Libraries in South Africa

by Kenneth Walker

Transforming Lives, Advancing Education

Andrew Carnegie thought that access to books should be a part of the birthright of every youngster. During the presidency of Vartan Gregorian, Carnegie Corporation has invested in that vision in South Africa, creating model libraries to help promote educational progress on many levels, from pre-school on through graduate studies at top South African universities.

Libraries, like universities, are levers of change within societies. They serve a critical role in improving literacy levels, and act as information hubs, often providing a community’s only access to electronic communication. African libraries are generally given a low priority by governments and international funders and most have severely deteriorated infrastructure, stock and service. Reflecting the interests of Andrew Carnegie, the Corporation, which first provided funding for library services in South Africa more than eighty years ago, has been making major investments in sub-Saharan African libraries. These investments have leveraged other funding, including from governments, to rebuild public libraries in South Africa and to revitalize the libraries of several universities on the continent.

Today, the Corporation is nearing completion of more than $35 million in recent grants to libraries in South Africa. The investments have helped to unleash enormous pent-up demand for library services from a wide variety of South Africans, from toddlers and teens, to postgraduate university researchers.

The impacts are widespread and fundamental. Public libraries are being transformed into multipurpose community centers that seek to foster a lifelong culture of reading and library attendance. These new “Centers of Excellence” include early childhood development sections, teenage computer game rooms, and performance and meeting spaces and are also serving as integral components of violence-prevention projects in previously crime-ridden cities and sections of black townships.

Internet access is another critical resource that is being vastly extended through upgraded library facilities and services. In fact, 10 years ago, there was practically no free Internet access in South Africa, but Corporation funding pioneered the way and has been largely responsible for advancing the spread of free Internet access in the country.

Corporation investments have also helped to transform university postgraduate research libraries that the government is relying upon to help create a “knowledge economy” in South Africa within 14 years. At the same time, a variety of training programs have been created, and these are totally energizing the profession of librarian, which had long been insular, marginalized and demoralized.

Schools Without Libraries

The root of the demand for public libraries can be found in the failure of a public school system still struggling with the legacy of apartheid’s “Bantu education” (1) for black children. Over 90 percent of South Africa’s schools—virtually all of them in black areas—have no library at all.

In 2011, in the largest youth demonstrations in South Africa since the Soweto uprising in 1976, more than 20,000 Cape Town students joined a protest march to Parliament demanding school libraries. Most public librarians feel the problems of the schools have been dumped in their laps and many cite a lack of civic and governmental will to face up to the problem.

In an interview with The Carnegie Reporter, South Africa’s finance minister Pravin Gordhan said: “The fact that only around 8 percent of South Africa’s schools have libraries is a legacy of apartheid. We wish it were otherwise. But there’s only so much we can do.” Gordhan added, “South Africa may never decide to build all the brick and mortar libraries that are needed.” He believes the government’s commitment to connect every school to the Internet, “should be the equivalent of libraries.”

Robert Moropa, the past president of the Library Association of South Africa, criticized that view as “Wrong thinking,” asking, for instance, “Who will train the teachers to train the students how to use computers and the Internet for research? It’s the wrong way of looking at this thing. The politicians don’t understand the importance of school libraries, because most of them never had them.”

Sixteen-year-old Thabisile Mkhize is a good example of how inadequate resources at public schools are driving students into public libraries. Thabisile arises every Saturday at five in the morning to begin a 25-mile journey to the Bessie Head Library in the center of Pietermaritzburg, the provincial capital of the South African province of KwaZulu Natal, off the Indian Ocean. The library is named for a renowned South African writer who was raised in an orphanage after being born in 1937 of an illegal union between a white mother and a black father. Many of her writings reflect the rejection and alienation she experienced from an early age. Thabisile has to spend the equivalent of $4 to catch three minivans used as taxis in South Africa before she arrives at her destination, the main downtown
city library.

Thabisile is one of five children and three adults who live with her impoverished grandmother in a one-room shack in the rural township of Sweetwaters, so $4 is a considerable sum for a family struggling to feed itself. The shack has no running water or electricity. Yet Thabisile takes the trip every week, on Saturday. The library, with its recently opened new wing, has become a kind of home away from home. She starts her trips so early in order to get there an hour before opening time to assure herself a spot in the line of students that snakes around two corners of the library building, through the front door, past the reading rooms and on up a circular stairway to the second floor.

“I must come here,” said Thabisile, adding, “It’s the only place I can learn. Our house has one room and there is not even a place to sit at a table to study. It’s always too much noise and too many things going on to be able to study. And we use paraffin lamps, which don’t have much light.” Thabisile has yet another motive for making her long trip to the library. “I need to do my school work,” she said, “but I also love to read about faraway people and places and I imagine myself going there.”

Thabisile is one of more than 1,400 students in the Saturday morning line. Most, like Thabisile, have traveled from rural areas far away to do assignments from their schools that don’t have enough textbooks to go around. And most of the students have never been taught how to use a library, so they are jam-packed into the library’s reference room and wait for the staff to hand them the books they need. There is hardly any elbow room, and there are so many children in the space that they overwhelm the building’s air conditioning, and most are sweating.

“The moment we open our doors, we are packed,” said senior library assistant Haren Chutterpaul. “Sometimes, we don’t have time to put the books away. If we had ten more libraries like this, they would be used to their full potential.”

Library director John Morrison said funding from Carnegie Corporation has served as “the stopgap for the many schools in South Africa with no libraries.” In recent years, Corporation grants to public libraries in several cities, including Pietermaritzburg, Durban, Cape Town, and Johannesburg, as well as to the National Library in Pretoria, have typically helped to leverage government contributions for the construction or rehabilitation of the libraries. Corporation funds are used for books and other content, such as periodicals, music and audiovisual materials. Library staff also conduct training sessions for students to learn how to use computers and the Internet as well as how to use the library itself. Local schools and city workers also use the café for training and research.

Corporation funds have also provided book trolleys, chairs, filing cabinets and new storage facilities. “Basically,” Morrison said of the Bessie Head Library, “the province paid to have the new wing built and the Corporation paid for everything else. Their contribution came to about $5 million. The impact has been huge,” Morrison added. “It’s opened up a whole new world for the children of this city.”

In addition, Corporation contributions enabled the development of the adult reference library and the purchase of new shelving for unique collections, such as publications in the province going back more than 100 years, including the first black and Indian newspapers. One particularly notable item in the collection is a newspaper called Indian Opinion, published by Mohandas Gandhi.

But arguably, one of the most important effects of Corporation grantmaking has been to help public libraries throughout the country respond to the virtual absence of school libraries. In this regard, the Corporation made a choice to focus on central libraries with many branches. Rookaya Bawa, program officer, Higher Education and Libraries in Africa and manager, African Libraries Project, Carnegie Corporation International Program, spearheaded the project for the Corporation. She explains, “We wanted to put in enough money to compel the government to agree to construction costs. It had to be too attractive for them to walk away from.”

In terms of the Corporation’s grantmaking, a focus on South African libraries has a long history, dating back to the early twentieth century. In 1928, for example, it provided a grant for a survey of libraries in South Africa and supported the medical library at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 1934, the Corporation donated $125,000 to an endowment fund for library development in South Africa. In a concession to the segregated realities of the day, the Corporation first gave grants to libraries in white communities. Eight years later, library grants were made in nonwhite areas and continued over the years to libraries in the black townships.

Eagerly Awaiting a New Library

For weeks before the planned June 2011 opening of the new public library in Khayelitsha, an impoverished township just outside Cape Town, children came every day just hoping to get a glimpse inside. The spontaneous gatherings started after library officials were heard on the radio announcing the opening of the new library dedicated almost entirely to children, ages three to sixteen.

The official opening had to be suddenly delayed for two weeks, but on the day it was supposed to open, a group of about ten youngsters showed up. They all pressed their faces against the locked glass doors to try to get a glimpse inside. The sight of the disappointed children broke the librarians’ hearts so they opened the doors and gave the students a tour. Word soon spread and every day after that until the actual opening different groups of students made their way to the library to accept the offer of the tours.

The library is also part of a violence prevention project that is funded, in part, by the German government. Upgrades to the community around the library have helped to create a new and vibrant public space, with shops and new residences in what had previously been an area of barren, poorly lit lots where violent crime flourished. The library is the anchor tenant of the development. And now, said Alastair Graham, the manager of the program, called Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading, “Murder is down 33 percent and crime is down 20 percent. Crime often happens around poorly designed and unoccupied public spaces,” he added. “We had very broad consultation with the community. They told us they had three goals—improve safety, advance socioeconomic development, and bring about improvement in the quality of life.” The project is proving so successful that other communities in Khayelitsha began clamoring for “their” library, so the city is planning to build one in a different section of the township. And the national government is using Khayelitsha as a model for projects in other provinces across the country.

Lulu Langeni, the library director, brims with excitement when talking about it. “The specific focus of this library is on children, from very young children to early to mid-teens. No other library looks like this or feels like this,” said Langeni, who spoke during a tour of the facility, which includes early childhood development rooms, outdoor play areas, group reading areas, audiovisual rooms and a computer game room for teenagers.

The library has aggressive community outreach programs, including a focus on youngsters aged three to six. “Most of the day care centers here are just the homes of women who have no training,” Langeni explained. “In most of these places, the kids just eat and then they sleep. There is no real development.” But a plan is in place to try to change that situation. “I will go out every week,” Langeni declared, “and prepare a reading corner and advise them about getting old tires for swings and things for the yards so that the children can develop motor coordination and such. Then they must come here with groups of children and visit our early childhood development room, which we call funda udlale, which means ‘read and play’ in the Xhosa language. We read stories to the children and then divide them into two groups so some can go outside for structured play.” Further, she explains, “The [day care providers] will then get training from early childhood education specialists regarding some of the activities they can do with the children. We also teach them how to handle a book and teach some of the nine-to-ten-year-olds to help the younger ones.”

Langeni has also entered into partnerships with nearby primary schools. “Most of the students here have never been exposed to libraries,” she said. “The teachers bring groups of their students and we make book loans to the schools and the teachers will structure reading and writing lessons around them. We will train the students how to use the library, and hopefully, they will get cards and take out books on their own. For those students we will have games, like reading competitions and a game called Hunt for Knowledge where they will hunt for certain information in books based on clues we’ll give them. And we will have a reader loyalty program where kids get prizes for reading a certain number of books. Perhaps most importantly,” Langeni continued, “when they come to the library, the children will see that people care and try to motivate them.”

Similarly, the Johannesburg public library has reading competitions for many of its primary schools, including those in townships. One such school, in Soweto, is the Lodirile primary school. Salaelo Mopanyane, who teaches grade four students, describes the competition. Students aged eight-to-ten compete in what is known as a Book Skirmish. Older students compete in Battle of the Books. “The rules for both are pretty much the same,” Mopanyane said. “We register with the library at the start of the school year and they give us 15 titles, two of each. All grade four students—more than 80 children—participate. They read aloud in groups of four and then exchange books when they are finished. Later, we choose those who will represent each class. The classes compete and then we choose the best class, which will represent the school. The schools then compete in their regions against other schools, and finally the regional champions compete for the citywide championship.”

Mopanyane has been with the program since it started in 2005. “It is very popular. Everybody wants to be in it. When we do the school round, the other children watch the competition and they all want to be there. It helps them enjoy reading and it improves their vocabulary, their spelling and their schoolwork. Even after the competition, they usually go to the library and collect books to read.” So far, more than 27,000 students have participated in the competitions.

The Central Library in the city of Cape Town is leading the way in the growing nontraditional use of the libraries. There are areas for watching videos and movies, conducting chess games and tournaments, weekly dance classes, video conferencing, live jazz, comedy and karaoke performances, a knitting and poetry circle, art exhibitions and book readings, and a local business group uses one of the rooms for network breakfasts.

“Before,” said library director Ninnie Steyn, “you could never imagine all these activities as being part of a library. But our approach is to build a center of excellence that also serves as a community center that people will use throughout their entire life.”

Steyn proudly pointed out all the new books and toys in the early childhood development area. “We have baby hour in the morning. Parents and crèches [day care centers] bring small children here. We introduced one-on-one reading and the children’s schools are reporting an improvement in reading skills.” Steyn paused outside the public Internet access room with its 80 computers. There is a perpetual line of people waiting to use them, so the library has imposed a 45-minute time limit. Often people get back in line several times to complete their projects.

Carnegie Corporation provided almost $4.5 million in grants for the Central Library, Steyn said, with which the library was able to leverage an equal amount from the city, the province of the Western Cape and the U.S. Embassy. (The Corporation provided an additional $3 million for the new library in Khayelitsha.) Corporation funding included support for the book collections, staff training and information and communications technology (ICT). Notably, the ICT infrastructure will eventually enable each of the city’s 99 branch libraries to access
the collections.

In addition, the library was able to install information kiosks and equipment enabling it to digitize its extensive historical collection of newspapers and pamphlets extending back to the early nineteenth century. “These collections contain the most amazing stuff. It’s a lot of precious local history. We really want to digitize it, preserve it for the future, and make it available to everyone,” Steyn added. “Materials are provided in English, Afrikaans and Xhosa, the three official languages of the Western Cape.” Materials in the other eight official languages of South Africa are actively collected at Central Library where a special collection is maintained. Materials are supplied on request, free of any reservation fees, to other libraries throughout the city.

The new city library in Johannesburg is similar in scope to the one in Cape Town. Nobuntu Mpendulo, the director of Johannesburg’s Library and Information Services, said that with a Corporation grant of more than $2 million, the library was able to convince the city to put up about $8 million to completely upgrade the original, classic 1935 library building, and add a three-story addition. Corporation funds also provided for the creation of an Internet center for the public with 200 computers, as well as for the provision of wireless access and to purchase digitization equipment. Said Mpendulo, the grants “also helped us upgrade our collections and database, train staff to work with specialized reference collections and to link the stock of our specialized collections.” Those include the Michaelis Art Library, the Performing Arts and Film Library and the Harold Strange Library of African Studies, which is world-renowned and widely regarded as the best in Africa. “Now,” Mpendulo said, “we will be able to share all this electronically with our branches and with the world. Sometimes our communities were not even aware of all the things we had in the collection.” Corporation grants also allowed the city to upgrade the children’s sections in 17 of their library branches.

Training for public librarians in a number of areas has been another priority. Staff has been trained to work with specialized reference collections and in how to link the stock of specialized collections. Experienced librarians train new graduates and help train other librarians in how to work with children. And to ensure the future of library services, the Leadership Academy in Pretoria helps to identify and retrain the next generation of library leaders so that they can be effective in the twenty-first century knowledge-based environment. An additional strategy to aid staff development involves support for librarians to attend national and international conferences or visit libraries in other countries, such as in the United States and Europe. These programs provide “a skills and knowledge transfer that serves as a motivation for the staff,” director Mpendulo noted. “After such experiences, staff come back with new ideas.” However, enhanced staff training opportunities have spurred some librarians to pursue better paying jobs, such as those in university or business-related libraries. This, Mpendulo admitted, is a problem that has not yet been solved.

In Durban, the only large South African city without a major central library, there will soon be improved library services with leverage provided by Corporation funding. Guy Redman, who heads the Durban City Library, explained that currently, library facilities are scattered in several different downtown buildings. “We want to consolidate everything,” he said, and to that end, “Carnegie Corporation contributed $3 million and the city, province and national government have to come up with $18 million more.”

The National Library of South Africa has also been focused on carrying out a major upgrade of its services. The library houses a number of valuable collections comprising a rich record of much of South Africa’s heritage dating back to 1818. However, for far too long, these materials remained uncatalogued and stored in inaccessible locations, making them unavailable—and largely unknown—to the public. Corporation support changed all this, enabling the library to consolidate and catalogue the collections, capturing more than 400,000 records and providing public access to these materials—not just in South Africa, but around the world. In addition, the library was able to purchase over 500 computers, which enable free, public Internet access as well as computer training. As with other libraries where computing and online technology has been made available, the public demand is so huge that the library was forced to put time limits on individuals’ use of the computers.

Planning for the future, the National Library has also leveraged Corporation support to create the only de-acidification facility in Africa. Acid treating collections increases their durability for another hundred years.

For University Libraries, a Different Strategy and a New Consortium

Compared to its approach to public libraries, the Corporation has focused on a completely different strategy for assisting university libraries, one that emphasizes supporting the next generation of African academics and researchers.

An important impetus for this strategy is rooted in the unfortunate reality that of the relatively small number of African students who pursue postgraduate degrees, even fewer remain in universities choosing, instead, to enter careers in the more lucrative private sector. In South Africa, one way this problem is being addressed is through efforts by the country’s six major research universities—spurred, in large part, by government pressure—to develop programs that will help South Africa become more competitive in the global knowledge economy. The government has set a target of increasing the number of doctorates and other postgraduate degrees by more than 300 percent in 10 years: from 1,400 per year to more than 6,000 annually. It’s a goal most academics believe is unachievable. Still, the government is using a carrot-and-stick approach. While increasing the number of research grants, the government has also warned it will cut postgraduate subsidies for students who don’t complete their postgraduate studies soon enough.

As Robert Moropa, director of the University of Pretoria’s library, explained, “The government used to give universities money according to the number of students they had. Now, it will only pay the subsidy based on the number of people who graduate in a timely fashion. If a three-year degree is completed in three years, then the university gets the full subsidy. For each additional year the student takes to get the degree, the government decreases the subsidy by 10 percent. Now, they want to revise the subsidies even further since South Africa, for example, is producing fewer engineers than Singapore, India, Brazil or China.”

One reason often given for students’ inability to complete their degrees in time is the lack of facilities at South African universities. An emphasis on greatly improving university libraries is therefore considered key to keeping students on track and thus adding to the pool of highly trained men and women with advanced degrees. These efforts are seen by many as not only a way to help deal with the country’s economic concerns, but also to address worries about how to replace the current generation of academics, who are mostly white and nearing retirement.

The universities of Cape Town, KwaZulu Natal, Pretoria, Stellenbosch, Rhodes and the Witwatersrand produce the majority of South Africa’s research work and its Ph.D.s, and so Corporation funding has been concentrated on assisting with substantial improvements at the libraries of these institutions. The universities themselves have formed a consortium to manage the grant funds as well as to share findings and results. But to move even further—and faster—the Corporation sought to leverage its grants by obtaining commitments from the universities to build new library spaces, which have been dubbed “Research Commons,” and to not only equip them with substantial, cutting-edge resources, but also to reserve them for the use of students and researchers pursuing postgraduate degrees.

The University of Cape Town’s chief librarian, American-born Joan Rapp, directs the consortium project. Rapp, who holds a Master of Library and Information Studies degree from Rutgers University and an MBA from the University of Southern Illinois, explained that the concept of a consortium “required a change of thinking by both researchers and librarians.” She noted, “The culture of libraries was very insular here. When I first took this job in 1998, I went into the director’s office and tried to make an international call. I asked the secretary and she said the director didn’t have international access on this line. I said, ‘your boss never calls anyone outside South Africa?’ She replied, ‘no, why would he?’ So I said, ‘Let’s change a few things here.’ I started sending people to conferences and academic libraries in the UK, the United States and elsewhere.”

What was also critical, Rapp said, was recognizing the differences in postgraduate education systems. “What struck me,” she said, “was that in the United States, postgrads have at least one year of class work and a cohort of people going through the same program. But the system in South Africa is principally adopted from the British system. You are thrown from undergrad into postgrad research immediately, and you either sink or swim on your own. Therefore, we wanted to design a support structure for postgraduates that would provide people with the highest level of technology, the highest level of support, internationally trained support specialists, limitless time, limitless bandwidth, and limitless access
to resources.”

Rapp said the Research Commons provide environments “where students can either work very hard on their own or they can sit and chat and read journals and network with others.” The new facilities, she added, “help students find whatever they need to write a proposal or carry out their research. We try to keep them focused and provide them with a sanctuary.”

And in fact, the effort seems to be succeeding. The Research Commons concept has proved wildly popular. Several universities are responding by rushing to build more Research Commons for individual postgraduate faculties, such as those devoted to science, medicine, law and engineering.

The current Research Commons facilities at all six universities are notably similar. They have comfortable furniture and workstations with computers for those who need them and wireless access for those with their own laptops. There are rooms where groups can come together and collaborate on research projects along with areas where students can study alone.

The libraries also subscribe to a survey of library users called Libqual, which evolved from a popular tool for assessing service quality in the private sector. The libraries all report findings similar to those of the University of Cape Town, which was the first African university to employ this resource. “The survey uses a scale of 1 to 10 and rates the library on information resources, space and service,” said William Daniels, the university’s Research Commons manager. “On every question, our scores have gone up.”

Dr. Eli Mabaso, a facial surgeon, spoke of his encounter with a Research Commons at the University of the Witwatersrand. He used the facility while researching the thesis that would make him the only physician in South Africa with an advanced degree in cranial, maxillofacial, and oral surgery. As Dr. Mabaso explained, there were no libraries in the Soweto schools he attended as a child and he didn’t have much use for those he encountered during most of his college career. He said, “When I first got my medical degree there was nothing at Wits [the University of the Witwatersrand] like this. I was pretty much on my own. But now, the research hub is fantastic. The staff is trained and friendly and they frequently offer very helpful suggestions when I find myself getting stuck. They can suggest databases and other resources I hadn’t thought of. These days, I think of new reasons to go to the Commons just to do new research.”

The comments are typical across all six campuses. George van Reenen and Taryn Herbst are pursuing master’s degrees at Stellenbosch, his in business administration and hers in environmental ethics. Both say that one of the most popular features of the Commons is the fact that they are limited to postgraduates.

Van Reenen got his undergraduate degree at Stellenbosch University in 1997, which makes him a bit older than many other postgraduates at the institution. “As a senior guy,” he said, “it’s nice to have a separate place so I don’t have to listen to the noise of the youngsters.” Herbst agreed. “Last year,” she said, “I used to have to bring ear plugs. I would want to strangle the undergrads babbling on in their cell phones about how their weekend went.”

Practically, all the universities’ Commons get crowded, and that really is one of the rare complaints. Some universities have tried to respond by expanding their present facilities, while others just keep adding more Commons. They are trying to strike a balance between the intimate feel that everyone appreciates and expanding access to more postgraduates.

The Research Commons have really taken off at the University of KwaZulu Natal since opening in 2008. “The student reaction has been overwhelming,” said Nora Buchanan, director of libraries. “They begged us to stay open later hours. There are often queues because our current facilities are really too small.”

The law school was the first to build its own Commons, with the medical school to follow shortly. The university is spread over five campuses, following the consolidation of several tertiary institutions into the University of KwaZulu Natal. “Eventually,” said Buchanan, “we will have six Research Commons.”

Gwenda Thomas, director of library services at Rhodes University, explains how the software works. “It links and connects all online catalogues and electronic resources that all consortium universities share. Previously, the content was siloed. You had to run several different searches to find anything.”

“Primo,” she continued, “is very powerful in bringing everything together. It’s almost like Google—very intuitive. Users want that. They really don’t want to know about a lot of very complicated search strategies. The software also allows users to see the results of others who have made similar search requests.”

Among the consortium universities, Stellenbosch University has the newest Research Commons, but the oldest Carnegie relationship in South Africa. In 1912, Andrew Carnegie donated the sum of £6,000 toward the extension and maintenance of the library of the Victoria College. An additional donation of £1,500 from Carnegie Corporation to the University of Stellenbosch in 1938, as well as contributions from alumni, enabled the University to build a new library.

Ellen Tise is the senior director of the university library and recent past president of the International Federation of Libraries, which represents 141 national associations or institutions in 40 countries. Tise has tried to take her Research Commons beyond even the transformative goals set by the consortium. “We have partnered with various departments in the university,” Tise said. “We work with people from the writing lab, student counseling, and also help them with intellectual property rights. We do a lot on how to publish and upload. It’s much more than traditional services.” She adds, “Our Research Commons compares with some of the best. People come from Sweden and other places and say this is the best they’ve seen. This is world class. This is tops.”

There has been one totally unexpected benefit from the Research Commons at Stellenbosch University. Long regarded as the pinnacle of white Afrikaner academia, the new black vice chancellor, Professor Russell Botman, is convinced the project “will become an important part of the ongoing transformation of the Stellenbosch community.” He further explained, “We need to find ways of advancing transformation that don’t make whites feel it is something being done to them. It is much better that transformation be undertaken in a way that is inviting and voluntary. The principles underlying the Research Commons are collaboration, exchanges, synergies, sharing among and between students and among and between universities. It invites everyone involved into the larger world into collaborating with a wider network of South Africans and Africans generally, and to involve them in research aimed at addressing the developmental challenges of the country.”

Elda Nolte is the library’s director of client services and human resources administration. In matters related to Stellenbosch, Nolte coordinates consortium-related training and development efforts. In that capacity, she helps to select Stellenbosch librarians to participate in professional training activities. “A whole world opens up for the librarians,” Nolte said. “I’ve seen that in our own library: people come back with a completely new outlook. The impacts are absolutely profound. People grow so much—even staff who have worked here for many years; the enthusiasm and the growth that’s taken place in people is remarkable, and very gratifying.”

Elevating the Profession of Librarian

For librarians, the opportunity to increase their skill level and enrich their work is particularly important because the library profession in South Africa has become marginalized over the years. “People who choose to become librarians in South Africa often feel there’s nothing better they can do,” said Joan Rapp of the University of Cape Town. “South African librarians are viewed in the same way as nurses here, in distinction from the United States. Nurses in the United States are highly trained and do many things that doctors do, including assisting in operating rooms. But here, unfortunately, those two professions are not well trained,” Rapp continued, “and therefore, they are often not viewed with as much respect as they should be. In the international community, academic librarians have postgraduate degrees. It is a highly regarded profession. If you go into research librarianship you have at least two postgraduate degrees and you work within faculties from day one. By contrast,” she added, “librarianship education in South Africa has been watered down. It’s carried out at the undergraduate level and often results in a technical degree.”

At a time when most South African universities no longer offer degrees for library science, Carnegie Corporation funding has spurred the development of a master’s program for academic librarians from five English speaking African countries: Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Ghana and South Africa. Based at the University of Pretoria, the program is run by Professor Theo J. D. Bothma, head of the Department of Information Science and chair of the School of Information Technology. The school has received 120 applications from across the continent since the program was launched in January 2011. As the University notes, one critical aim of the program is “To empower the next generation of library and information professionals within sub-Saharan African countries with knowledge and skills to apply modern information and communication technologies (ICTs).”

To Bothma, this goal is vital to the development of countries across the African continent because, as he said, “The information technology environment in Africa is changing dramatically. Internet access, for example, is becoming much more widespread. And so, the world’s information resources will become more available to Africa’s academic libraries. The new generation of highly trained research librarians can provide better support for these institutions. And, in this way, international librarianship can also impact on the wider African environment.”

Because a master’s program of this sort does not exist anywhere else in Africa, it serves not only its main purpose of producing exemplary research librarians but also as a model that other institutions can replicate. Said Bothma, “The whole idea is to get a core of librarians who can have widespread impact. They can become champions and catalysts for change in their own environments."

To help bolster development and training for academic librarians in South Africa, Corporation funding has been used to open a research academy in the Western Cape, where about 20 academic librarians spend two weeks in annual seminars and workshops. The country’s leading professors and researchers are brought in to help the librarians learn about international best practices. In the next phase, a smaller group of about nine is selected to visit the United States. The first stop is an intensive two-week stay at the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs at the University of Illinois. Top academic librarians from across the United States are brought in to help with the training. For the visiting South Africans, the experience serves as an introduction to how postgraduate research is done at a major American university. Each person in the group is then matched with a major U.S. university library where they intern for two-and-a-half months.

In several cases, interns returning from the United States describe the experience as having transformed their lives. “I came back with such a wonderful sense of confidence,” said Fiona Still-Drewett, a research librarian at Rhodes University. She added, “The internship changed my life. It was inspiring to see what’s being done in American libraries. The whole experience has led us to be much more confident in how we see our roles going forward.”

Collectively, all these efforts to upgrade university library services and to plan out a more inviting and rewarding path for research librarians seem to be making a measureable difference. At the University of the Witwatersrand, for example, Paik Muswazi, the school’s deputy librarian, said there has been a definite improvement in the status of the library among the academics. “Because of the increased confidence in our facilities and our librarians, we have elevated the role of the library across the university community. We have developed sustainable relationships with the postgraduate office. Our work and our resources are highlighted in all of the workshops they run, which means we must be giving them something of value and that we have moved a step up in terms of standing with our faculties.”

Robert Moropa at the University of Pretoria agrees—and cites Carnegie Corporation’s contributions as an important factor in library advances across the board in terms of South Africa’s libraries. “Going back many years,” Moropa said, “the Corporation has played an enormous role in developing our libraries, not only in terms of money but in terms of support and leverage—for example, in getting the decision-makers to come to the table in terms of investing in South Africa. The fact that we have a public library system can be credited, to a large extent, to the role Carnegie Corporation has played in South Africa.”

Kenneth Walker currently runs Lion House Productions, a South African media company. He has had a distinguished career as a journalist. In the U.S., he worked for ABC News, covering the White House as well as the U.S. Justice Department and also served as a foreign correspondent. Before that, for 13 years he reported for The Washington Star newspaper, which assigned him to South Africa in 1981 where his work earned several of the most prestigious awards in print journalism. In 1985 he won an Emmy for a series of reports he did on South Africa for the ABC news program Nightline.

1. The Bantu Education Act of 1953 was a South African law that codified several aspects of the apartheid system including enforced separation of races in all educational institutions.