Years of dawn bus rides and late returns shaped a career of service, mentorship and quiet impact.
Peter Luhanga.
- For seven years, Lungelwa Ciliba commuted from Khayelitsha for two hours each way in order to serve the Dunoon community.
- Ciliba helped establish and run the library from 2018 through its 2019 launch, until today.
- Having forged strong relationships between the library and the community, she is taking a post closer to home.
After years of enduring a four-hour round trip from Khayelitsha to Dunoon, the founding librarian of the township’s R40 million state of the art library is finally heading home.
Lungelwa Ciliba has secured a transfer to a branch closer to where she lives, a move she calls overdue, earned, and necessary.
Next Tuesday will be her last day at Dunoon Library, where she has helped schoolchildren research projects, guided elders through SmartCape terminals, and watched first time readers leave clutching books like treasure.
“I’ve requested a transfer to go work near home even though I love it here, but it is too far. I spent two hours coming to work another two hours going back home in Khayelitsha,” said senior ibrarian, Ciliba, who is 54-years old and a mother of three children aged, 14, 17 and 19.
Ciliba was working at a municipal library in Kuyasa, Khayelitsha when she spotted a vacancy for a senior librarian. The advert did not say where the post was based, but she applied anyway and got it after interviews. She was appointed senior librarian in Dunoon in 2018, and she says she was thrilled because it meant growth, a new challenge and real movement in her career.
Her career has stretched across public and academic libraries. From 1999 until 2008 she worked as a librarian at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business. From 2008 to 2015 she was stationed as librarian at the City of Cape Town’s legal department.
She says when she took up the Dunoon post in 2018 she and her team worked behind closed doors in an empty new building. They set up shelves, arranged study sections, and mapped the layout long before doors opened to the public in April 2019.
“I’ve been a librarian my entire life,” she said.
She says after matriculating in 1992 she wasn’t sure what to do. Then her late mother who worked as a domestic worker brought home a prospectus that listed different career paths. When she read the word librarian she felt drawn to it.
She says she applied and was accepted at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology which at the time was still called Cape Technikon. After completing her diploma she continued her studies and earned a BTech in Library and Information Studies which laid the foundation for her career in public and academic libraries.
She says she will miss the school learners who stormed the library for information for their school projects.
“Some of them would wait till it is the last hour to submit their projects. We’d wait for them ’till they submit and provided that information,” she said.
She says the library became more than just books. Non-profit groups booked the board room for meetings. Community forums gathered there too. When shack fires broke out in Dunoon, residents brought whatever they could save and stored it safely near the library. Even municipal workers would ask if they could park their vehicles there overnight instead of leaving them at the depot in Killarney. She agreed, she says, because it meant they did not have to travel back and forth by public transport after late shifts.
“I did not want to hide behind policy and say no. I hope the next senior librarian will continue to be kind to the community,” she said.
Her farewell message to Dunoon: “People must keep using this library and look after it. When I see them taking pictures inside and outside the building it tells me they love it,” she says.
She says she does not know who will take her place or what kind of librarian they will be.
“Not all librarians are not the same,” she says.
Whoever steps into her role, she says, must protect the relationship between the library and the community.
Assistant librarian and Dunoon resident Nangamso Vaphi, 38, a mother of three, says she has worked with Ciliba since the day the library opened.
“She is kind and caring. She encouraged us to study further. She lives the values of the City of Cape Town. She grew us as a leader, she supported our programmes and worked with us hands-on,” said Vaphi.
She says Ciliba involved staff in decisions and recognised their strengths.
“If you are good at what you do she will uplift you. I saw her as a big sister,” she said.
Head of English at Inkwenkwezi Secondary School, Phinda Siyo, says the school began working with the Dunoon Library almost as soon as it opened.
Siyo says plans for a coordinated programme were badly disrupted by the covid pandemic and many ideas had to be put on hold.
Even so, he says the school encouraged learners to use the library for research, internet access, and as a quiet space to study.