MICHAEL MORRIS | Boy’s library ordeal highlights city’s human side - Business Day

Michael Morris

A nine-year-old got the fright of his life earlier this month when he woke after dozing off in the late-afternoon placidity of Cape Town’s Central Library to find he’d been accidentally locked in.

Having slept through the closing-time calls on the intercom, and the librarians’ routine end-of-day walk-through of the four-storey complex, when the library closed at 6pm the young boy was none the wiser.

There was, as you may know from the extensive media coverage, a happy ending. I’ll get to that.

I was intrigued by the story from the word go, mainly because I thought it revealed something larger. And I was lucky to hear it firsthand - across the supper table, as it happens, since my wife, Sharon Sorour-Morris, is the communications manager at the Cape Town Central City Improvement District (CCID), in whose role is the story’s greater civic meaning.

That nine-year-old, who had gone to the library to wait for his father’s shift to end at a nearby barbershop, revealed something of the larger narrative when he woke up to find he was locked in and Parade Street was dark and deserted.

His shouting and banging on a window caught the attention of one of the CCID’s public safety officers on duty near the library. He alerted the 24-hour control room, and the night manager and two safety & security team members responded. They in turn managed to contact one of the library staff; soon the boy was let out and reunited with his father.

His story reminded me of a late 1990s interview with architect and former long-time Cape Town city councillor Llewellyn van Wyk. He was vigorous in opposing the concept of any central city being thought of solely as a central business district, arguing that “a city that is seen as a depot for businesses … is not a place of human proportions”.

Van Wyk memorably recommended that “the city [should be] understood to be a public, not a private, realm … a stage for human drama”. In 2026, making our cities places “of human proportions” has become paramount with the rising scale of urbanisation.

The challenge is captured by fellow Daily Friend writer Sindile Vabaza’s recent piece (on the Barbican restoration, and its implications), in which he hoped reformers would “understand that the job is not simply to make Johannesburg functional again, but to make it magnificent again. Because if all we do is fix the plumbing, we will have saved the house, but we will not have restored the home and made it a place where we love to live and make memories.”

And this is why I felt the simple story of the boy in the library was revelatory. It tells how every spirited ambition to create places that reflect our humanity back at us, and affirm the best we think of ourselves, depends on the ordinary array of expectations we find, if we look closely, in the seemingly mundane, the job descriptions and procedures, the shared information and clearly understood protocols, and the considerable sums invested by businesses, restaurants, shops, property tycoons and start-up bistros.

Taken together, these determine the unhesitating steps of people we will likely never meet, yet in whom we instantly recognise our own unspoken expectation. When such a system, elaborate yet remarkably unassuming, finds a young boy locked in a library, it responds not with heroism or any kind of exceptionalism but with ordinary day-to-day procedure.

And when that happens in your city, it’s a city worth living in.

Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations 

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-08-31-michael-morris-boys-library-ordeal-highlights-citys-human-side/