"The books were just the props": Public Libraries and Contested Space in the Cape Flats Townships in the 1980s

This article examines the relationship between public libraries and social change in South Africa during the 1980s. It focuses on libraries in selected townships on the Cape Flats. It concludes that debates about the public library’s success or failure as an instrument of social change cannot overlook the idea of contested space in which the live discussion, debate, and circulation of ideas precludes and includes the use of books and libraries. Introduction The relationship between public libraries and social change is still unclear. There is Jesse Shera’s (1949, p. 248) early view that public libraries tend to follow rather than create social change, and then there are more ambitious views found in journals like Information for Social Change. In this article, this relationship is examined in an analysis of public libraries in South Africa during a period of dramatic social change. Much like the 1940s that ended in a surprising election victory for the National Party and apartheid in spite of alternative political futures, the 1980s also ended with unforeseen events that led to the first democratic elections in 1994.1 There were several imagined possibilities for a future South Africa in that decade. Nothing was inevitable at the time, but the hardening of attitudes and lines of division in the 1980s make the anti-apartheid narrative compelling. The United Democratic Front coordinated hundreds of autonomous organizations and thousands of activists who opposed state reforms and resisted the institutions and policies of the apartheid regime. It also promoted the profile and underground structures of the African National Congress.2 As the liberation struggle intensified, the primary antagonists consolidated LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 55, No. 3, Winter 2007 (“Libraries in Times of War, Revolution, and Social Change,” edited by W. Boyd Rayward and Christine Jenkins), pp. 698–715 © 2007 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois “The books were just the props”: Public Libraries and Contested Space in the Cape Flats Townships in the 1980s