Africa

Devil’s Peak wildfire hits historic Jagger Library

Damon Leff By |

CAPE TOWN, South Africa – On the morning of April 18, an uncontrolled wildfire on Devil’s Peak, on Cape Town’s Table Mountain, gutted part of the Rhodes Memorial restaurant, threatening the campus of the University of Cape Town’s upper campus. Students living on campus were evacuated.

Fire trucks on the Hospital Bend interchange going into the City Bowl to fight the Table Mountain fire – Image credit: Discott – CC BY-SA 4.0

Fanned by strong wind and supported by four helicopters that waterbombed fire lines, 250 firefighters from the City of Cape Town, Table Mountain National Park, and those working on Fire and Volunteer Wildfire Services continued to battle the blaze on the ground until the following day.

By the morning of April 19, the fire spread on campus, completely gutting Mostert’s Mill, and UCT’s historic Jagger Library containing UCT’s 65,000 volume African Studies collection and African Film collection, rare archived material from the 19th and 20th centuries, rare and antiquarian books, newspapers the Cape Argus (from 1857) and the Cape Times (from 1876), periodicals and journals, as well as unpublished collections of African folklore.


The loss of the contents of Jagger Library is staggering since the collection included Indigenous works from the whole of sub-Saharan Africa as well as national imprints from all over Africa in addition to works published in Europe and North America.

 

UCT described the Special Collections on African Studies Book Collection, in part, as:

The collections are especially strong in gender studies, media studies, HIV/AIDS issues, and debates around the character of African studies as a discipline. There is an important collection on Southern African languages, donated to the university in the 1950s, which includes religious texts and school textbooks as well as dictionaries and grammars. Some of the titles in these collections, published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are extremely rare. The specialist book collections include a Kipling and Antarctic collection.

The Jagger Library’s rare and antiquarian collection contained “books and journals about, and representative of, humankind’s intellectual and cultural development in the broadest sense, emphasising the book arts and the history, development and future of the book.”

The library listed its oldest book as a volume “by the Roman historian and moralist of the first century C.E., Valerius Maximus, entitled Facta et dicta memorabilium, published in Mainz by Peter Schöffer in 1471. Schöffer, together with Joachim Fust, apparently took over Gutenberg’s press.”

Also lost to the fire, “a copy of the first book to contain photographic illustrations, William Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature, published in 1844.”

Additionally, the library also contained an extensive pamphlet and ephemera collection of almost 26,000 titles, that included 800 rare or old titles that were published before 1925, in the Black African Advancement Programme (BAAP) collection. The collection of posters included roughly 1,700 items, mostly from the fight against apartheid, but it also featured a selection of Mozambican posters from the post-independence period.

Apparently, one small room of the library was spared:

Mostert’s Mill was the oldest surviving windmill in South Africa, constructed by Gysbert van Reenen in 1796 on the “Welgelegen” farm. The farm was later bought by Cecil Rhodes and bequeathed to the country on his death.

The remains of Mostert’s Mill – Image credit: Discott – CC BY-SA 4.0

By midday schools and homes in the Vredehoek area, Ministerial Estate, Disa Park, and Mountain View complex were evacuated as a precaution. The fire affected more than 400 hectares of mountainside forest and fynbos. Fynbos is a group of endemic species of flowering plants – shrubs and trees, found only on the southern tip of Africa.

The fire was reported to have been largely contained by 3 pm on Monday. Hotspots remain below the University of Cape Town (UCT), above Vredehoek, University Estate, and Walmer Estate, and along Philip Kgosana Drive.

Four firefighters were hospitalized for injuries. No other injuries or fatalities were reported.

Residents suffering from allergies, asthma, and other respiratory conditions are urged to stay indoors.

Cape Town Safety and Security spokesperson Jean-Pierre Smith reported that a 35-year-old man has been arrested and questioned by police on suspected arson-related charges.

News 24 reported that Fredrick Mhangazo appeared before the court on Tuesday morning, and will remain in custody until at least April 28 while authorities verify the information he gave before granting bail.

According to reports of statements made to the court by pro bono attorney, Shaun Balram, Mhangazo arrived in South Africa in 2013 and had applied for a visa to study Information Technology at Cape Town, which he did not receive.

Balram stated Mhangazo lived in a plastic structure at the base of the mountain and had lost all of his belongings to the fire. He also stated that Mhangazo was being wrongly accused.

At this stage, the investigation has not concluded that the fire was started deliberately.

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