NDUMISO NGCOBO | Silence is not violence when you’re labouring in the library

I grew up in a bygone era when the principle of maintaining silence in a library was sacrosanct — and it was a hard-and-fast rule.

As a natural-born klutz, being in a library has always been an angst-inducing experience for me. I’d invariably trip and send a pile of books clattering to the ground. This would be followed by a stern ‘Shush!’ from one of the librarians, who back in the 1980s were stern, bespectacled aunties with hair tied up in a bun.

Anyway, my point is that silence in the library is just another relic of an increasingly distant past that fuddy-duddies like me are desperately clinging onto.

This columnist was groomed to be a voracious reader by his mother, Rosemary Ngcobo, who taught him his letters by the age of three. In those days, it was thought that to write well, you needed to read books — and thousands of them at that.

Of course, in the age of AI there is a whole plethora of published works written by people who proudly proclaim they haven’t ever read anything.

A library is for my kind what the small intestine is to a tapeworm

In any event, for those of us who began our writing careers on typewriters, our natural habitat has always been the library. A library is for my kind what the small intestine is to a tapeworm.

In the first 20 years of my life, I must have spent at least 5,000 hours inside these sacred spaces, and they have over the decades provided a desperately needed sanctuary from the drudgery of conventional tourist activities during my travels.

This past week, I have been working from my family home in the Valley of a Thousand Hills. Despite all the smugness among the chattering classes about what a good job the electricity minister and Eskom have done in resolving the electricity crisis, the residents of KwaNyuswa hardly ever enjoy two weeks of uninterrupted power. Many technical explanations are put forward for this state of affairs, but the upshot of the crisis is that last week I found myself spending six hours a day in the Hillcrest library.

I must commend eThekwini municipality for such an excellent, well-maintained facility, and it would also be remiss of me not to rave about the library’s efficient and helpful staff. While I was working there on Monday, I needed some information about the history of jazz and was referred to an appropriate volume in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

However, five minutes after I took my seat, eager to attack my deadlines, the silence of the space was shattered by a loud shriek. I peeked around a bookshelf and saw two librarians howling with laughter. I’ve had my own fair share of laughing fits during funerals, so I did not at first make much of their antics.

As no-one else seemed to have a problem with the noise levels, I must accept that I am the one with the problem

Unfortunately the expression of mirth was not an isolated incident. For the next six hours, my ears were assaulted by the kind of clamorous chatter I normally associate with domestic workers travelling home on the 4pm bus.

I looked at the other library users for signs of outrage and realised most of them were drowning out the din with an assortment of aural devices. If these regulars were so nonchalant about the noise, complaining didn’t seem a great idea.

I consoled myself with the thought that maybe it was just a Monday thing and the staff had a lot of weekend gossip to get through. But I was back on Wednesday and immediately saw this was most definitely not the case. If anything, the ambience had degenerated to the rowdiness level of Warwick Triangle.

At some point, I got up to check just how many people were making so much infernal noise and was astonished to see it was just three individuals, led by a somewhat stout, bespectacled lady with her hair tied up in a bun. Oh, but how the librarian of my youth has morphed!

I am proud to report that by the time I returned to the library on Friday and Saturday, I was starting to adjust to the intermittent shrieks of laughter and raucous conversation. As no-one else seemed to have a problem with the noise levels, I must accept that I am the one with the problem. Librarians who pour scorn on the erstwhile code of silence are just part of the cohort that includes JMPD officers who overtake on double barrier lines, chat on their cellphones and clip their seatbelts behind them while they are driving.