Libraries Apart: National Libraries in South Africa's Homelands

During the late 1970s and early 1980s national libraries or national library services were established in South Africa's ten homelands as a by-product of the apartheid policy. These libraries are characterized by a fairly uniform legal and organizational structure known as the ‘Vink-Frylinck model’. An evaluation of what the national libraries have achieved, based on annual reports and published statistics, indicates that most have made only modest progress. This can be attributed to a lack of qualified staff, money and space and, more fundamentally, to certain weaknesses in the Vink-Frylinck model. At root the problems must be attributed to the homelands policy which, in the case of the homeland libraries, had the effect of isolating them in a depressing cycle of inadequacy and lack of recognition while insulating the maily White librarians in mainstream South Africa from the realities of rural African librarianship.