Literacy, Libraries, and Consciousness: The Provision of Library Services for Blacks in South Africa in the Pre-Apartheid Era

During the early years of the twentieth century an increasingly politicized black elite emerged in South Africa in the context of a growing segregationist climate. A critical feature and weapon of this elite was literacy. While black intellectuals regarded unrestricted access to libraries as a necessity, missionaries, white liberals, and, ultimately, the state considered the question of reading and library provision for blacks in the light of a perceived threat of radicalism from the black elite. Efforts to develop library facilities for blacks were to receive official sanction and support only after the role of libraries had been clearly defined as part of a wider context of social control. Under apartheid the primacy of control over service in the provision of library facilities for blacks would become systemic.