"The books were just the props": public libraries and contested space in the Cape Flats townships in the 1980s.

ABSTRACT

This article examines the relationship between public libraries and social change in South Africa during the 1980s. It focuses on libraries in selected townships on the Cape Flats. It concludes that debates about the public library's success or failure as an instrument of social change cannot overlook the idea of contested space in which the live discussion, debate, and circulation of ideas precludes and includes the use of books and libraries.

INTRODUCTION

The relationship between public libraries and social change is still unclear. There is Jesse Shera's (1949, p. 248) early view that public libraries tend to follow rather than create social change, and then there are more ambitious views found in journals like Information for Social Change. In this article, this relationship is examined in an analysis of public libraries in South Africa during a period of dramatic social change. Much like the 1940s that ended in a surprising election victory for the National Party and apartheid in spite of alternative political futures, the 1980s also ended with unforeseen events that led to the first democratic elections in 1994. (1)

There were several imagined possibilities for a future South Africa in that decade. Nothing was inevitable at the time, but the hardening of attitudes and lines of division in the 1980s make the anti-apartheid narrative compelling. The United Democratic Front coordinated hundreds of autonomous organizations and thousands of activists who opposed state reforms and resisted the institutions and policies of the apartheid regime. It also promoted the profile and underground structures of the African National Congress. (2) As the liberation struggle intensified, the primary antagonists consolidated their ideological positions and escalated actions against each other. The result was states of emergency, detentions without trial, sustained township violence, and deaths throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Importantly, 14,000 lives were lost in the four years immediately preceding the elections of April 26-27, 1994 (Coleman, 1998, p. 243).

These developments attracted national and international attention, while less striking events involving the daily responses of ordinary South Africans went unnoticed. Moreover, the prominence of the African National Congress-led liberation movement during the period overshadowed the roles played by other liberation forces that advocated different methods and goals in the struggle to overthrow the apartheid regime. Organizations such as youth groups, civic associations, and trade unions that responded to community grievances and workplace oppression, in fact, conceded this principal role to the African National Congress. "The masses, in other words, chose the African National Congress rather than the other way around" (Legassick, 1998, p. 452). Struggles around local social grievances as well as national political demands yielded a complex situation.

PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND SOCIAL SPACE

Events and experiences in the 1980s involving a number of public libraries in the strife-torn coloured townships on the Cape Flats (3) are examined against this background. The Group Areas Act of 1950 legislated that areas were set aside for exclusive occupation by a particular "race" group as officially divided by the Population Registration Act of 1950 into "whites, coloureds, Asians and Natives" (Saunders, 1989, p. 488). This led to the forced removal of thousands of Coloureds in Cape Town (Western, 1996; Bohlin, 2001; Field, 2001). Coloured refers to South Africans of mixed descent, and their identity remains a topic of ongoing controversy (Erasmus, 2001).

In 1985, a significant year for this article, the demographics for Cape Town in terms of the apartheid classification were 57 percent Coloured, 27 percent White, 15 percent African, and 1 percent Indian. The population statistics in South Africa for that year were 73.8 percent African, 14.8 percent White, 8.7 percent Coloured, and 2.7 percent Indian (Survey of Race Relations, 1985, p. 185). So while they are a South African minority, Coloureds are in the majority in Cape Town. Analyses of township struggles focus either on structural or material conditions within which action or organization occurs, or on conspiratorial or agitating roles played by national political organizations like the African National Congress and the United Democratic Front (Seekings, 1992). These approaches neglect the reactions of township residents themselves and the ways in which township agencies such as libraries and librarians responded to social change out of a sense of facing together political and material struggles.

What is common to the debate on public libraries and social change are commitment to the institutions of literacy, conviction about the positive influences of reading and the recorded word, and consensus on their transforming effects. From that perspective, public libraries in apartheid South Africa, especially in the 1980s, were perceived as mainstream, passive, inadequate, out of touch with the information needs of their communities, and indifferent to social change. Alternative information centers, such as peoples' libraries and community resource centers (CRCs), that emerged at that time enjoyed "struggle" legitimacy. Closer cooperation between public libraries and these alternative information agencies was recommended, but the prevailing view of public libraries was unflattering (van Zijl, 1989, p. 4; Siegruhn, 1990, p. 5; Nassimbeni, 1991, pp. 45-49; Karlese, 1991, p. 14). Official library and information services were associated with the propagation of apartheid as the ideology of the dominant social grouping (Karlese & Nassimbeni, 1997, p. 36).

This verdict, however, obscures ways in which some public librarians responded to actual situations in their townships. In the case of the Cape Flats, which had low levels of literacy, such a verdict ahistorically overlooks a tradition of library service in which the live discussion, debate, and circulation of ideas precluded and included the use of books and libraries. Illiteracy among Coloureds, for example, rose by almost 19 percent between 1960 and 1980 (Ellis, 1987, pp. 9-11). Such a negative judgment about public libraries also misunderstands some of the ways in which libraries, books, and information were used by participants in the liberation struggle. I draw on personal experience, interviews with librarians, and primary and secondary sources to grasp the contradictions that characterized some of the Coloured township libraries on the Cape Flats during the 1980s. The public libraries selected for analysis are located in Lentegeur, Hanover Park, and Bonteheuwel townships.

One of the criticisms leveled against public libraries was that they were sites of conflict and struggle and that they should therefore not be neutral. In a militarized South Africa, libraries were certainly sites of conflict, as in the case in 1988 of a fourteen-year-old boy that shot indiscriminately at users in the children's section of a library and explained that he always wanted to be a policeman so that he could shoot people. (4) And public libraries were regular targets for destruction or damage during periods of unrest throughout the apartheid era. (5) But more fundamentally, their involvement in urban racial zoning and the forced removals of thousands of people meant that township libraries could never be neutral. The township library was always contested social space--geographically, racially, ideologically, and professionally.

Ideas about social space are prominent in the literature of social theory and in disciplines such as geography and urban sociology (Castells, 1983; Soja, 1985; Lefebvre, 1991; Bachelard, 1994). Their local application in South Africa, however, is guided by perspectives about the control of social space exerted by the South African state and "the reactions it provoked among recipients and opponents of government policy" (Hart, 1990, p. 285). Space in this view is not just a passive geographical milieu that is simply assigned and manipulated by the South African state; rather it is a "lived space" of continual meaning making and conflict among various social groups. It is constantly made and unmade, claimed and disclaimed by people. The "spatial patterning" of Cape Town stretches back to the seventeenth century, and social identities and the reclamation of its urban space are still closely intertwined today (Bank & Minkley, 1998/99; Jackson, 2003).

But the…