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Absorbing Modernity
OR HOW SOUTH AFRICAS
DEFINING STRUGGLE WAS
CONCEIVED AND FOUGHT
IN MODERNIST TERMS
Il modernismo
ed i suoi doppi
Lesperienza
sudafricana
1914-2014
Layout Diagram
LIFT
PASTS
DESIGNING FUTURES
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FIGHT OR SUBMIT
PRESENCE
CURATOR
Lemaseya Khama
Lemaseya Khama an experienced architect and thinker who strongly advocates the role of cultural
relevance to the current built environment. Of importance for Khama is the near universal exclusion
of African experience from architecture. If an African architecture is to emerge in South Africa it
must have a thorough grasp of the forces that have so long militated against it. From his thesis at
Manchester Metropolitan University exploring the notion of a right approach to an emotive site to
providing a cultural veneer to regionally anchor the DTI Campus in Pretoria to myth-forming at the
Cradle of Mankind to truth seeking at Freedom Park to reinterpreting motifs at Sandton City Courts,
Khama has sought to prove African experience can be generate powerful change in a modernist
environment.
CURATOR
Jean-Pierre de la Porte
Jean-Pierre de la Porte is a writer and philosopher interested in the reasons why transformation
has been so slow in key areas of South African experience. He is interested in the ambiguities of
modernity and teaches an annual graduate seminar on its consequences. He is currently the Research
Director at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Infrastructure and affiliated to the
Universities of Pretoria and the Free State.
1900
PASTS
After many attempts
at establishing utopian
republics, the Boers finally
clashed with the British
Empire over the autonomy
of the Orange Free State
and Transvaal. At war over
mineral resources, the
British Empire mobilised a
global effort to eliminate
the Boers resulting in their
Vietnam, a damaging
guerrilla war that would
adversely shift Britains
place in geo-political
power.
The Boers, who were strategically
impoverished and pushed into the
immiserised margin usually reserved
for colonised people, proposed
a desperate cultural revolution to
differentiate themselves from the
dominant colonial group. They sent
emissaries to benchmark institutions
throughout the world with the
intention to return and establish
institutions of their own, centred in the
uniqueness of their language, printing
presses, media, schools, institutions
of higher learning and economic
cooperatives.
1914
PASTS
After three centuries of wars
of colonial dispossession,
first against the Dutch
and then the British, black
South Africans made a bid
to represent themselves to
the British king in order to
achieve recognition of their
rights as subjects within his
Empire.
In preparation for this, many young
South African intellectuals from the
Eastern Cape were sent to study at
prestigious campuses in England
and the United States. In the course
of the American experience, African
Diaspora ideas of Pan-African
Nationalism were encountered and
absorbed, but remained peripheral
to the main mission of achieving
recognition by the British sovereign.
This mission failed and was insultingly
dismissed only to be followed by
the British engineered Land Act that
aimed at displacing the successful,
agrarian societies of South Africa
1948
DESIGNING
FUTURES
The futuristic path to
achieve an inclusive
nationalism in a state of
internal Diaspora was
made difficult to formulate
by events between the
two World Wars. German
experience shows how
the impact of Bolshevism
and the American New
Deal called forth growing
labour movements
and the alternative of
German indigenous massmobilisation.
In a Diaspora centred overnight on
growing industrial cities, the black
inclusivist national ideal that would
one day be the formula of South
Africas democracy, encountered
many more glamorous or urgent
competitors. Union movements were
widely embraced even becoming
clubs and societies outside of
industrial centres and hosting
apocalyptic themes. Modulating these
were Communist parties fortifying
mostly white mine workers against deskilling through technological change.
In contrast to inclusive nationalisms
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1948
DESIGNING
FUTURES
The dissonant republics
began establishing their
presence, much like
young republics anywhere
in history, through the
building of civic presence
that clearly spoke to cultural
and political capacity. It
is almost impossible to
conceive of a republicanism
that does not image itself in
cities or dramatic revisions
of existing city sites.
From Florence to Washington to
Pretoria, the potentials for turning
buildings and spaces into allegories
of envisioned nationhood have been
aggressively seized.
The city of Pretoria unlike its agrarian
counterpart Bloemfontein was the
subject of intense industrialisation
and hence urbanisation. It required
a modern modality of city planning
whilst simultaneously fulfilling the
obligation of symbolising Afrikaner
nationhood. In the course of a few
decades, it became a machine for
incubating a new kind of citizen
equipped with the capacities for
He is chosen to pre-emptively
symbolise Afrikaner nationhood, in
one of the most powerful buildings
of the 1930s decade. Eventually
he would monumentalise growing
administrative precincts in eclectically
modernist terms, giving an inhabitable
face to the progress linked to the
infrastructured growth throughout the
part-pragmatic, part-utopian city of
Pretoria.
1948
pRESENCE
The 1948 national elections
bring the first non-British
aligned ruler to power in
white South African history.
The culminating event
of exclusive culturalism
and nationalism is the
inauguration of Afrikaner
presidential candidate
D.F Malan. This resulted in
a return of a neo-colonial
sense of ownership of
space and of the images
and ideas allowed to
circulate in it.
Confronted by their opponents
extraordinary ability to shift fronts
of engagement between the public
and the personal, between the
collective and the individual, the
white government embarks on a
process of rigorous normalisation in
which it applies its standardisation
and managed expectations to its own
constituencies and attempts to do the
same to the majority.
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13
1961
PRESENce
Already, as second or
perhaps third generation
Diaspora accommodated
to someone elses urban
context, the South African
majority developed an
extraordinarily refined art
of public self- presentation
which at the same time
serves as a mask to
protect the shared secrecy
necessary to resistance.
Equipped with highly distinctive
powers of self-presentation and
withdrawal, black South Africans
embark on powerful and audacious
experiments in public presence,
indiscernibly organising wide-spread
campaigns of civil disobedience such
as school stay-aways to disempower
white attempts to strategically lower
the quality of education, bus-boycotts
to derail attempts to tax transport, and
marches on administrations, including
the Union Buildings, to protest against
the imposition to carrying a pass in
order to work and remain in cities.
This era of the South African
experience develops the visibility,
sincerity, theatricality and stealth
that are the ingredients of cultures
of occupation and protest to
extraordinary degree. Its motif is the
modernistic theme of possessing,
making, controlling and using your
own presence as a kind of power.
Anticipating the politics of minorities
FIGHT OR
SUBMIT
1961
1979
14
15
Aziz Tayob
16
17
FIGHT OR
SUBMIT
With culturalism and
nationalism as ladders to
be climbed and thrown
away, the 1961 Republic
changes the international
status of South Africa
from a beleaguered
ex-British territory, crisscrossed by competing
British nationalisms, to
a durable western white
presence in Africa buffered
against African nationalist
aspirations, seen elsewhere
on the continent.
The cities and economies would
translate colonial experience into
white national idioms. Eventually a
Republic would be declared aiming
to benefit all western identifying
groups including western Cold War
aligned African states.
This western homogeneity,
modernistic and progressive, would
be made free of competing claims
and influences by declaring all nonwhite South Africans, non-western
and relegating them to homelands,
offering self-rule under carefully
chosen and supported dictatorships.
Thus, black South Africans could
aspire to be part of a commonwealth
of states at the periphery of a
1961
Westernised core. This policy was
euphemistically known as good
neighbourliness and stands on a par
with the geopolitical re-engineering
carried out by the Soviet Union and by
the Nazi invasions in Europe.
In its confident audacity, the city
of Pretoria becomes for the third
time the experimental site for the
republican metropolis experiment
after its previous deployment as a
culturalist and nationalist test-bed.
Now geared to exert power at a
distance, like the original colonial
centres, such as Amsterdam and
London, it undergoes metamorphoses
similar to their managerial capacity,
where alliances and affluence
accumulate within its decisionmaking matrices. Functionally
perfected, it now concentrates on
its form, benchmarking a number of
metropolises, including Niemeyers
Brazil and producing, under the
compulsion of modernistic up-todateness, a series of showcased
buildings worthy of the world expos
of the time.
This brief flowering of the fourth
great strand of modernistic social
engineering (besides Soviet Nazi
and American New Deal) alternatives
is short lived; its cost in poverty
and suffering soon turns it into the
improvised citadel of a civil war.
1979
18
1979
<35
2014
What is less obvious is that this
moment also flowed together
in a more-orless unplanned,
unanticipated fashion, the two
sides of modernity that had been
so intensely developed by South
African adversaries. This merger has
proved so elusive to participants and
commentators because it consists of
a yet to be determined alloy of two
strands of modernity.
Since there is no greater indignity
than speaking on behalf of others,
the final element in the South African
Pavilion consists of confrontations with
people and places: places shaped
by extremities of social engineering
and people whose legacy is the great
struggle to achieve the modern ideal
of an inclusive society. South Africans
under the age of 35 present their own
experience, their own summation of
where we have arrived at and their
own report on the open futures that
they now shape.
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19
the Consul-General
of The Republic of
South Africa to
Milan, Italy
Mr Saul Kgomotso Molobi
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