John Gaspard Gubbins

A disastrous fire on Christmas Eve 1931 at the Witwatersrand University destroyed 35,000 books, and half of Gubbins' Africana collection.

When John Gaspard Gubbins disembarked from the Kildonan Castle in 1902, he was a young man who believed in the rhetoric laid out for him in church and school in England.

Having lived and toiled in South Africa for fifteen years, at the end of a brief respite in England, Gubbins could no longer ignore the great and decidedly modern colonial lie that he had long suspected of being false: that good and evil, heathen and saved, evolved and evolving are mere products of a system of thought that demands binary opposites.

Educated in the church and libraries of late-Victorian England at the height of empire, he was a man who went to Africa filled with certainty about what he would find there.

Through historical forays, collecting, farming, and mining, as well as witnessing the multiple effects of World War I in Europe and Africa, Gubbins was no longer able to rely upon the intellectual framework he had once held so dear.