Using Books to Do Things: Black Library Services in South Africa from the 1930s Through the 1990s

This study explores how libraries mediated interactions between black readers and texts in twentieth century South Africa. By situating libraries as vital infrastructures of reading, I critically examine how librarians tried to build the habit of reading within black communities. Beginning in the 1930s with the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s intervention in the South African system of libraries, I show how professionally trained librarians struggled in vain to establish their services among black readers. I argue that this system stagnated in the 1950s because librarians’ professional training prevented them from understanding black reading preferences and practices. The failure of the state system opened space for experimentation with different types of library service by librarians and readers alike. This occurred in unlikely places, like the bantustans, and by unlikely people, such as black librarians trained and supervised by apartheid librarians. I highlight such examples as a way to break free of the politics of anti-apartheid struggle that forced people’s lives into binary categories of resistance or collaboration. Instead I draw out how librarians and readers experimented with different ways to use books that were rooted in local information needs rather than national politics. I follow this experimentation through the early 1990s when the transition to democracy undermined an emergent alternative library and information system. This dissertation is animated by two fundamental questions: what was the purpose of library services in twentieth century South Africa, and what did those services have to offer black readers?