Matching shadows: remembering the Plant Conservation Unit

The campus where I work is built around a central concourse of stairs leading up the slopes of Table Mountain. On one side of this bisecting line are mostly arts and humanities buildings; on the other are mostly sciences. Seen from above, the two halves of campus mirror each other like a Rorschach test. Literature has its symmetrical twin in Mathematics; Architecture is echoed by Astronomy, History by Biology. When a mountain fire swept down from the slopes on Sunday 18 April 2021, embers carried by a hot, dry wind randomly picked out buildings for destruction. The cypresses and creepers outside my office were set alight, but the building survived (just, and with heat-induced cracks in the glass of our windows). But the roof of the Jagger Reading Room just opposite began to burn, perhaps because embers flew into the gaps between the roof tiles. Firefighters were concentrating on buildings with gas cylinders and stockpiles more flammable than books. By Sunday evening, pictures of the African Studies Library burning were on news sites around the world: its arched windows filled with red flames, its teak desks, open shelves, and artworks utterly destroyed, the damage to the collections in the vaults unknown. Before and after pictures were soon circulated: a beautiful reading room; a charred wreck. In the wake of the fire, there was an enormous salvage operation that relied on thousands of volunteers. You would get your plastic hard hat and safety briefing, then go down into the dim, waterlogged stacks of Special Collections. Here you would fill up plastic crates (donated by local supermarkets) with rare books and boxes of manuscripts, maps, photographs, drawings—all carefully labeled. The key thing was to maintain the archival order as the crates came out and were stacked on big flatbed trucks, then taken to other locations, unloaded again, stacked again: it was labor intensive work. For over two weeks, a long human chain stretched out of the building. Staff, students, and volunteers passed along the crates, mostly too quick for you to see what was in them. Occasionally someone would shout “Triage!” and skip the line, rushing a box of water-affected items to a marquee pitched outside, where conservators and curators assessed the damage. I watched as they picked through soggy photo albums with tweezers or flash-froze wet texts—this bought some time in combating mold, which was now the big threat. It turned out that many of the most important holdings had survived, among them the nineteenth-century records of |Xam and !Kung oratures (commonly known as the Bleek and Lloyd Collection) that are part of the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. So there was some good news; it wasn’t quite as bad as it had