“All who care to look”: loss and renewal in the wake of the Jagger library fire

KEYWORDS:

• African archives
• Jagger library
• fire
• digitisation

The push to digitise archives in Africa implies better access to African histories for African people. The expansion of digital infrastructures across the continent opens up new avenues for researchers and collection managers, but it also raises new challenges.

In many respects, African archives are still shaped by colonial practices of assembling, indexing and display, and digitisation does not resolve the many ethical issues associated with them. The most subtle yet problematic exchange underpins many archival artefacts. Peter Davis observes of colonial photography, for instance, “From the beginning these images were ‘property:’ pictures did not belong to the people they portrayed but to the person who took them” (1996, 2). For many scholars of colonial histories this act of extraction, of literally “taking” or recording, cannot be viewed only in terms of law. But this is one of the fiercest battles in the digital environment: who owns a thing, what version of that thing has value (is a copy equal to its original?), how should that thing be presented and disseminated and by whom? The process of digitisation can also result in lopsided, biased and/or inaccessible versions of materials, as certain narratives and histories are rendered visible and searchable, while others remain secret, out of view.

Thinking about archives around the world, particularly those dealing with indigenous histories in former colonies, also raises the ethics of viewing materials once digitised. What if increased accessibility facilitates the creation of new content that is, at best, unwittingly insensitive and, at worst, explicitly and intentionally discriminatory and hateful? And how does one go about cataloguing the material of colonial conquest in a way that takes cognisance of how materials were obtained, and the potential harm latent in their representations, without over-curating?

The runaway fire that gutted the Jagger Reading room and several collections at the University of Cape Town in 2021 threw these debates into sharp relief.

The fire occurred on a campus that was literally and metaphorically burning. Since 2015, and the genesis of the #RhodesMustFall movement, universities across the country have been visible sites of dissent, with students protesting against high fees, financial exclusion and accommodation challenges as well as the colonial legacy of their institutions’ culture and curricula. Fire, long associated with rebellion in South Africa’s history, soon became a key tool of protest (Breakey 2017). Dozens of tyres were set alight across campuses, buses were torched and UCT Vice-Chancellor Max Price’s office was firebombed in 2016. In the same year, students set fire to the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Law Library, and attempts to do the same at the University of the Witwatersrand were narrowly thwarted. Also in 2016, UCT students removed several artworks, deemed offensive, that adorned residence walls and placed them on a bonfire.

The 2021 fire was different. It occurred at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic on an unusually warm and windy Sunday afternoon in April when a homeless person started a small fire near Rhodes Memorial. Very quickly, the surrounding mountainside was ablaze, exposing the university’s vulnerable location, situated as it is on the regularly burning slopes of Table Mountain. While these fires are a necessity for the regeneration of the mountain’s fynbos, they frequently threaten mountainside properties.

But, given developments in universities in the country, nobody would have been surprised to hear that the library fire had been a deliberate attack. Indeed, some more radical voices celebrated the fire on social media platforms. Certainly, what was considered a tragic loss by some was viewed as an opportunity for renewal, a regeneration by fire, by others. For those who had worked in the Special Collections for many years, the event was a traumatic and profound loss.

It is important to distinguish between the archives and the special collections, though what made the building at UCT important was that many elements of the archive and the Special Collections, including African Studies and rare books, were housed in the same space. The film and video collection, specifically, thus comprised both archival materials and collections of films on DVD.

For scholars in film and media, the immediate aftermath of the fire was particularly shocking. The main collection of DVDs from South Africa and the continent – a valuable resource of often hard-to-find films – was completely destroyed. More distressing was the incalculable loss of yet-to-be digitised films in various analogue formats stored in the basement, damaged by water. It would take nearly eighteen months to fully appreciate what was lost, and what was “saved.”

The sense of loss in the wake of the destruction of any archive is compounded by an important factor: its value is only unlocked when a particular researcher happens upon previously undiscovered information and makes sense of it. We can thus never know exactly what histories were lost in 2021.

Talk soon turned to the future – recovery, restoration, renewal and reimagining – and the fire and subsequent salvage efforts were increasingly mythologised. Photographers assembled beautifully produced photo essays depicting the library burning, the library in ruins and then volunteers’ efforts to save the archive. University management turned the focus away from the tragedy of the event, referring to the library as the “phoenix that would rise from the ashes” and inviting the UCT community and wider public to a series of “imaginarium workshops,” at which several proposals for the rejuvenation of the library were made. These ranged from the conservative (restore it to its former state) to the outlandish (knock the entire building down and replace it with a garden boasting high-quality WiFi connectivity). The reification of the digital in this latter suggestion is obvious.

This was too soon for some of those who had devoted their careers to building, managing and maintaining the collections. Indeed, some commentators asked why the physical archives hadn’t been digitised already, overlooking both the careful work of curatorship and the larger issue of the cost and scale of cloud-based storage.

The underlying implication in many “renewal” comments was that digitisation was, itself, a good thing, an automatic improvement on the paper and celluloid archive. However, as Katja Müller notes,

digitisation is believed to bring improvement in a wider sense, so a Collection Management System (CMS) is understood to bring improvement for museums and archives … While a general notion of CMS equalling improvement prevails, the outline and details of the software needed are vague, and imagined benefits can differ from stakeholder to stakeholder. (Müller 2021, 59–60)

In a seminar we presented in the Centre for Film and Media Studies at UCT, many commented on what a “new” library space should look like and how its archives should function. Countering the digital capitalist enthusiasm for WiFi-gardens and “clean” and minimalist reading spaces reported in early engagements with library “stakeholders,” one scholar said, “Curating an archive is an act of intent. We shouldn’t forget the processes that led to the creation of the archive in the first place.” There were those who felt that the new library needed to demystify the archive, while others echoed Scott Eyman’s feeling in his article, “The Thrill of the Chase,” in which he associates digitisation with the loss of that thrill:

I’ve come to believe that the forbidden aspect of archival research had a heightened effect that approached the erotic. The easy availability of so much that was previously inaccessible only emphasizes the absence of the sense of occasion that discoveries used to provide … everything is grist for the mill. (Eyman 2015, 52)

At the heart of these deeply felt beliefs are two sets of tensions. Firstly, the archive is not just a resource but represents a practice, the act of searching, and discovering, and then the ethical deliberation of how to use the material. Secondly, there is the principle aim of accessibility or, in a different light, the “benefits of inaccessibility.” Should all materials be made freely and openly available? Not necessarily. In an article on a digitisation project involving mātauranga Māori (or indigenous Māori knowledge), Honiana Love and Claire Hall write, “We needed to consider a Māori worldview from the get-go. This meant secure areas where knowledge might only be available to a few – worlds away from the library vision of information available to all who care to look” (2011, 28).

Researchers often see themselves as the benign users for whom archives have been created, but as Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues, “research is one of the ways in which the underlying code of imperialism and colonialism is both regulated and realised” (2012, 8). Colonial archives have long been complicated, in Premesh Lalu’s words, by “the complicity of knowledge in achieving social subjection” (2007, 36). Knowledge and research, the pumping heart and – at first glance – least controversial aspect of the archive, cannot be taken for granted in discussions about digitised archives in Africa. For Smith, the assumption that “benefiting mankind is indeed a primary outcome of scientific research” has become “so taken for granted that many researchers simply assume that they as individuals embody this ideal” (2012, 2).

The subjects of archives, on the other hand, are often barred from accessing material, which, even if digitised, requires particular technologies and sometimes expensive subscriptions. As Steve Anderson and Genevieve Hart point out, “the people who are subjects of films, photographs and interviews in liberation archives (and who perhaps most deserve access), often cannot afford the technology needed for that access” (2016, 6).

Building or restoring an archive requires one to envision the identity of future users, those “who care to look,” and how they will approach the past. How do we make particularly archives of colonialism meaningful for a generation that openly rejects the symbols of the past and seeks to actively dismantle the structures that represent what Victoria Collins-Buthelezi has called “the afterlife of colonialism and apartheid?” (2016, 68).

Laila Shereen Sakr writes that

to amass an archive is a leap of faith, not in the function of preserving data, but in the belief that there will be someone to use it, that the accumulation of these histories will continue to live, that they will have listeners. (Sakr 2015, 364)

Restoring an archive is equally a leap of faith, particularly since the fire is the turning point in a period of volatile transition from a material to an ephemeral understanding of archives. As important as it is for vulnerable materials to be preserved and digitised, it is also important that the process for collecting and curating materials going forward is intentional.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk

Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk is a senior lecturer in the Centre for Film and Media Studies and a member of the Environmental Humanities South research programme at the University of Cape Town. He has published widely on the filmmaker Terrence Malick, as well as South African film.

Martha Evans

Martha Evans is an associate professor at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Film and Media Studies. Her research interests include South African media history, transitional justice and the media, and the anti-apartheid struggle.