Africa--the Final Word : Noted Book Collection, One of World’s Best, Being Sold Off by Ex-Caltech Professor

For more than 40 years, Ned Munger stalked books about Africa the way safari hunters stalk big game.

Often, the thrill was in the pursuit.

Once, while crawling on his hands and knees along the cold concrete-floor basement of a Zurich bookshop in the early 1960s, the former Caltech professor heard what sounded like a huge rat gnawing at a book.

He peered cautiously into the next aisle. And there was his old pal Nnamdi Azikwe, then-president of Nigeria, also on his hands and knees, gazing intently at contents on the dusty lower shelves.

“He, too, knew that hit-and-miss collectors will often . . . leave the real gems unmined on the less-convenient lower shelves,” Munger recalled.

It took Munger more than four decades of haunting bookstores on six continents to build up a collection of 45,000 volumes on Africa, the largest such private library in the United States, says Moore Crossey, curator of the African Collection at Yale University’s library.

But the professor retired last year and Caltech, which housed the books, says it can no longer accommodate his library. Neither can Munger, whose Pasadena home will hold only a fraction of his collection.

So Munger, 67, has been forced to break up what many scholars have called a unique cultural resource.

“It really was invaluable,” said Richard L. Sklar, a professor of political science at UCLA and former president of the Atlanta-based national African Studies Assn. “I’m so sorry to hear it’s being broken up. So many scholars have used it from all over the world.”

At first Munger had hoped to sell his library in one piece, but many universities already owned some tomes and didn’t want to duplicate their holdings.

He donated about 8,900 books to Caltech. Several hundred more were sold at a discount to Occidental College and Pasadena City College. Others were purchased by antiquarian book dealers in far-flung places like Sydney, Australia, and Johannesburg, South Africa.

Now he is down to one-quarter of his original collection. Another 1,000 of his rarest books will go on the auction block beginning todayat Sotheby’s in London.

Munger did not reveal how much the books have sold for, but he noted that one bookseller said the estimated worth of the entire collection “probably approaches seven figures.”

Munger says he has few regrets about breaking up his collection.

“It’s like when a child grows up and goes to college; it’s a part of life,” says Munger, who hopes his 45,000 “children” will all find good homes.

One of Munger’s most prized possessions is a scrap of paper that bears what the professor calls the only known signature of Cetywayo, the last great King of the Zulus, who trounced the British in South Africa in 1879, wiping out an entire British regiment.

When a later Zulu king visited Munger, and saw the rare signature, “he broke into tears” Munger recalled.

Munger’s library includes rare political pamphlets written in 1912 by South African communists. It also includes first editions of “Cry The Beloved Country,” by the anti-apartheid South African author Alan Paton, a friend of Munger.

It includes 15th-Century illuminated manuscripts on vellum written in Geez, the liturgical language of the

Ethiopian Coptic Church; there is a letter signed by Dr. David Livingstone dated 1861 and a document signed by Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, who sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to India in the late 1490s, opening the first all-water trade route between Europe and Asia.

One collection that Munger didn’t snap up was a cache of 200 letters that Mahatma Gandhi wrote to an architect friend while living in Durban. At $20,000, Munger thought it too pricey. But he often sought out rare publications and manuscripts that dealt with the history of the Indian people in Africa, who “played an extremely important role in developing the economic history of East Africa,” Munger says.

During the 1930s, when he was growing up in Chicago, however, Munger didn’t know Durban from Timbuktu. But he did have a penchant for book collecting, often trading candy to neighborhood children in exchange for books.

Some years later, while he was in the Army, Munger showed an aptitude for poker. When he hit the jackpot one night in 1947, he took his winnings and headed for West Africa--a place that had long conjured up visions of exotic adventure.

Thus began a lifelong fascination with Africa, one that led eventually to a doctorate in political geography from the University of Chicago, a role in founding the national African Studies Assn. and a 14-year stint as president of the L.S.B. Leakey Foundation, the Pasadena-based organization founded by archeologists Louis and Mary Leakey which supports scientific research into the origins of man.

While completing his Ph.D and looking for an academic home, Munger realized that few libraries in the United States had sizable Africana collections. Bent on teaching students about Africa, he decided to build up a collection that could both serve as a teaching tool and make him a welcome addition to any faculty.

When Caltech offered him one of its few humanities professorships in 1959, he agreed, so long as he could take along his “laboratory.”

During the decades that he taught “The Politics of Africa” to science majors at Caltech, Munger’s podium served as a revolving door for visiting lecturers that included the foreign minister of Tanzania, the president of Gambia, and South African critics of apartheid.

Indeed, Munger has met just about every important person in recent African history, including the noted Nigerian social realist writer Chinua Achebe and the notorious tyrant and former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who had been a bellboy in a hotel where Munger once stayed in Kampala. Amin, an amateur boxer, was so big and brutish that he could knock out two men at once, and proved it during fights that the British set up, Munger recalled.

After 76 trips to Africa, Munger concludes that “the people are the most exciting in West Africa, the scenery is the most inspiring in East Africa and the problems are the most challenging in South Africa.”

Book collecting proved challenging too, an occupation ill-suited for weak-kneed bookworms.

Munger says he has been shot at by a Cuban MIG fighter plane in Angola and held upside-down over a cliff in Sao Tome--an island in the South Atlantic--by Portuguese secret police who mistook him for a revolutionary. Another close call came in 1960 when the Belgians began pulling out of the Congo (now Zaire). Munger was walking down the street with an Israeli colonel in Leopoldville--now Kinshasa--when, briefly after parting ways, the colonel was shot in the head by guerrilla snipers.

Bibliophiles say Munger himself played an important role in African scholarship, beginning with his doctoral thesis: a history of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, the African country founded in 1847 by freed U.S. slaves.

Munger’s library “has a lot of unique, interesting and very, very scarce political material, especially about South Africa,” said Crossey, curator of Yale’s African Collection.

Today, Munger devotes most of his time to the Cape of Good Hope Foundation, a Pasadena-based organization he founded in 1984 to provide college educations in South Africa to promising poor and underprivileged minority students.

Meanwhile, some academics who have enhanced their own collections with Munger’s books are of two minds about the dismantling of his library.

“On one hand, it’s a pity because it was put together by the vision of one individual,” said Gerald J. Bender, director of the school of international relations at USC.

But then again, “If it’s going to be better utilized, then perhaps that should be its fate.”