Fri 25 Jun 2021 01.15 EDT
Last modified on Fri 25 Jun 2021 04.11 EDT
The fire that started on the slopes of Table Mountain on April 18 this year quickly swept through the University of Cape Town campus. The world watched in horror as the African Studies Library was burned to the ground. In the weeks that followed, volunteers waded through the waterlogged basement of the razed building to see which rare books had survived.
What few people beyond the university realised at the time is that barely 100 metres away the Department of Biological Sciences had also suffered catastrophic losses. “We’ve lost everything,” says Prof Timm Hoffman, the director of the Plant Conservation Unit (PCU), which was housed in a “highly flammable wooden turret” on the roof of the HW Pearson building.
Hot on the heels of the devastating fire at the University of Cape Town narrowly missing the famous Bolus Herbarium, the Albany Museum’s Selmar Schonland Herbarium, closely associated with Rhodes University, barely escaped a devastation of its own la