"Forest fires raging in South Africa’s Table Mountain National Park have reached the University of Cape Town (UCT), and gutted the reading room of its main library, which houses irreplaceable documents and records from the country’s past." Source: Nature.
"Amid apocalyptic scenes on 18 April, fire tore through part of the 200-year-old university’s campus on the slopes of Table Mountain, torching the library building and destroying a plant research unit."
Comment: The Jagger Library, named after the British politician and businessman John William Jagger, a major benefactor of the UCT libraries in the early 1900s, held thousands of irreplaceable books and manuscripts, including the first Xhosa-language dictionary, compiled by the Scottish missionary, John Bennies, in 1823, and copies of the first Xhosa-language newspapers published by missionaries in the 1870s.
According to early reports, the blaze which engulfed the library may have been started by a cooking fire which got out of control. Cape Town apparently has a major problem with homeless people sleeping on the streets and in the surrounding countryside. It now looks like the blaze was intentionally set, however. According to Cape Town's Eyewitness News, one man was arrested six days ago after authorities received reports that several people were moving through the bush, starting fires.
The destruction of the Jagger Library is only one calamity in a series of disasters to hit South Africa recently. South African Airways went bankrupt; the South African Post Office is "on the brink of collapse;" the South African Road Accident Fund is bankrupt; and the Johannesburg General Hospital suffered major damage in a fire earlier this month. These are all obvious symptoms of the social disintegration taking place as South Africa continues its decades-long and all too predictable collapse into the Third World.
Related: Why did it take the ANC so long to destroy South Africa?