‘The damage is total’: fire rips through historic South African library and plant collection

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University of Cape Town risks losing ‘irreplaceable’ historical material on anthropology, ecology and politics

Gutted interior of the University of Cape Town library's Jagger Reading Room, which was built in the 1930s.Credit: Ashraf Hendricks/GroundUp
Forest fires raging in South Africa’s Table Mountain National Park have reached the University of Cape Town (UCT), and gutted the reading room of its main library, which houses irreplaceable documents and records from the country’s past.

Amid apocalyptic scenes on 18 April, fire tore through part of the 200-year-old university’s campus on the slopes of Table Mountain, torching the library building and destroying a plant research unit.

Researchers have set up an online page asking for anyone with photos or digital scans of the library’s collections to upload them.

“This archive is special for all sorts of reasons, and for me it’s because it includes collections which provide a record of the ordinary lives of ordinary people in the area — from working-class children to Black students attending night school,” says Sarah Emily Duff, a historian of South Africa based at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. “We lose that texture of everyday life and struggles with a catastrophe like this,” she adds.