Source: https://mg.co.za/
What do you do when you have too many books? (Actually, you can’t have too many books; it’s storage that’s the issue, especially for bibliophiles of the peripatetic persuasion.)
Sylvia Arthur’s solution was to start a library.
When Arthur, who grew up in London, was working in Brussels in 2011, she would send boxes of books to her mother’s house in Kumasi, Ghana, for safekeeping.
Fast-forward to 2017, and Arthur had moved to Accra, post Brexit (for obvious reasons). She came across an empty floor on top of a pharmacy her mother frequented; a day later, she had signed a lease. And so the Library for Africa and the African Diaspora was born.
Sylvia Arthur Sylvia Arthur
In creating a home for her book collection, Arthur was set on the idea of a library rather than, say, a bookshop. “Every time I would visit my mom, I would see all these books just sitting there. I felt guilty about it. I thought: ‘It’s a waste when there are people who could have access to these books’.”
If access is one of the library’s founding principles, cultural relevance is another. The lion’s share of books are by authors of Africa and the diaspora — and the African writers are particularly popular with patrons.
“There is a real need and desire to feel connected to Africa through books, because obviously it’s not so easy to travel within Africa, which is a shame,” Arthur says. “And so people who come to the library feel like they want to read books by their fellow Africans; they feel like they want to travel to those African countries through those books. They also recognise the cultural context in a lot of these books, and I think they appreciate that.” Continue reading