Menings | Opinion > Briewe | Letters > SpeakEasy > Cultural heritage? Cultural heritage?

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Archie Dick - 2007-04-30

As is the case for the other official languages of South Africa, I could not find Afrikaans on Christopher Moseley's recent Encyclopedia of the world's endangered languages. But the NALN issue, of course, raises a bigger concern. And what is happening there today could happen at places like NELM, the National Archives and the National Library tomorrow. The concern is that these national treasures now have to prove their value to a new breed of managers captivated by privatisation, re-engineering and other capitalist-oriented attacks on the public sphere. I recently heard that valuable 19th-century South African newspaper and magazine indexes were abandoned when the National Library of South Africa's publishing programme was cut. Brave individuals had to rescue discarded index cards and safeguard them in their homes.

Perhaps the time has come for South Africans to ask what should be done about all our cultural heritage institutions to stop this madness.

Archie Dick