a reader will be able to click on a link online and read any book they want." She says she is also working toward the day when all libraries across Africa will be able to link to each other and serve each other's users. "The goal," she explains, "is to make access to all the libraries seamless, no matter where you live on the continent. We want to get to a point where anybody in any village in Africa can log on over the Internet and tap into any kind of information they need."

That idea may not be as far over the horizon as it would seem. A few years ago, John Perry Barlow, an American writer and thinker on computer connectivity who has often visited Africa noted that almost everywhere he went--though sometimes it took more effort than others--he was able to log onto the Internet. "Even," he noted with satisfaction, "in Timbuktu."

Kenneth Walker, who currently runs Lion House Production, a South African strategic communications firm, has had a distinguished career as a journalist. In the U.S., he worked for ABC News, covering the White House as well as the U.S. Justice Department and also served as a foreign correspondent. Before that, for 13 years he reported for The Washington Star newspaper, which assigned him to South Africa in 1981 where his work earned several of the most prestigious awards in print journalism. In 1985 he won an Emmy for a series of reports he did on South Africa for the ABC news program Nightline.