African adventures in library consulting

In early 2015, while I was still serving as director of library services at Ambrose University in Calgary, I was invited by The Langham Partnership to become the library consultant for the Engagement de l’Afrique (EA) initiative. The primary goal of EA was to enhance the research culture at three seminaries in francophone Africa offering doctoral programs. This role would include visiting seminaries in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Côte d’Ivoire, the Central African Republic and Cameroon; interviewing librarians and administrators; attending annual EA meetings; and making recommendations to EA. It became part of my life for the next seven years.

In September 2015, I flew to the site of my first assessment, l’Université Shalom de Bunia (USB) in Bunia, DRC. After a couple of days of interviews, the librarian took me on a tour of the other academic libraries in town. At 30,000 volumes, USB’s collection was by far the largest, and the USB library was the only one that had begun to automate its catalogue. It was clearly the city’s flagship library.

Saturday was a free day, and I hoped to do some birding. A faculty member arranged a trip for the library staff and me to a Mbuti (Pygmy) village in the Ituri Forest. The Bambuti took us on a hike, but it ended (birdlessly) in a downpour, and I quickly discovered that banana leaves may make effective umbrellas for Mbuti but not for this 6’6” “albino Tutsi.”

Côte d’Ivoire

I was off again in January 2016, this time to Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, site of la Faculté de Théologie Évangélique de L’Alliance Chrétienne (FATÉAC).

While at FATÉAC, I was asked to give a chapel talk in French about my work as a librarian. The congregation sat expressionless, and the few laughs I got were from an American missionary, but I later heard that the host librarian had said, “Finally, people were able to find out what we do!”

From Abidjan, I travelled to Yaoundé, Cameroon, the extension site of la Faculté de Théologie Évangélique de Bangui Seminary (FATEB). In 2013, I had served on the team that established the site.

All of the librarians I interviewed were conscientious and dedicated, but only one of the four had the required master’s in library and information science, and one had only a high school diploma. Their lack of facility in English left them out of touch with about half of the books in their collections and with most of the theological content available online. I recommended that EA provide funding to rectify both deficiencies, since both were also hindering the librarians from making the identity switch appropriate to a culture of research, from being (and being perceived as) administrators and custodians to being assertive partners with faculty in research and teaching.

I also discovered that both librarians and faculty had to contend with frequent power outages and unstable internet connections, which made access to essential theological databases difficult – not that most of the institutions could afford them. Nor was there secure off-site storage for electronic data. So, four more recommendations for my report.

I’d noticed that every librarian had an office copy of The Librarian’s Manual, a primer on library administration for libraries in developing countries. Did it have enough promise as a reference book and staff-training aid to warrant translation into French? I would have to wait until our first group meeting to find out.

Librarian’s Manual

That meeting took place during the first EA scholars’ colloquium, which was held in Abidjan in 2017. Like the other four annual colloquia (Bunia 2018; Abidjan 2019; Bangui 2020 and Bunia 2022), it was attended by both the scholars and the librarians of the participating institutions. Things started badly for me: the librarians expressed displeasure that I had neglected to show them my reports before passing them on to their administrators. I also struggled to express myself in French, and became impatient (did it show?) when my African colleagues paused to compose their thoughts before speaking. Thank God, I eventually regained my equilibrium and was able to share in the librarians’ joy at finally meeting together. We ended up slightly revising the recommendations in my report, and then met with the seminaries’ administrators to discuss them. The administrators later adopted the recommendations, thereby making them an official part of the EA agenda.

Our discussion on translating The Librarian’s Manual came to an abrupt end when one of the librarians got up, took out his smartphone, and showed us a photo of about 15 librarians at a conference in his home city: “These people have no training; the manual is the very thing they need.” Case closed: we would translate the entire manual and publish it in paper format. I began working on the translation (with the help of Google Translate) almost as soon as I got home. Once I’d finished a chapter, I’d send it to the EA librarians for their editorial suggestions, then to the publisher, Langham Publishing, for final scrutiny by a native French speaker. Finally, at the end of March 2022, after almost five years of grinding toil (my specialty), it was all over but the printing.

Librarian meetings

After Abidjan 2017, the librarians’ meetings, which had always been held in conjunction with EA’s scholars’ colloquia, became seminars on topics of interest and open-source library software. We reported progress made towards achieving our goals, and met with the administrators to discuss our reports. Slow, but inexorable, progress was, and continues to be, the order of the day. One of our biggest success stories was a librarian who gained facility in English and acquired a degree in library science during the course of the program.

No colloquium meetings were held on Saturdays, and so the librarians would hire a car and driver and head off to see the local sights. These included a Pygmy encampment in the eastern DRC (2018); the largest church in the world, the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, in Yamoussoukro, Côte d’Ivoire (2019); Boali Falls, about 95 km northwest of Bangui, Central African Republic (2020); and a restaurant overlooking Lake Albert a couple of hours’ drive from Bunia, DRC (2022).

On Sundays, we attended at least two French-language church services. Sometimes two or three choirs would sing (not at the same time!), and the harmonies were beautiful. We were always seated at the front, near the band, and the sound system was usually cranked up to the max, so I always brought along earplugs. If I didn’t find the sermon captivating, I would mentally prepare a brief greeting from my home church and my home institution, just in case we, as visitors, were suddenly called upon to introduce ourselves.

The final librarians’ meetings took place in June 2022 at USB and included librarians from across Ituri province. At the closing ceremony, I gave a five-minute presentation on the history of the translation of La Gestion d’Une Bibliothèque, after which the province’s deputy minister of education presented a copy to each participating library.

This was likely the last time I would ever see any of the EA librarians. We’d worked hard together, enjoyed one another’s company, worshipped together, shared both enjoyable and difficult experiences, and now it was all over. Well, not quite. We now have a WhatsApp group through which we still keep in touch.

After the meetings at USB, a representative of the lead funding agency informed me that she had engaged one of the EA librarians to serve as the library consultant for a project in South Sudan. Things had come full circle.

USB Today

By Maaike VanderMeer

Last December, l’Université Shalom de Bunia (USB) announced that Mr. Unen Uchanda Jean Baptiste, Director of the Library, is working with two other higher education institutions in north-eastern Congo to “revitalize the culture of reading and modernize university libraries in order to align them with international standards.” Unen is working with l’Université Bâtissons l’Espoir au Centre de l’Afrique in Dungu and l’Université de l’Unité Nationale et Gestion des Ressources du Congo in Isiro to implement the Dewey Decimal Classification, update software and connect them to global virtual libraries.

Unen said, “Reading is not only an academic act; it is a foundation of understanding, analysis and action to transform society.”

In November, the university was awarded a Diploma of Merit by the Famille Amani Universelle, an organization that promotes peace in conflict areas. At the event, the university’s rector mentioned that in the early 2000’s, the Southard campus (pictured above) “had welcomed many displaced people from various ethnic communities, who had found a place of harmonious and brotherly coexistence.”

Direct quotations translated from French.

Photo: Campus Southard of USB. (Photo credit: Wesley McKnight, CC4.0).