The Kimberley Public Library, now the Africana Museum, was founded in 1882 and housed opposite the Kimberley Club in a magnificent building with wrought-iron gallery, spiral staircase and sparkling chandeliers. Dyer, the city’s first qualified librarian, arrived in 1900 from England, where at one time he had worked in Buckingham Palace.
But he was also a fraudster, misappropriating funds until auditors caught up with him in 1908. Rather than go to prison, he took cyanide, and his ghost can still be seen dressed in Victorian clothing rearranging books and files in the stacks section.