A hard-hitting exhibition in Rotterdam examines South Africa’s built environment. Ferial Haffajee was there
The landscape of the next millennium in South Africa will overwhelmingly be the landscape of an apartheid past. The physical form of this new country is yet to be made.
Now and for the next years it will remain a space of division between town and township where those who do not live here remark on the stark built separateness between black and white, between rich and poor.
The only new remarkable feature is the growing ubiquity of walled compounds with 24-hour armed guards, live electric fencing and menacing razor wire to keep “them” out.
What has become everyday to us in the new South Africa is an abomination and a symbol of how little the built environment has changed and of how little its purpose has changed since the Dutch East India Company built their fort at the Cape of Good Hope and grew a hardy border bush to keep out the Khoi.
Division and fortification remains the defining legacy of architecture in South Africa, says Hilton Judin, the curator of a hard- hitting exhibition in the Netherlands called blank_ Architecture, apartheid and after.
It is the first microscopic inspection of the professions which planned and built the apartheid space. Judin points out the plans of fortified buildings, the photographs of forts and the contemporary insignia of fortification (the armed-patrol signs and razor wire) which he and a team of 60 South Africans carted to Rotterdam.
“Fortification is at the heart of control and fear. It is about feeling surrounded and entrapped. You see it from the forts, to buildings and now in the shopping malls and housing complexes,” says the young architect and philosopher.
The first fort was the blueprint for others throughout the country. And later the fort was replaced by the laager as the defining symbol of largely Afrikaner architecture in this century.
>From the Voortrekker Monument, the political laager of apartheid, everything took on a distinct built form. Judin and his team of four researchers delved into official archives, personal files, dustbins and museums to find these forms.
Some plans were rescued literally from the bins. It could have been, says architect Melinda Silverman, the equivalent of the destruction of the security police files because they hold the key to understanding why South Africa’s built environment is the way it is.
In addition to one of the only two original wooden ox wagons from the Great Trek left in South Africa, also on display are the original blueprints for the Rand Afrikaans University, where the laager-like form made it a concrete fortress in the city.
With small windows and a foreboding aspect, it was the Afrikaner stamp of authority on Johannesburg where the liberal University of the Witwatersrand shaped intellectual thought. Many other contemporary fortresses are displayed at the exhibition in a section called The Sixties.
After the Sharpeville slaughter, the Sixties was a dark time for most of the country. But the economy boomed and so did building.
The super-Afrikaners augmented their forts with other supremacist buildings. David Goldblatt’s photographs at the exhibition capture the concrete authority of the Volkskas headquarters, the impenetrable squareness of the SABC building, the megaphone-shaped whiteness of the administration building of the University of Pretoria and the jutting structure of the University of South Africa.
These megalomaniac buildings were the physical manifestations of grand apartheid meant to display Afrikaner creative, financial and intellectual prowess.
“We live,” said South Africa’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Carl Niehaus, “with the dictatorship of the architecture of the past.”
There is one small glimmer of light offered at the exhibition and that comes in the form of new buildings like the Hillbrow fort, which will reopen early in the next millennium as the seat of the Constitutional Court.
Judin’s ire is piqued also by the planners and bureaucrats in Pretoria. In the section, “Planned Divisions”, the most arresting display is a 1,5m- high bust of Hendrik Verwoerd, formal apartheid’s architect and Dutch by birth. In this section a photograph shows Verwoerd’s apartheid planners labouring over maps.
Also on display are some of the fruits of their labours. Township layouts with clearly labelled “buffer strips” to separate them from the white suburbs are displayed. The original plan of Lydenburg shows a painstakingly laid- out town with immaculate streets, parks and a church at its centre. On its outskirts across the river, and almost as an afterthought, the planner added the words “Die locatie” (Townships are also called locations).
The planned divisions were the natural extension of the laager mentality: the formal planning of other spaces to keep “them” in their own places. The philosophy later found an extreme practice in homeland planning.
While the bantustans have been consigned to the dust-bins of history, little has changed on the map of Lydenburg or on any of South Africa’s other maps where contemporary planning of housing and new business is still plotted on the grids of yesterday. Squatter camps have been allowed to mushroom only near to townships – those near cities and suburbs are quickly moved.
On exhibit too are absolute follies of apartheid’s planners: a yellowing piece of paper with coloured blocks seems innocent enough, until you look closely and see that it is the key to group- areas classifications where each block is symbolic of a race – yellow for the Chinese, blue for whites and black for Africans.
Ordinary people were encouraged to “map” their communities by race to make the case for a group-areas classification.
There is a selection of microfiches, made by a bureaucrat, of the detailed scale drawings of Cato Manor homes marked for destruction. (Ironically, the same microfiches are now being used to compensate the people of Cato Manor who lost their homes.)
In a plan for the Native Women’s Centre in Johannesburg’s Polly Street, an architect created the space where whites brought their female domestic workers to be checked for disease and infection before they were given the passes to enable them to work in the city. Hostel plans painstakingly show the concrete beds assigned to each migrant worker.
“How were architects and planners able to do that? How were they able to separate out their talent and make rude, bombastic buildings that were in a sense controlling people? Were they [the buildings] designed to humiliate and subjugate people?” asks Judin, who hopes the architectural exhibition will ignite a debate among architects and planners to answer precisely these questions.
The curator and philosopher offers few spatial solutions for the new millennium: there are few new democratic buildings, few community spaces and just a sprinkling of alternative housing schemes on show.
“People now have some role in deciding the type of houses they will get,” says Judin. But, he adds: “They don’t have a role in deciding where that housing’s going to go. It’s being built in the same areas that it always has: in townships. Housing must make the city accessible to people.”
In other words, the divisions must end. How to end them is a challenge that will occupy a new generation of architects and planners well into the next century.
blank_ Architecture, apartheid and after is on display in Rotterdam until April 1999, after which it will tour Germany, France and the United States. It will come to South Africa in 2000