Wits opens Phiroshaw Camay Library
The new facility boasts a collection of 8 000 books from Camay, an activist, unionist and champion of democracy who was once denied access to a library.
Wits University added a new library to its suite with the opening of the Phiroshaw Camay Library at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS), located at the Parktown Management Campus. This rich resource for students, researchers and civil society has been bequeathed to the centre by his life partner, Anne Gordon.
Camay, who passed in October 2016 at age 69, was a lifelong activist and humanitarian who is said to have made an immense contribution to the development of democracy in South Africa through his leadership pre-and-post democracy.
Described as a principled, humble intellectual giant by speakers, Camay started his career as a teacher before becoming a librarian in 1966 for the Johannesburg City Council, where he eventually coordinated 17 libraries in African, Coloured and Indian townships. Ironically, when he registered to study for a Diploma in Public Management in 1976 at the then Graduate School of Business Administration (Wits), Camay had to apply to the dean for special permission to use Wits libraries due to the segregation laws of the time.
Gordon teased that this new library can be seen as poetic justice adding that Camay would be happy that his book collection will be used in the furtherance of democracy, equality, development and sustainability in South Africa and elsewhere.
Guest speaker, South African editor and journalist Ferial Haffajee shared how she, as a young, labour journalist benefited from his patience and piercing questions that nurtured rigorous debate and tolerance for alternative views. “What a gift to a young person and an example of how to consider mentoring and sharing knowledge.”
She hailed his generation for raising many of the ideas of how to mediate the destructive inequality of the country and the world including the minimum wage, political unionism, and social solidarity, among others.
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