Architecture, State Modernism and Cultural Nationalism in the Apartheid Capital

Hilton Judin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000367119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

This book is the first comprehensive investigation of the architecture of the apartheid state in the period of rapid economic growth and political repression from 1957 to 1966 when buildings took on an ideological role that was never remote from the increasingly dominant administrative, legislative and policing mechanisms of the regime. It considers how this process reflected the usurpation of a regional modernism and looks to contribute to wider discourses on international postwar modernism in architecture.

Buildings in Pretoria that came to embody ambitions of the apartheid state for industrialisation and progress serve as case studies. These were widely acclaimed projects that embodied for apartheid officials the pursuit of modernisation but carried latent apprehensions of Afrikaners about their growing economic prospects and cultural estrangement in Africa. It is a less known and marginal story due to the dearth of material and documents buried in archives and untranslated documents. Many of the documents, drawings and photographs in the book are unpublished and include classified material and photographs from the National Nuclear Research Centre, negatives of 1960s from Pretoria News and documents and pamphlets from Afrikaner Broederbond archives.

State architecture became the most iconic public manifestation of an evolving expression of white cultural identity as a new generation of architects in Pretoria took up the challenge of finding form to their prospects and beliefs. It was an opportunistic faith in Afrikaners who urgently needed to entrench their vulnerable and contested position on the African continent. The shift from provincial town to apartheid capital was swift and relentless. Little was left to stand in the way of the ambitions and aim of the state as people were uprooted and forcibly relocated, structures torn down and block upon block of administration towers and slabs erected across Pretoria.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of architectural history as well as those with an interest in postcolonial studies, political science and social anthropology.

1

Apartheid ideology and architectural form: State building in Pretoria

Pretoria was administrative capital of a country in the 1960s basking in the glory and confidence of a new Republic. It had become central to Afrikaner’s drive for modernisation and economic progress. This ambition was captured in the report “Pretoria Our Model City” in local newspaper Dagbreek:

Already some of the most modern buildings in Africa adorn this city that has changed from day to night as the ‘city with the quiet town atmosphere’ to a frenetic metropolis. Pretoria becomes a giant of steel and stone, sculpture and concrete, copper and clay, glass and … even money … The plan of the Government to develop Pretoria as the model city of South Africa will place the capital on an even footing as the most modern and most prestigious cities in the world.¹

Reflective of the rhetoric of the apartheid state, the article also personified the pride of an aspiring Afrikaner nation. The agrarian kerkplaats (church place) settlement alongside the Apies River grew from its founding on the farms Elandspoort and Daspoort in 1855 by Marthinus Wessel Pretorius (1819–1901), son of Afrikaner leader Andries Pretorius and first President of the ZAR (South African Republic), into the Afrikaner capital. The “model city” with its bold new buildings served as an illustration to the white nation of a commanding power and to the black population of a state rising and in control, proclaiming to the world at large its modernity and sophistication.²

State institutions and buildings were erected in this period to consolidate white nationalist presence in Pretoria. The exclusion of the black population by policies of white nationalism would come to define the capital. The black community was systematically driven out of Pretoria through the demolition of inner-city “native” townships, forced removals in so-called “black spots,” establishment of segregated “dormitory” townships and banishment to distant Bantustans.³ Architects addressed inexorably this ideology through building projects of the National Party after they took power in the white elections of 1948. An evolving cultural nationalism is explored in this chapter of earliest buildings of the apartheid state. Modern was seen as a reflection of an unburdened cultural destiny and access by Afrikaners to new economic opportunities. The degree to which architects’ ideas and innovations applied needs to be unpacked as these buildings were not simply manifestations of political forces. For the path from ideology to architectural form was not straightforward. As capitalism and cultural nationalism aligned, architects were quick to adapt an International Style in matching goals and rhetoric of the apartheid regime.

State enterprises were developed in strategic political spaces to provide infrastructure and ensure industrial stability under apartheid. These organisations required highly trained white professionals and technicians along with a compliant and inexpensive black workforce. Just how far the state was able to shift urban and architectural responses to address this can be seen, for instance, in administrative and cultural buildings prioritised in the capital as much as townships. Architecture in this period of economic growth and social repression can be understood in part through buildings that were among the earliest apartheid structures to embody Afrikaner ambitions for modernisation. Whether giving form to societal values or consolidating existing urban morphology, architecture in Pretoria was more than a stage to political struggles taking place. These would require a more complex reckoning with Afrikaner culture. Yet neither were architectural forms literal embodiment of prevailing nationalist ideologies. For abstract elements could not simply be nakedly applied to buildings as representations of the power and resolve of Nationalists.

Certain elements of modern movement in architecture found ready expression in political conditions across the globe that appeared ripe for exploration by the state. Among these, functionalism would not necessarily serve democracy as was seen in the embrace of rationalism in Italy during the 1930s. Nor was classicism solely ripe for revival under fascism as was evident in the violent rejection of modern tendencies in Nazi Germany. While modern architecture was eventually dismissed as degenerate by Mussolini, it was initially embraced for its revolutionary potential before being dropped for reactionary classicism of Rome.⁴ How then might modernism have come to represent nationalism in a society as conservative and authoritarian as the Afrikaner? How did romantic eclecticism of the Afrikaner’s journey to the interior of the country inspire the modern precision of the capital? Clearly, an ornamented neoclassicism became tainted for Afrikaners with its British imperialist associations. Even so, aspects of the monumental with references to a European heritage, Dutch even or German, could have competed with modernism in the search for a fitting architectural language. Instead, an International Style freed of obvious symbolic or cultural traces yet expressive of capitalism and progress was embraced by architects in Pretoria. It was simplified in organisation and structure, economical and easy to reproduce. It was also self-referential and reflective of successful counterparts in flourishing modernising economies that would require the lightest of regional flourishes.

Transformation of the Afrikaner in the city

Ambitions of architects in Pretoria to fully realise these political opportunities would follow urbanisation of small-town and rural Afrikaners. It was an important task for Nationalists at the time to educate poor white Afrikaners and provide opportunities for employment and as civil servants. The political triumph of the National Party brought together new educated Afrikaner professionals with the working class and civil servants. After Nationalists took power, increasing numbers of Afrikaners made the move to the city.⁵ Ideas of a pure nation that was rooted in the soil depended heavily on the cultural romanticism of a society possessed of a national “essence” that had to be discovered, nurtured and preserved. Moral purity and values were seen as under threat, especially those of women and poor Afrikaners who had just moved to the city. Potential for deviance was ever-present, in particular fears of the rasvermenging (racial mixing) that concentrated living conditions in the city were thought to bring about. This constant dread of miscegenation permeated populist rhetoric. As their growing power and privilege felt threatened, a violent anticolonial cultural tradition was there for Afrikaners to turn to in their task of building a white nation.

Leaders, such as D. F. Malan at the Great Trek Centenary of 1938, claimed that Afrikaners would face a new struggle in the city.⁶ There was little room for nostalgia for the rural as Aletta Norval notes:

Marshalling the symbols of Afrikaner history, Malan rearticulated them to a new urban context: the urban situation and labour market were to become the Afrikaner’s new Blood River, and the battles to be waged there would be no less deadly than those of a hundred years before.⁷

The challenges of urbanisation to the moral and social values that could have led to a loss of the volkseie (national character) required a set of equivalences drawn, as Norval describes it, between the city, Englishness and amorality on the one hand, and the platteland, nature and simplicity on the other. This contrast needed to be starkly raised, while not rejecting modernity and developing instead a new positive conception of the city. Yet what they were doing in the same breath was staking a claim for a people, more specifically the Afrikaner working class, while proposing it as a manifestation of the nation. This incessant myth of the merciless struggle for Afrikanerhood was endlessly expounded. The sense of loss and inferiority associated with the daunting move to the city could only be overcome by a collective communal effort. Within the Broederbond it functioned as both the economic and cultural lodestone for an entire generation. One of the principal responsibilities of the Broederbond was in developing a new class of urban entrepreneurs. For writer Dan O’Meara, this “new class of aggressive, Afrikaner urban capitalists now made the running in the Broederbond, often side lining the academics, clergymen and other intellectuals who had led the organisation in the past.”⁸ Urbanisation was transforming the very social structure of the Afrikaner population and new urban elites were in turn bringing disruption to the previously coherent social groups within the Broederbond.

The context for the architecture of the apartheid state was one of hierarchies and onerous pass laws. Nationalistic and symbolic edifices and seats of cultural sovereignty were to be unleashed along with the administrative structures of an entrenched power. Ideology of apartheid was based less on the self-conception of a certain group of Afrikaners than on the structuring of broad social relationships brought over from colonialism. Not all Afrikaans-speakers were part of a single monolithic ethnic group or necessarily shared interests as a social class of conservative customary values. The collective term volk – distinguished after all as a term of opposition to be borne in battle – served to both describe a people and also separate them out as a privileged group. White supremacy came to depend on differences evoked by the culture and traditions constantly assigned or recognised within a social group. This shift in Afrikaner nationalism from one of primarily withstanding Anglicisation, to one based on prejudices, whether understood as political survival or opportunism, was neither an inevitable outcome nor driven solely by racism. But by the 1940s it served to mobilise divided Afrikaners with a coherent vision and Nationalists with means to electoral power. It presented itself as best able to secure white supremacy and maintain what was advocated as the “Christian civilisation” on the African continent.⁹

The confluence of nationalism with apartheid grew increasingly visible in the 1950s in racially entrenched social divisions and the segregated built environment. Despite stated intentions, architects were not so easily able to convey national sentiment or represent the white nation through building. For these nationalist sentiments were relatively fluid, contested within and outside political parties, obscured by a legibility for architects that was seldom in sync with the white public. It was also one that was not always commensurate with an evolving nationalism. Although not all buildings of this period were responding to white nationalism – developing as well with scientific, educational or economic imperatives – few were completely detached from the political or without wider social consequences. Many could be understood to form a symbolic setting if not cultural stronghold for unfolding events. An article in 1959 in the British Architectural Review on the Commonwe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: “South Africa Builds …”
• 1 Apartheid ideology and architectural form: state building in Pretoria
• 2 Atomic Research Centre
• 3 Volkseie: Afrikaners and the University of Pretoria
• 4 Emerging traditions: the vernacular in “separate development”
• 5 Norman Eaton’s glass cabinet: Wachthuis
• 6 Hubris: isolated edifices, state apparatuses and a depleted vision
• Conclusion: architecture for ourselves
• Bibliography
• Index