Living in what he calls a “tough” urban neighborhood, Jason Martins dreams of a peaceful life on a farm. For now though, he is willing to settle for the library.
“I like that it’s a quiet space,” says the agricultural economics major. On a frosty autumn morning, he is among a dozen people in the reading room of the Johannesburg City Library. The rows of tables flanked by bookshelves and old map cabinets offer a refuge from the grind of daily life in the city outside, which faces high unemployment, decaying infrastructure, and chronic water and power outages.
But until March, the library’s heavy bronze doors had been locked for five years – its 1.5 million books on one side, the city’s 5.8 million residents on the other.
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For five years, Johannesburg’s central library sat closed, a symbol for many of the city’s decay and poor governance. Its recent reopening has sparked hope for a turnaround.
Its reopening is “symbolic of a turnaround,” says Yunus Chamda, program coordinator for an activist organization called the Joburg Crisis Alliance.
And not just for the library, he says. For Johannesburg, too.
“Free our books”
The city government “stepped up and listened to the voice of the people,” says Mr. Chamda, referencing the pressure activists put on the city to reopen the historic institution, which has existed in its current location since 1935.
Last May, Mr. Chamda stood in the square outside, joining a small crowd of demonstrators clutching signs that read “Open our library doors and free our books” and “Libraries are not a luxury.”
The library, which covers a full city block of downtown, had been closed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The city government claimed the nearly century-old building was undergoing urgent repairs, but as the timeline for those repairs dragged on, many sensed a bigger problem.
For nearly a decade, Johannesburg had been ruled by an unstable coalition of bickering political parties. In the first four years of the library’s closure, the mayor had changed seven times.
“There’s constant turnover, not just in the mayor’s office, but in all the departments [of city government] as well,” explains David Fleminger, chair of the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation, who spoke at the protest that day. “So you can’t get any continuity … [and] as a result, things keep getting worse.”
For many, the central library’s closure was particularly painful because it was a place that had once represented Johannesburg’s promise.
“For people of my generation … there’s quite an emotional attachment to the Joburg City Library,” says Mr. Chamda, who is in his 60s.
In 1974, the Johannesburg City Library became the first in the country to allow patrons of all races, according to the city. “It was the one place that we had access to … where you could get information; it was a safe place where you could go and study,” he remembers.
Another protester in the crowd was pensioner Stanley Mokaiwa. He was arrested in 1984 for distributing banned literature, he says, and spent nine months held without charge in a cell a half mile from the city library. “All they gave me to read was the Bible,” he says. “I read it from Genesis to the last page.”
Decades later, in 2012, Mr. Mokaiwa helped form a book club at the library, a multigenerational weekly gathering that endured until the institution’s closure in 2020. Members didn’t read the same book, but instead shared recommendations with each other. As a result, Mr. Mokaiwa learned to devour all kinds of texts, from fantasy novels to self-help books.
“This library has an ancient life,” he says. “The libraries we have in the townships are far from it.”
A first step
The library’s reopening in March was partial, but Mr. Chamda, who has a background in local government, says he hopes it will spark further improvements in the city.
“If you do one block right, then it encourages the next and the next,” he says.
Still, the inner city’s challenges are apparent. In the square outside the library, homeless people lie on the cracked pavement below empty office buildings plastered with “to let” signs.
“People used to play chess out on the square – it was so lively,” says Brian Mugdza, who sits inside the library leafing through “The Four Loves” by C.S. Lewis. “Things have changed. The city is not inviting to young people anymore. It feels unsafe,” he says.
The library has played witness to the inner city’s woes. Two years ago, a few blocks from here, a city street snapped in half during evening rush hour, sending people and cars flying into the air and injuring dozens. The culprit was a gas explosion, and the street remains closed to this day.
A month after that explosion, a mile in the other direction, a fire in an overcrowded building killed at least 76 people. Even inside the library itself, chronic water shortages sometimes force the building to close early, according to regulars.
“We can’t try and turn the clock back [but] the central business district still needs to be functional, productive, and serve the community,” says Mr. Fleminger.
He hopes pressure from citizen-led groups – like those who advocated for the reopening of the library – will “encourage the city to do their jobs and get a move on.”
Next up for the Heritage Foundation, he says, is the Johannesburg Art Gallery. With more than 10,000 pieces in its collection, it is one of the largest public art collections on the continent. But the building has been in severe decline for over a decade.
“Without urgent intervention,” Mr. Fleminger says, “the artworks will be lost.”
Special correspondent Ryan Lenora Brown contributed reporting.
