JOHANNESBURG – Fire fighters in Cape Town on Monday battled a devastating fire that engulfed the slopes of the city’s famous Table Mountain and destroyed parts of the University of Cape Town library, a devastating blow to the archives of South African history.
Helicopters have thrown water on the area to try to contain the fire, which started Sunday and was likely caused by an abandoned fire, according to South African national park officials. But when the wind came up overnight, the fire spread to the neighborhoods at the base of the mountain, forcing some houses to evacuate on Monday. Monday night officials warned that the fire would likely rage for days.
“Hopefully we can get containment very soon, but to put out the fire, in other words to put it out completely, it will take more than a week,” Philip Prins, fire manager for Table Mountain National Park, told reporters on Monday .
The Devastating Fire is the latest in a series of devastating mountain fires that have swept across the Western Cape Province in recent years. However, the aftermath of that fire was also felt across the region after towers of orange and red flames engulfed the University of Cape Town’s special collections library – home to one of the largest collections of books, films, photographs, and other primary sources documenting Southern African history .
“We are of course devastated by the loss of our special collection in the library. They are things that we cannot replace. It hurts us, it hurts us to see what it looks like in ashes now, ”said Mamokgethi Phakeng, Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, on Monday. “The resources we had there, the collections we had in the library, were not just for us, they were for the continent.”
She added, “It’s a big loss.”
Shortly after 9 p.m. on Sunday evening, Table Mountain residents reported seeing three people lighting small fires on the foothills as the devastating fire raged. Shortly thereafter, police arrested one of these people – a man in his thirties – in connection with the fires, according to Jean-Pierre Smith, a Cape Town councilor who sits on the mayor’s security committee. It is unclear whether the man is linked to the initial fire, added Mr Smith.
The devastating fire started at 9am on Sunday morning on the lower slopes of Devil’s Peak, one of the rugged ridges that are part of Cape Town’s legendary Table Mountain backdrop. Fanned by gusts of fire, the fire engulfed and destroyed a hillside restaurant before descending to the university campus, which is largely built on the slopes of the mountain.
Several buildings, including a historic mill and the school library, were soon on fire, and thick billows of white smoke rolled over the city. No deaths have been reported so far, but at least five firefighters have been injured, officials said.
According to Nombuso Shabalala, a spokeswoman for the university, around 4,000 students were evacuated from the dormitories on Sunday. The university announced on Sunday that it would cease operations until at least Tuesday.
Videos on social media showed dozens of students, some of whom were clutching small bags and storming out of apartment buildings as the fire engulfed the nearby hillside. Busisiwe Mtsweni, a finance and accounting student, was on the university’s upper campus around noon when “everyone panicked,” she said on a phone call.
Sparks from the mountain started small fires between buildings and billows of smoke made breathing difficult as she and her friends stormed to their apartments to retrieve their belongings, she said. Ms. Mtsweni was later evacuated by bus and spent the night in a hotel.
On Monday, evacuated students reported shortages of food and other essential supplies, and volunteers used social media and WhatsApp groups to coordinate deliveries.
According to university officials, a reading room for special collections in the university library had been destroyed by the flame by Sunday evening. The reading room housed portions of the university’s African Studies Collection, including works on Africa and South Africa printed before 1925, hard-to-find volumes in European and African languages, and other rare books, according to Niklas Zimmer, library director at the university.
A school archive curator, Pippa Skotnes, confirmed on Monday that the university’s African film collection, which includes around 3,500 archive films, had been lost in the fire. The archive was one of the largest collections in the world of films made in Africa or containing African content. The library will conduct a full loss assessment once the building is declared safe, university officials said.
While the university had recently made great efforts to digitize the school’s collections, only a “wafer-thin” portion of the archive of the special collections was transferred due to the enormous volume of material and the Ice Age pace of work, said Zimmer. Who directed this program? A single cabinet with microfilm, said Mr. Zimmer, Processing can take “a whole working life”.
University officials said they are confident that most of the archive, which is located on two basement levels below the library and is protected by a system of fire doors, may have been spared. But on Monday, as scholars and librarians waited to learn the extent of the damage, many pointed to the possibility that the basement might have been flooded during the fire fighting.
“Very unique things are probably gone,” said Sibusiso Nkomo, a doctor of history. Student who is a member of an interdisciplinary archival research unit on campus.
“We have lost valuable history that tells us where we are from,” he added, noting that the mood among his colleagues was “traumatized and devastated”.
Several other campus buildings were damaged.
For many in the Western Cape, images of the burning mountain were reminiscent of other major mountain fires that have devastated the province in recent years. In 2015, four days of fires broke out on the outskirts of Cape Town, destroying around 15,000 acres of land. Two years later, another devastating fire broke out in a coastal town in the province, Knysna, in which at least four people were killed and about 10,000 were forced to evacuate their homes.
The massive forest fires in the mountains were fed by a flammable mix of fire-prone vegetation from southern Africa – known as fynbos – and particularly flammable tree species such as gum trees and pines that colonists imported into the Western Cape and contributed to the accidental spread of fires.
In order to prevent uncontrollable forest fires, many ecologists have warned that national park officials must carry out prescribed burns more frequently. But in Cape Town, where the edges of the city have spread to the foothills of the mountain, mandatory burns are particularly difficult, and park officials have encountered resistance from residents who fear their homes may be destroyed.
“If there isn’t a fire, all of the vegetation is just sitting there and it’s only a matter of time,” said Dr. Alanna Rebelo, an ecology postdoctoral fellow at Stellenbosch University in the Western Cape. “We had this huge bonfire just waiting to be passed.”
