Support For Kaiyamo On ‘Old Books Out’

HAVING missed out on your “Political Perspective” of Friday 13 February (maybe because of the date?), I regret that responding three weeks later is a bit lame.

While agreeing with most of the sentiments expressed in that particular column, you completely miss the point on the issue of “old books” that Kaiyamo referred to. You say, “A book is a book is a book” – no, unfortunately not.Not at all.If you take the trouble to look into school and public libraries countrywide, you will find plenty of outdated reference and irrelevant items no one wants to read.And books that have been read so many times that they are disintegrating.This is what Kaiyamo referred to in his statement.And he knows what he is talking about, because the Library Council has been travelling throughout the country to really inspect libraries on the spot, and to rely on its own evidence and not on consultancy reports and misleading statistics of numbers of books.After independence, the Namibian Education Library Service embarked on a programme (with Swedish aid, mostly) to supply all schools in the country with at least a basic library.”Formerly advantaged” schools were in the beginning left out of this programme, because it seemed that they had well-stocked libraries.Until it was discovered that they were now becoming disadvantaged – rows full of books in mostly Afrikaans, while they were supposed to be teaching in English; outdated encyclopaedias, pre-1990 atlases where you could locate none of the new states in Eastern Europe, etc.We could easily stock our libraries with thousands of volumes of the works of Kim Il Sung, American fundamentalist garbage, “scientology” and apartheid school textbooks.And irrelevant items from overseas book donors who think anything with printed letters is good enough for a third world country.No, thank you.Is that what we want our young readers to feed on as their first and foremost diet? A book is not just a book.Not that we should just throw everything away.Some colleagues and myself have sorted through mountains of dusty old schoolbooks in the Ministry’s storerooms to make sure that at least two copies of each are preserved in the National Library for the record and for future research into ideology transmission.Books with statements like “Duitsland het 18 soldate onder kaptein Kurt von Francois na SWA gestuur om die vrede te help bewaar” (Geskiedenis vir skole in SWA/Namibie 5, published in Windhoek 1985).I mean, really! And readers do still believe in this kind of crap they have been offered at school – see the letter by Japie van Wyk in the Namibian of 6 February on the 1904 war.You end with the statement: “We should hang onto and cherish the older books, for their value only increases with age, for research and other purposes.”Agreed.If we had a first edition of Orwell’s “Animal Farm” (published in 1945) or “1984” (published in 1948), we would give them an honorary place in the National Library.Regrettably, we haven’t, and I hope we do continue buying new editions of these classics for school and public libraries as the old copies are read to pieces.The National Archives also owns and keeps Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”, but I wouldn’t recommend that one for the school libraries, and hope nobody would call it censorship!Werner Hillebrecht Windhoek (another member of the Namibia Library and Information Council)NOTE: I think you have indirectly supported my argument that ‘a book is a book is a book’! Even if books, in your view, are ‘fundamentalist garbage’ or outdated encyclopaedias, or propagandistic in nature, they still have a place, if only for researchers and those interested in the subject in question.Perhaps Kaiyamo should have explained himself better when he recommended tossing out ‘old books’.You admit to keeping apartheid textbooks in the archives – quite rightly so, or how else can historians write about our history? Even a book like ‘Mein Kampf’, Hitler’s ‘bible’, is surely necessary for those studying Nazism.Surely the value of ‘old books’ lies not only in being collector’s items or the fact that they are ‘first editions’? Anyhow, don’t you think that it would be of more benefit to try and instil a reading culture in this country, rather than toss out ‘old books’? – EdYou say, “A book is a book is a book” – no, unfortunately not.Not at all.If you take the trouble to look into school and public libraries countrywide, you will find plenty of outdated reference and irrelevant items no one wants to read.And books that have been read so many times that they are disintegrating.This is what Kaiyamo referred to in his statement.And he knows what he is talking about, because the Library Council has been travelling throughout the country to really inspect libraries on the spot, and to rely on its own evidence and not on consultancy reports and misleading statistics of numbers of books.After independence, the Namibian Education Library Service embarked on a programme (with Swedish aid, mostly) to supply all schools in the country with at least a basic library.”Formerly advantaged” schools were in the beginning left out of this programme, because it seemed that they had well-stocked libraries.Until it was discovered that they were now becoming disadvantaged – rows full of books in mostly Afrikaans, while they were supposed to be teaching in English; outdated encyclopaedias, pre-1990 atlases where you could locate none of the new states in Eastern Europe, etc.We could easily stock our libraries with thousands of volumes of the works of Kim Il Sung, American fundamentalist garbage, “scientology” and apartheid school textbooks.And irrelevant items from overseas book donors who think anything with printed letters is good enough for a third world country.No, thank you.Is that what we want our young readers to feed on as their first and foremost diet? A book is not just a book.Not that we should just throw everything away.Some colleagues and myself have sorted through mountains of dusty old schoolbooks in the Ministry’s storerooms to make sure that at least two copies of each are preserved in the National Library for the record and for future research into ideology transmission.Books with statements like “Duitsland het 18 soldate onder kaptein Kurt von Francois na SWA gestuur om die vrede te help bewaar” (Geskiedenis vir skole in SWA/Namibie 5, published in Windhoek 1985).I mean, really! And readers do still believe in this kind of crap they have been offered at school – see the letter by Japie van Wyk in the Namibian of 6 February on the 1904 war.You end with the statement: “We should hang onto and cherish the older books, for their value only increases with age, for research and other purposes.”Agreed.If we had a first edition of Orwell’s “Animal Farm” (published in 1945) or “1984” (published in 1948), we would give them an honorary place in the National Library.Regrettably, we haven’t, and I hope we do continue buying new editions of these classics for school and public libraries as the old copies are read to pieces.The National Archives also owns and keeps Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”, but I wouldn’t recommend that one for the school libraries, and hope nobody would call it censorship!Werner Hillebrecht Windhoek (another member of the Namibia Library and Information Council)NOTE: I think you have indirectly supported my argument that ‘a book is a book is a book’! Even if books, in your view, are ‘fundamentalist garbage’ or outdated encyclopaedias, or propagandistic in nature, they still have a place, if only for researchers and those interested in the subject in question.Perhaps Kaiyamo should have explained himself better when he recommended tossing out ‘old books’.You admit to keeping apartheid textbooks in the archives – quite rightly so, or how else can historians write about our history? Even a book like ‘Mein Kampf’, Hitler’s ‘bible’, is surely necessary for those studying Nazism.Surely the value of ‘old books’ lies not only in being collector’s items or the fact that they are ‘first editions’? Anyhow, don’t you think that it would be of more benefit to try and instil a reading culture in this country, rather than toss out ‘old books’? – Ed