The politics of preservation
Gavin Stamp
Johannesburg
Johannesburg can never have been a beautiful city; it is certainly not beautiful now. Founded as a gold-mining camp in 1886, it has always been vigorous and prosperous, yet uncertain of itself as if worried that it is only a temporary settlement; although, today, Johannesburg looks very permanent indeed and this American-style city of high-rise towers and urban freeways is the commercial centre of South Africa. It is sad, therefore, that so many of its early buildings have been torn down since the Fifties: ordinary but charming late Victorian structures, with iron verandahs and iron ornamental decoration (all imported from Britain), of which there are too few left. The sheer ruthlessness of Johannesburg is a slight puzzle, for whereas similarly raw American cities have developed a sense of civic pride as they became older and richer, making parks, museums and fine public buildings, there seems to be no civic sense in Jo'burg, despite its wealth. It is more American than America, with much private affluence and much public squalor.
The present state of the Art Gallery perfectly symbolises this urban selfishness. It was a product of a brief era of enlightened patronage before the Great War, and it contains some excellent early 20th century British paintings — by Sargent, William Nicholson and Brangwyn — given by Lady Philips and Mrs Otto Beit. No less an architect than Edwin Lutyens was invited out to design the building in 1910, but it remains pathetically unfinished. Lutyens designed it to stand in a formal park; instead its entrance portico overlooks a railway cutting and beyond that the black bus station makes a journey from the south slightly perilous for a pedestrian. It seems astonishing that over 70 years the city of Johannesburg has never been able to afford to put a simple lid over the railway, as Lutyens intended, but money can always be found for new roads or for redeveloping inner-city residential areas.
The trouble with South African cities is that the city planners are too strong and the preservation movement too weak. Far too many good buildings have been demolished in the past few decades and legislation for protecting historic buildings and areas — other than a few national monuments — is virtually non-existent. In my earlier article I described the disastrous consequences of planning in South Africa and the baleful influence of Lord Holford in Durban. Holford, indeed, seems to have hated the past in his native land. In the Sixties he proposed sweeping away most of Church Square, the heart of old Republican Pretoria, and his destructive proposals for the charming little Victorian town of Pietermaritzburg astonished even Nikolaus Pevsner, who was an ideological ally back in Britain.
The preservation movement is comparitively weak partly because the sort of radical energy which in Britain goes into fighting motorways and protecting old quarters of towns tends in South Africa to be channelled into political activity. The loss of beautiful old buildings seems to be less important than social injustice, and, with the exception of the polemical bulldozing of District Six in Cape Town, the social consequences of urban renewal are not much of a public issue. This is very sad, both because it is the Indians and the Coloureds who suffer most from inner-city decay and redevelopment, and because South Africa, so insecure and divided, has an historic architecture of three centuries which ought to be an asset and a common heritage, even if it is, inescapably, the product of European culture. A further problem is that the whole issue of preservation which, in Britain, is mercifully apolitical, is, like everything else in South Africa, bedevilled with sectarian rivalries and with national politics.
As Richard West remarked in these pages a few weeks ago, the whites in South Africa seem more divided than were the Americans at the time of the Civil War and the hostility between English-speaking and Afrikaner South Africans may militate against the protection of the national heritage. The Afrikaner Nationalist government certainly has very un-Romantic and Victorian attitudes to slum clearance and to 'progress', but the English like to believe that the government cares only about old Boer architecture — 'Cape Dutch' — and is actively prejudiced against the Victorian and Edwardian buildings erected by the British in the cities. The principal example of this cultural discrimination is said to be the spoiling of Parktown, an inner suburb of Johannesburg. Certainly the Afrikaners have no reason to contemplate Parktown with affection, for it was the area settled after the 1890s by the 'Rand-lords' the rich Anglo-Jewish uitlanders who exploited the mines, undermined the Transvaal government and thereby fomented the war which destroyed the independent Boer republics. On the warmer, north-facing ridge north of the city, men like Lionel Philips, Otto Belt, Starr Jameson and Ernest Oppenheimer built large and often magnificent suburban houses on the bare kopje and created a sylvan, opulent environment: the best part was known as Millionaires' Mile.
With the expansion of Johannesburg and the removal of the rich to more distant spots, Parktown inevitably declined in status. Some houses are still lived in, others have been taken over by institutions, but many have been demolished. As always, the English blame the Afrikaners for the unpleasant facts of life and certainly the worst assaults on Parktown have been made by the national and state authorities. A sunken motorway has been cut through the middle of it; the Transvaal provincial administration appropriated about 70 acres and cleared most of it for a park and playing fields, and an astonishingly massive and brutal new hospital — a quarter of a mile of unbroken concrete slab — has been erected on the very top of the ridge. But Johannesburg itself has never been an Afrikaner dominated city and the municipal authorities seem to have been thoroughlY feeble in protecting English Parktown from the Boer.
The Boer legacy is certainly much more respectable and fashionable. This is Cape Dutch: the simple white plastered farmhouses with fancy gables built by the Dutch farmers in the Cape in the 18th century. Today these are equivalent in social status to Georgian rectories in Wiltshire and Hampshire, being expensive and desirable. Many of the best Cape Dutch houses have estates which produce much of the excellent wine of South Africa. Unfortunately, in the 19th century, as many Boers moved north on the Great Trek, this architectural tradition became debased and, ironically, it was the British who first began to appreciate the virtues of Cape Dutch, or, rather, two men: Herbert Baker and Cecil Rhodes. Baker was an architect steeped in the Late Victorian Arts and Crafts attitudes of William Morris, who had met Lutyens in the office of Ernest George. In 1892, at the age of 30, he arrived in Cape Town to seek his fortune and soon discovered the Cape Dutch houses, recognising in them an honest simplicity and a true vernacular architecture in which the traditions of Europe had been adapted to meet local conditions. At the time such virtues were entirely unappreciated, except by the most dynamic man in South Africa, Cecil Rhodes, whom Baker soon contrived to meet. Rhodes, a disciple of Ruskin, found in Baker a sympathetic talent which he could mould; he made Baker's career. He first employed him to rebuild the old farmhouse of Groote Schuur (which he left to the South African government, and which became the prime minister's residence) and to design several new Cape Dutch houses, such as the Woolsack, where Kipling always stayed. Baker was thereby launched on a brilliant career in South Africa, based on the patronage of the Rand-lords and on Milner's young politicians, which ended when he left for New Delhi in 1912.
Up until the Thirties, South African architecture was dominated by Baker and his disciples, notably Gordon Leith. The Afrikaners, who had played no role in the revival of their own Cape Dutch, were not much involved, with the exception of Gerard Moerdijk, who tried to evolve an African (not Afrikaner) modern architecture by incorporating native details onto his monumental designs. Moerdijk's principal work is the most emotive and political building in South Africa: the Voortrekker Monument. My English-speaking architect hosts were reluctant to show it to me; unable to appreciate the structure on purely aesthetic terms, they see it as representing the most repressive and racialist aspects of Afrikanerdom, whose political domination they resent while enjoying its benefits.
The Monument, built in 1938-49, commemorates the Great Trek of the Boers away from British rule in the Cape a century earlier, the defeat of the Zulus and the foundation of the Boer republics. The later events of Afrikaner history — the defeat of the British in 1881 and the crushing of the republics by vastly superior forces in the cruel and bloody Anglo-Boer War — are not here recalled though certainly not forgotten. The design of the Monument was closely inspired by Bruno Schmitz's vast and brutal Battle of the Nations Monument (Valkerschlachtdenkmal) at Leipzig, inaugurated in 1913. Protected by a circular concrete wall, or laager, with stylised waggons, the Voortrekker Monument is a monumental, rugged structure of courses of rough stone enclosing a Hall of Heroes with a sculptured frieze depicting heroic events.
T'There is certainly something very Geri manic and slightly repulsive about the Monument; it manifests rather too much of that semi-religious popular nationalism which was all too evident in Europe in the Thirties. But the attitude of the English is unfair and unedifying. The monument symbolises Boer nationalism and the revival of Afrikaner power and confidence after defeat in the Anglo-Boer War, but it also recalls historical events which moulded both Boer and English and which, since the Act of Union, should be the joint property of both white tribes. It also celebrates much that is admirable in a tough, resourceful people who, like the British settlers in America, made a nation in a hostile continent and who now have no other home but Africa. The refusal of English-speaking South Africans to accept part of their own history, that they are truly South African, may be what makes them so impotent politically and so disturbingly ambivalent socially.
The Voortrekker Monument stands prominently on a hill to the south of Pretoria, the old Boer Transvaal capital. On the opposite side of the city, set against another hill, can be seen another crucial South African architectural monument, the Union Buildings. These are the parliament buildings erected in 1910-12 after the Act of Union established federal government with two alternating capitals — Pretoria and Cape Town. They consist of two long porticoed blocks, each with a tall dome, separated by a semi-circular colonnade. Exploiting this duality to symbolise the AngloBoer Union and combining the Renaissance Classicism of Italy with that of Wren, the Union Buildings were the masterpiece of Herbert Baker, who, having been sent off to the Mediterranean, was again fulfilling the vision of Rhodes: the vision of an Imperial architecture. The sheer quality of these monumental and yet picturesque buildings strongly influenced the early designs for New Delhi — another Imperial vision in stone — and ensured that Baker joined Lutyens there as a collaborator.
The Union Buildings are magnificently sited above a series of terraced gardens, but beyond those there is chaos: Pretoria is now a messy city of towers. Neither the CapeDutch-Classical school of Baker, nor the Expressionism of Moerdijk, survived the Second World War. In the Thirties, a school of pure International Modern flourished in South Africa which was admired by the master, Le Corbusier, himself, but today modern architecture is dominated by the influence of America and, in particular, of Louis Kahn. Several South African architects trained with Kahn, notably Willy Mayer, architect of the astonishing Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg, whose academic megalomania makes Essex or East Anglia seem quite homely.
Such Afrikaner modernity, allied with state power and money, would seem to be inimical to preservation movements, but something of old Republican Pretoria just survives, in particular Kruger's simple little house (filled with international testimonials in favour of the Boers in their struggle against British imperialism which are a salutary experience for an English visitor). A particular friend of old Pretoria is the architect Hannes Meiring who, paradoxically perhaps, was one of the designers of the huge hospital which has so damaged Parktown. Architects, as always and everywhere, are ambivalent about keeping old buildings; in South Africa they need to do much more — more agitation, more research — to give historic buildings legal protection. South Africa's isolation possibly militates against this, for the authorities are probably not aware of how far conservation movements have gone in Europe and America in recent years and Afrikaner power is obsessed with modernity and progress: South Africa is still in the Sixties. It is also sad that politics and, in both Britain and South Africa, the feeling that social injustice is a more worthy cause than preservation interfere in this area (the secretary of the Victorian Society was recently attacked by members of the committee for going to South Africa to give professional advice), for if buildings matter, they are worth keeping for posterity — whether that posterity be white or black.
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