Officials from the University of Cape Town, known as UCT, said the Jagger Library, which houses priceless African studies collections, was among the buildings that burned.
“At this stage, we can confirm the Reading Room is completely gutted and thankfully the fire detection system in place triggered the fire shutters, thereby preventing the spread of the fire to other parts of the library,” Ujala Satgoor, executive director of UCT Libraries, said in a statement.“Some of our valuable collections have been lost,” she said. “However a full assessment can only be done once the building has been declared safe and we can enter.”
The library houses printed and audiovisual materials on African studies as well as 1,300 sub-collections of unique manuscripts and personal papers, and more than 85,000 books and pamphlets on African studies including up-to-date materials and works on Africa and South Africa printed before 1925, according to the UCT website. It also contains one of the most extensive African film collections in the world, the website added.
The university’s vice chancellor, Mamokgethi Phakeng, confirmed that some parts of the African Studies Collection were destroyed.
“The library is of course our greatest loss,” she told CapeTalk radio. “Some of these cannot be replaced by insurance, and that is a sad day for us.”
COMMENT
As with the 2018 fire at the National Museum in Brazil, the loss of library archives is a severe cultural loss. Other buildings can be rebuilt, but once one-of-a-kind endangered information is lost, it is lost for good. Since the African studies collection contained documentation of non-literate cultures, the loss of archives makes it that much harder for African scholars to research cultural identity.
