ASH: Memorializing the 2021 University of Cape Town Library Fire

Abstract

On Sunday 18 April 2021 a wild fire rushed down from the slopes of Devils Peak into the grounds of the University of Cape Town (UCT) upper campus. Buildings and student housing were at risk. Students and staff were quickly evacuated, fortunately evading fatalities or serious injury. Firefighters quickly arrived on scene. The situation escalated fast. Via social media and chat platforms online, there was increasing concern about the security of UCT Libraries. Soon news began filtering in that library buildings had indeed caught fire. The first onsite video footage began circulating in the late afternoon, showing the worst: thick orange tongues of fire guzzled out of the windows of the Jagger Reading Room. Firefighters directed hoses in a vain attempt to douse flames that roaringly consumed decadesold invaluable collections of books, manuscripts, and archival records. The UCT intellectual community reeled in shock at the loss of the library and archive. Images of the smoky, blackened ruins of the Jagger Library and its African Studies collections appeared in the media the following day (Figure 1). Real and symbolic fires have flickered in the background of an extended period of public debate about higher education and institutional change in South Africa that was often fueled by struggles over UCT’s material cultural heritage, such as with Rhodes Must Fall (see Makhubu 2020). It was therefore a surprising, ironic tragedy in many ways. Unclear sentiments of archival grief, loss, and sadness were cluttered up among material ruins that now also demanded urgent salvage and recovery. In this essay I profile the Salvage and Recovery Project (SRP) implemented by UCT Libraries as a disaster management response. It is vividly depicted in photographs taken by Lerato Maduna, senior photographer in the UCT Communications and Marketing Department, and Health Sciences librarian Dilshaad Brey. Memorialization appears central to working through the layered chaos of ruined archival remains and feelings of loss during that time. Memorialization of disasters like this often follows a pattern of ordered ritual performance directed to recon with tragedy, salvage and sanctify material remains marked by it, and consecrate the site for remembrance by the community of the bereaved. Memorials accompanied the salvage at UCT, but to some extent also encompassed it. It initiated the symbolic process of reordering complicated relationships between notions of archive, cultures of knowledge, race, and access to higher education that the Jagger Library had symbolically contained. The 2021 UCT Library SRP was therefore a process of material recovery that also involved a politics of heritage and the sacred.