The Voortrekker Monument, the birth of apartheid, and beyond

Political Geography 20 (2001) 221–246 www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo

The Voortrekker Monument, the birth of apartheid, and beyond Andrew Crampton

*

School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sunderland, Priestman Building, Green Terrace, Sunderland SR1 3PZ, UK

Abstract The role of monuments in producing contested national histories and identities is increasingly receiving critical attention in geography. This paper contributes to the existing literature on monuments and nationalism by examining the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria and illustrating how it became a key site at which Afrikaners produced a distinct political identity in the late 1940s. Through examining the discourse surrounding the monument’s inauguration in December 1949 it looks at five key discursive themes that attached different, but often complimentary, meanings to the monument. Through analysing these themes, I demonstrate how a contemporary Afrikaner identity was constructed through a particularistic interpretation of an heroic Voortrekker past and argue that the construction of this history and identity was governed by political debates in the 1930s and 1940s rather than any historical authenticity to Afrikaner nationalist claims. Moreover, the monument’s inauguration just months after the election of the first apartheid government provides a useful window into the specificity of apartheid political identity. I argue that the representation of Afrikaner identity at the monument in distinctive ethnicist terms both legitimised, and was fundamental to the possibility of, apartheid. Finally, building on this analysis of apartheid I conclude by suggesting how this illuminates debates concerning South Africa’s contemporary nation building project and the content of post apartheid identities.  2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Monuments; Political identity; Apartheid; Post apartheid

* Tel.: +44-121-515-2227; fax: +44-121-515-2229. E-mail address: [email protected] (A. Crampton). 0962-6298/01/$ - see front matter  2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 9 6 2 - 6 2 9 8 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 6 2 - 7

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Introduction In a recent article in The Guardian, Chris McGreal (2000) drew attention to the ongoing nation building process in post apartheid South Africa. On this occasion recent debates concerning the renaming of some of South Africa’s largest cities came under scrutiny with McGreal (2000: 11) noting that “[t]he scrapping of apartheid era and colonial names in favour of African ones has been particularly slow”. Plans include changing Johannesburg to the Zulu name eGoli, Pretoria to Tshwane, and Port Elizabeth to Nelson Mandela Metropole. The controversies and questions that surround each of these old and new names reveal the contested and constructed nature of nation building in South Africa today and also asks questions concerning the basis on which a unified and inclusive post apartheid identity can be built. This paper addresses these contemporary questions through analysing the inauguration of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, 1949. In doing so it uses the monument to provide a reading of the specificity of the apartheid political imaginary, and building on this the paper concludes by suggesting what the ‘post’ in a post apartheid must signify if South Africa is to move towards a genuinely post apartheid identity in its contemporary nation building project. The paper, therefore, contributes to at least three sets of debates. Firstly, it adds to the growing literature within geography on monuments and political identities; secondly it contributes to our historical understanding of apartheid and the multiple mechanisms producing the apartheid political imaginary; and thirdly, it contributes to contemporary debates in South Africa on the constitution of a post apartheid order.

Monuments, geography, and national identity In the last decade geographers have increasingly studied the social production of national and cultural identities. The ‘cultural turn’ of the 1980s along with the influence of post structuralism has seen inquiry centred on the discursive production of political identity. Anderson’s (1991) national imagined community is, as Bell (1999: 185) argues, “conceived as a discursive field, across which competing myths of national identity vie for hegemony” and geographers have focused enquiry on the multiple spatial representations that underpin and undermine different political identities. In cultural geography cultural landscapes are no longer viewed as fixed categories operating outside of social contexts. Investigations centre on the politics of memorial landscapes, the different subject positions they engender, and the implications arising when visions of cultural identity achieve hegemonic status (Jackson, 1989; Barnes & Duncan, 1992). In critical geopolitics institutional sites producing discourses of danger that allow for particular state formations have come under scrutiny (Dalby, 1990; Campbell, 1992) as have the identities produced in popular discourses (Sharp, 1993, 1996). Linking this work on the production of political identities is a focus on different sites or spaces where identities are produced, consumed, and performed. The range of sites studied by geographers in their investigations of identity pro-

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duction indicates both the breadth of work conducted within geography and the multiple sites at which identities are produced and contested. Thus, along with work on landscape paintings (Daniels, 1994), film (Sharp, 1998), heritage sites (Lowenthal, 1994, 1998) to name a few, geographers have increasingly studied monuments and memorials in discussions of political identity. Monuments are significant to geographical enquiry because they allow a focus on the use of public space in the production of national images. They are important sites at which national traditions are invented (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1993) and situated symbolically on the landscape and in the popular imagination (Johnson, 1994). The images and histories produced through monuments facilitate forms of political power but a monument’s meaning should not be seen as fixed. Indeed, a consistent theme in geographer’s work on monuments has been attempts to reveal firstly, the contestations around a monuments meaning and, secondly, temporal shifts in meaning and the importance of the social and political context in determining the meaning and symbolism of any monument. Monument’s, Lefebvre (1998) argues, do not have a single signified but have a “horizon of meaning” within which multiple meanings clash and compete. It is the contested polyvocality of monuments that much work in geography draws attention to. Heffernan (1995), for example, discusses the debates and politics behind World War I memorialisation, and reveals the conflicts arising between an individuals right to commemorate their dead and the British state’s wish to maintain a principle of equality — a principle that itself was cut across with discourses on taste, religious affiliation, burgeoning national movements within the Empire, and relationships with France and Belgium upon whose territory the World War I memorials rest. Harvey’s (1989) study of the Basilica of Sacre-Couer in Paris illustrates its contested meaning and history and O’Tuathail (1994) has illustrated how monumental space in Budapest has shifting and contradictory meanings as political regimes have changed. Similarly, Charlesworth (1994) points to the important context of Cold War geopolitics in attempts to de Judaise memorialisations of the holocaust at Auschwitz. Auschwitz, he argues, was chosen as a holocaust memorial site because it allowed memorialisation to emphasise Nazi aggression, the holocaust’s international dimension, Soviet liberation, and the unity of Warsaw Pact nations. Moreover, the 1970s has seen further deJudaisation with attempts to construct Auschwitz as a place of Catholic suffering. Geographers, however, have not only looked at the contested meanings of monuments, but have also investigated intended and ‘official’ meanings (Atkinson & Cosgrove, 1998). While monuments may not have any intrinsic meaning their iconographic features do lend themselves to particular interpretations and there are sites and occasions — such as speeches at a monument’s public unveiling and discussions in guidebooks and the media — which generate preferred or official interpretations (Johnson, 1994). The meaning of a monument, therefore, is historically contingent and discursively produced at particular times and places, and these meanings intersect with broader discourses on national history and identity. Atkinson and Cosgrove (1998), for example, recover the official meanings of the much ridiculed monument

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to Vittoria Emamnuele II in Rome and discuss numerous attempts by the Italian state to use the monument to articulate an Italian national identity. In her study of monuments and nationalism Johnson (1995: 63) argues that “an examination of public statues enables the researcher to gain some insights into how the public imagination is aroused and developed in the context of the ongoing task of nation-building”. This paper continues geographer’s work on monuments by analysing the official meanings attached to the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria during its inauguration in December 1949. In particular, it looks at meanings generated in the Official Programme for the Inauguration of the Voortrekker Monument in which there are a number of essays explaining the Monument’s history and symbolism, through speeches delivered at the inauguration, and the inauguration’s reporting in two English language newspapers (The Pretoria News and The Rand Daily Mail). Furthermore, it reads these meanings in the context of debates in South African political society in the 1930s and 1940s, and argues that the Monument was an important site where Afrikaner nationalists produced a vision of society that legitimised the social ordering of South Africa under apartheid. An analysis of the Monument, therefore, provides a useful window into the specificity of Afrikaner nationalism in 1949 and demonstrates one mechanism through which an Afrikaner identity was produced and placed in the popular imagination. Building on this analysis of apartheid, the paper concludes with a discussion of the possibilities for moving toward a post apartheid society. Building the monument The construction of the Voortrekker Monument was a protracted affair spanning 18 years from its initial planning in 1931 to its completion in 1949. In these years Afrikaner nationalism became a strong political force culminating with the election of the first apartheid government. Fundamental to the growth and mass popularity of the nationalist movement was the articulation of a heroic Voortrekker past in which their journey into the South African interior in the 1840s was represented as pioneering quest for, and achievement of, an independent Afrikaner nation. Although Afrikaner nationalism first emerged in the 1870s it did not gain mass popularity until the 1930s when new urban based Afrikaans speaking organic intellectuals explained a number of structural crises in the South African economy, and the threat these caused to the livelihoods of Afrikaans speakers, through a parochial nationalistic explanatory discourse (Giliomee, 1979; Norval, 1996; O’Meara, 1996). The 1920s and 1930s saw the capitalisation of South African agriculture, and a massive population influx to the cities produced new tensions in urban areas particularly with the emergence of a ‘poor white problem’. Here, relatively unskilled, uneducated, previously rural dwelling Afrikaans speakers migrated to cities and found themselves competing for work with a growing number of natives1 also pour1

I use the problematic term ‘native’ throughout this paper to refer to Africa’s indigenous population. ‘Native’ was the descriptive and designatory term used in the 1930s and 1940s (the period in question) and its continued use here is partly, for reasons of continuity between my discourse and the discourse I

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ing in from the countryside. Although English speakers were undoubtedly affected by the increased competition for work it was the unskilled Afrikaans speakers who suffered the most. Nevertheless, this does not in itself explain the emergence of an Afrikaner nationalism. As Giliomee (1979: 107) makes clear: Viewed from a Nationalist perspective the dominant feature of the South African economy was the vast gap between Afrikaner and English wealth. But from a class perspective the obvious characteristic was the cleavage between the capitalists and workers in a system that exploited the largely unskilled and proletarianised Afrikaner and black labor. However, the 1930s also saw a battle over the political representation of Afrikaans speakers. In 1934 the National Party split, with Hertzog leading a majority of their members into a coalition government with Smut’s South African Party, and Malan leaving the National Party to form the Gesuiwerde Nasionale Party (Purified National Party). Whereas Hertzog subordinated Afrikaner political identity to a united white South Africanist identity and saw the interests of English and Afrikaans speakers as one and the same (Norval, 1996), the urban based intellectuals who supported the Gesuiwerde Nasionale Party explained the poor white problem and mobilised political support “on the basis that they were discriminated and oppressed as Afrikaners” (O’Meara, 1996: 43). The emergence of Afrikaner nationalism as a strong political force owed much to the work of the Afrikaner Broederbond (AB) established in 1918, the Dutch Reformed Church, and numerous other cultural organisations (Giliomee, 1979; McClintock, 1993) although it should be noted that definitions of ‘the Afrikaner’ varied widely and sometimes included English speakers (Giliomee, 1979; Manzo, 1996). Through these cultural institutions Afrikaner intellectuals developed a narrow ethnicist conception of Afrikaner history and identity (Giliomee, 1979; Norval, 1996; O’Meara, 1996) and the inauguration of the Voortrekker Monument was an important moment in the making of this past and identity. It was not, however, the first monument built in honour of the Voortrekkers and formed part of a much larger nationalist reinterpretation of Afrikaner history. As early as 16 December 1865 General Piet Joubert laid the foundation stone for a monument to the Voortrekkers who fled in the Bloukrans massacre, and in 1909 a committee was formed that raised enough funds to purchase the ‘Church of the Vow’ in Pietermaritzburg. However, nothing substantial materialised from numerous commemorative projects until the early 1930s when the Afrikaner Broederbond’s cultural branch, the Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurverenigings (Federation of Afrikaner Cultural Associations — FAK) formed the Sentrale VolksmonumenteKomitee (S.V.K.) in order to “co-ordinat[e]…the different movements seeking to commemorate the Voortrekkers” (Jansen, 1949: 37).

am analysing, and partly, because any uneasiness the reader may feel through its continued use also demonstrates its political and ideological power.

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Established at Bloemfontein on 4 April 1931 the S.V.K. proposed that a monument be completed in time for the planned 1938 Great Trek centenary celebrations. Money was raised initially through a postage stamp issue but in 1935 the government agreed to contribute to its costs on a pound for pound basis (Jansen, 1949). However, the economic depression, and delays in choosing a site and design, resulted in a new timetable whereby the foundation stone was laid in 1938 with plans to unveil the completed monument on 16 December 1943. Despite the lack of a monument to honour the Trek centenary, the 1938 celebrations provided a massive impetus to the nationalist movement (Norval, 1996; McClintock, 1993). The Tweede Trek (Second Trek) saw nine replica oxwagons travel along various routes from Cape Town to Pretoria. Originally planned by the government to foster unity between Afrikaans and English speakers, Norval (1996): 40) argues that with the help of the AB the Tweede Trek “gradually took on the form of an extended re-enactment of the greatness of Afrikaner history, and was used to counter the Afrikaner sense of inadequacy, inferiority, and loss experienced as a result of urbanization and proletarianization”. As the wagons rolled through towns on route to Pretoria they prompted a massive outpouring of nationalist sentiment and the reinvention of an heroic Voortrekker past expressed through a panoply of symbols, rituals, and regalia. The celebrations, McClintock argues, sparked: an orgy of national pageantry, and engulf[ed] the country in a four-month spectacle of invented tradition. Along the way, white men grew beards and white women donned the ancestral bonnets. Huge crowds gathered to greet the wagons. As the trekkers passed through the towns, babies were named after trekker heroes, as were roads and public buildings…The affair climaxed in Pretoria in a spectacular marathon, with explicit Third Reich overtones, led by thousands of Afrikaner boy scouts bearing flaming torches (McClintock, 1993: 69). While the Tweede Trek was a raging success the plans for the Voortrekker Monument encountered further problems. The outbreak of World War Two prevented its completion on schedule and it was finally opened on 16 December 1949. Opening just months after Malan’s Gesuiwerde Nasionale Party’s election victory on the apartheid ticket, the political landscape of South Africa was dramatically different from the early 1930s. Delmont (1993: 79) notes the irony that the Monument “which served the ideological interests of the opposing Gesuiwerde Nasionale Party…should have been largely funded by the government in power, which was supporting a cause that was eventually to lead to its downfall in 1948”.

The Voortrekker Monument inauguration The Voortrekker Monument stands on a hill a few miles outside of Pretoria. Its location is significant because Voortrekker history was seen to culminate at Pretoria and because it is directly visible from Pretoria’s parliament buildings. Surrounded by a stone wall upon which is carved a protective 64 wagon laager, the Monument

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is a square structure with a length and width of 40.5 m and a height of 41 m. In front of its entrance stands a stone sculpture of a Voortrekker mother and child 2, on three of the Monument’s external corners stands a Voortrekker leader and on the fourth there is an ‘unknown’ leader3. Inside there is an upper and lower hall topped by a domed roof. On all four walls in the upper hall — the ‘Hall of Heroes’ — is a 27 panel marble historical frieze depicting key moments in the Voortrekkers journey into South Africa’s interior. In the lower hall is a cenotaph upon which is the inscription Ons vir jou Suid Afrika (We for thee South Africa) and on the wall in front of this burns a ‘flame of civilisation’ (Fig. 1). The Monument’s inauguration took place on 16 December 1949 after a 4 day festival at the monument site. On each day numerous activities (speeches, sermons, film shows, choir performances etc.) were provided to entertain those attending and through these the festival provided a space in which Voortrekker history and culture was invented and propagated. In the Monument’s iconography, the Official Programme, the inauguration speeches, and the spectacle of ceremonies, choral items, religious services, and film shows a particular history, culture, and identity was produced. From analysing the inauguration discourse there are five key discourses giving the Afrikaner nation a particular historical and contemporary identity. These are: the

Fig. 1.

2

The Voortrekker Monument, Pretoria. Source: Heymans (1986).

My reading of the Voortrekker Monument inauguration and Afrikaner nationalism should not exclude alternative readings. Significant here is the gendered dimension of Afrikaner nationalism with the symbolic figure of mother and child dating to the Boer War symbolising national suffering. See McClintock (1993) and van der Watt (1996). 3 The figures are Piet Retief, Andries Pretorius, and Hendrik Potgieter.

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Voortrekkers as pioneers of civilisation; the Christian nation; imagining community; the unified nation; and the authentic nation. Taming the interior: the Voortrekkers as pioneers of civilisation One of the dominant themes at the Voortrekker Inauguration is the construction of a Voortrekker history where their journey is represented as an heroic mission that established civilisation and an independent Afrikaner nation in South Africa’s interior. Delmont (1993) has analysed in some detail how the Monument produces a number of ‘national heroes’ who led this civilising mission — these are found in the sculptured figures outside the Monument and in the historical frieze.4 Although the construction of heroes is clearly important in providing a heroic national narrative, in this section I wish to investigate the supposed achievements of these heroes, namely, the establishment of civilisation in the interior. In particular, there are two important meanings attached to ‘civilisation’ in the monument discourse that deserve elaboration. The first of these are attempts to portray Voortrekker society as a ‘great and worldly’ civilisation. This is achieved through placing their achievements in the same lineage as the civilisations of Europe, China, and Egypt and making the argument that like these great civilisations the Voortrekker’s achievements should be recognised with a monument of their own. The monument, therefore, fulfils a function Heffernan (1995) points to in his study of World War I memorials and symbolises a great national struggle and a nation’s coming of age. In the Official Programme for the inauguration of the Voortrekker Monument Gerard Moerdyk (1949: 44) outlines the Voortrekker’s achievements when he argues they deserve a monument for “tam[ing] Southern Africa” and taking civilisation into the interior after other great civilisations such as the Phoenicians, Romans, and Portuguese had failed. The immensity of this is conveyed in the monument’s size and design that uses architectural techniques drawn directly from Europe. In fact, Moerdyk received his architectural schooling in Europe and borrowed extensively from one European monument, the Volkerschlachtdenkmal in Leipzig (Delmont, 1993). According to Delmont (1993: 85) this monument that commemorates the 1813 Battle of Nations at Leipzig and symbolises Germany’s rebirth “provided an eminently suitable prototype for the Voortrekker Monument”. Although the Voortrekker Monument borrows from European traditions, Moerdyk situates the monument more broadly in the context of monuments to great and historic civilisations both inside and outside of Europe and in doing so argues that Voortrekker claims to civilisation are worthy of commemoration in a monument of their own. The Voortrekker Monument, he writes: 4

Delmont’s (1993) paper provides an important source for historical details concerning the planning and building of the Voortrekker Monument, and its architectural vocabulary that Delmont argues reproduces some of Afrikaner nationalism’s central myths. Among these are firstly, the construction of a number of national heroes; secondly, their love for the country and the ties of blood and soil; thirdly, their love of God, and fourthly, the peaceful basis of their civilising mission.

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…is more or less of the same size as the Mausoleum of Halicarnass…which has served as a model for many great tombs. [It] is smaller than the Dom des Invalides in Paris, the tomb of Napoleon; much smaller than the Taj Mahal…and only one-eleventh the size of the Volkerschlacht Denkmal in Leipzig, Germany. Its volume is only one-twentyseventh of that of one of the Egyptian pyramids and less than one-thousandth of the Great Wall of China. It cannot be classed among the world’s great structures but, none the less, it is an earnest attempt to create that idea of immensity which, alone, can represent the work of the Voortrekkers (Moerdyk, 1949: 47). Speaking at the inauguration ceremony, Malan also constructed the immensity of Voortrekker achievements by comparing their society with other civilisations. “With deep respect and thanksgiving”, he argued, “we now pay tribute to the tough perseverance and heroism which enable them…to lay the foundation for a White Christian civilisation in a greater South Africa” (Malan, 1949: 2). He then continued: This feat was in itself great, but it is still greater when it is borne in mind that three and half centuries had elapsed since the discovery of the route round the southern tip of Africa when the Portuguese, Hollanders and the British — the three great sea faring nations and colonial powers of the world at that time — had sailed round our coasts without penetrating the interior of South Africa with all its savageness and dangers, but also with its immense possibilities. Only the drive of the Voortrekkers could achieve this (Malan, 1949: 2). The second discourse on Voortrekker civilisation is that which gives their society some specific meaning and characteristics. In the monument’s historical frieze and in the speeches delivered at the inauguration ceremony ‘civilisation’ is understood primarily as a law abiding and ordered society, and is juxtaposed against a chaotic and tyrannical native Other. Visual representations in the frieze depict Voortrekker society as well ordered and at peace with itself. The trekkers are shown packing cases, tending cattle, and their images have a sense of harmony and order (Delmont, 1993). The images and written commentary in the Official Programme also represent the Voortrekkers as people with peaceful and honourable intentions. Panel 10, for example, shows a Voortrekker family with Deborah Retief painting her father’s name on a rock on the Kerkenberg (Fig. 2). Moerdyk (1949: 51) notes that “[C]hildren appear in the scene — to remind us that the Voortrekkers were never conquerors but family men, seeking a new home and a new country”. Similarly, Panel 8 (Fig. 3) shows negotiations with Moroko and “proves that the Trekkers did not rob, but constantly tried to negotiate or barter with the native chiefs” (Moerdyk, 1949: 50). The viewer is left in little doubt that the trekkers proceeded nobly through the negotiated treaty rather than the gun. In contrast to these images, the natives are consistently presented as a warring barbarous rabble. While Voortrekker soldiers stand in straight and ordered lines, natives are chaotic, undisciplined, and unordered (Delmont, 1993). In panel 13,

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Fig. 2. Panel 10 of the Voortrekker Monument’s Historical Frieze. Debora Retief paints her father’s name on a rock. Source: Heymans (1986).

Fig. 3. Panel 8 of the Voortrekker Monument’s Historical Frieze. Negotiations with the Barolong Chief, Moroka. Source: Heymans (1986).

Dingaan’s reneging on a peace treaty is presented as a betrayal of civilisation by barbarism (Fig. 4). The murder of Piet Retief and his seventy men is shown next…We see the little elevation where the treaty was signed and where Dingaan and Retief sat to watch the dance of the Zulu regiments. The Boers were seized and dragged half a mile further away, arriving there more dead than alive, to be battered to death with sticks and stones…Piet Retief stands bound but with his blood stained head unbowed, the symbol of white South Africa and civilisation (Moerdyk, 1949: 52). If this was not enough, the next panel shows “the massacre of women and children at Bloukrans” with Moerdyk (1949: 53) noting, “[its] atmosphere…pulsates with the barbarians thirst for blood”.

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Fig. 4. Panel 13 of the Voortrekker Monument’s Historical Frieze. The murder of Retief and his men. Source: Heymans (1986).

The same themes linking civilisation with law and order are found in the inauguration speeches. Speaking on 16 December Havenga, the Minister of finance, argued “[T]he Voortrekkers were…the founders of a tradition of freedom, civilisation and the maintenance of moral law where formerly only the law of the jungle existed” (Havenga, 1949: 3). Moreover, numerous atrocities committed by the trekkers are justified as necessary evils on the road to a law abiding society. Smuts (1949: 4), for example, argued at the inauguration that “Vegkop, Mosega, Blood River, Makapanspoort and similar incidents were necessary as punitive measures to break for all time the power of the barbarous tyrants and to make law and order also the heritage of the Native”. In the speeches, the monument architecture, and the Official Programme the Voortrekkers are represented as bringing civilisation to Africa, and their achievements are measured against those of other universally recognised great civilisations. However, the construction of this particular history is not solely concerned with the past but is rooted in contemporary political debates. After the abolition of slavery the idea of a ‘civilising mission’ became fundamentally important as a justification for the continued poor treatment of natives (Manzo, 1996). This particular interpretation of Voortrekker history enabled Afrikaner nationalists to justify their relationship with native tribes in terms of a tradition of guardianship that protects the natives from themselves. In this respect, Havenga continued to argue that: The large non-European population, relieved of tyranny, learned to look to the white man as their guardian and learned how great and powerful was the justice of the law, and how respect for it brings peace and quite and unanimity…As they were saved from an uncertain existence under blood thirsty tyrants, our task, therefore, is, as Christian guardians, to guide those who look to us as their protectors of human rights, so that their confidence in us can be maintained…The great non-European population will then feel safe and will not seek refuge in unhealthy

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directions. They want to be assured that the European guardian placed over them will see to them and their rights, where they themselves are not in a position to do so (Havenga, 1949: 4–5). In the above passage Havenga draws on a socio-medical language used in South African political discourse to legitimate European control over Native movements and the system of migrant labour. The massive African influx to urban areas in the early twentieth century saw an emergence of urban slum areas, overcrowding, poor sanitation, and, inevitably, a myriad of health problems (Norval, 1996). According to Packard (1989), the associated medical discourse on tuberculosis produced two representations of African experience: the ‘dressed native’ and ‘the healthy reserve’. The first “placed responsibility for the apparent physical and moral failings of urban Africans…on their inability to cope with urban life” (Packard, 1989: 687) and their poor suitability to Western Civilisation. The second image constructed an idyllic rural life to which they were more suited and better adjusted. When returned to the ‘healthy reserve’, Africans supposedly recovered speedily from diseases inflicted through their contact with Western Civilisation and lived happily in their undisturbed ‘traditional’ economy. Taken together, these two myths legitimated a migrant labour system based on short, temporary contracts and also justified the more general policy of separate development (Packard, 1989). The reporting of the Voortrekker celebrations, therefore, offers a specific picture of Voortrekker achievements and attempts to situate Voortrekker identity within worldly civilisations. This discourse on civilisation is important because it justifies the Afrikaner presence in Southern Africa through demonstrating that ‘taming the interior’ benefited previously barbarous native inhabitants and this was achieved through negotiation rather than force. The Christian nation The second theme at the monument inauguration is the construction of Voortrekker society as a Christian society. This is evident in the numerous spaces in the programme given to prayer services, hymns, and choirs; in the references to God and Christian nationalism in the speeches; in the religious metaphors used by the media to describe events at the inauguration; and in the design and symbolism of the monument itself. Moreover, Christianity is rarely invoked without simultaneous appeals to nationhood. In Afrikaner Calvinist ideology, the right to nationhood comes from God, and Christianity and nationalism, therefore, are inextricably linked. This aspect of Voortrekker identity is communicated most effectively in the mythology that developed surrounding the Voortrekker vow. According to Voortrekker historians, before the Battle of Blood River the trekkers, surrounded by up to 50 000 Zulus and facing almost certain death, made a vow to honour God if they prevailed. In the Official Programme the vow is written in full5, and Panel 20 in the historical 5

The vow reads: My brethren and fellow countrymen, at this moment we stand before the holy God of heaven and earth, to make a promise, if He will be with us and protect us, and deliver the enemy into our hands so that we may triumph over him, that we shall observe the day and the date as an anniversary

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frieze shows the Voortrekkers, led by Sarel Cilliers with his “right hand outstretched to heaven” (Moerdyk, 1949: 56) making the historic vow (Fig. 5). Moerdyk (1949: 57) solemnly notes that “[T]he history of mankind is full of unkept vows. Here we have a handful of people who made a vow in their despair, and for a century that vow has been kept by their descendants”. In fact, the marking and keeping of this historic vow was a relatively recent invention that became popular in the late nineteenth century (Thompson, 1985; van der Watt, 1996). Similarly, although a church was built in Pietermaritzburg in 1841 that supposedly fulfilled the vow’s conditions, it was never referred to as the Church of the Vow until depicted as such in the Voortrekker Monument’s historical frieze (van der Watt, 1996). Nevertheless, the mythology that developed around the vow and its narration at the monument led Afrikaners to believe that the Voortrekker journey into the interior was only possible with divine blessing and that Afrikaners were God’s chosen people. The conflation between nationhood and religion is also explicit in the design of the monument. According to Moerdyk (1949: 44–45), the principle motif of the monument is the altar which “remind[s] the world and the descendants of the Voortrekkers of the supreme sacrifice Piet Retief and his men made for their ideals”. Delmont (1993) argues a number of other features also communicate the monument’s ‘shrine-like nature’. Firstly, its huge dome structure draws on an architectural lineage found in religious structures and Christianity. Secondly, inside the monument, light is manipulated “to convey a sense of holy religiosity” (Delmont, 1993: 89) with yellow stained glass imported from Belgium to give light inside the monument a golden glow. Thirdly, dress codes and regulations at the monument such as no shorts,

Fig. 5. Panel 20 of the Voortrekker Monument’s Historical Frieze. Making the vow. Source: Heymans (1986).

in each year and a day of thanksgiving like the Sabbath, in His honour; and that we shall enjoin our children that they must take part with us in this, for a remembrance even for our prosperity; and if anyone sees a difficulty in this, let him return from this place. For the honour of His name shall be joyfully exalted, and to Him the fame and the honour of the victory must be given.

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no bare feet, removal of hats, and no smoking all convey a sense of holiness, respect, and dignity. During the inauguration festivities, Mr M.C. Botha, secretary of the inauguration committee, argued that “[V]isitors” should enter the monument “in a spirit of humble reverence and dedication”. The celebrations “are in the nature of a pilgrimage to pay homage to our forefathers” and “[the monument] is, in fact, a shrine”. However, Botha noted that “some people…had thrown cigarette butts from the upper balcony onto the sarcophagus…others had entered the Monument with their hats on…[and] one man had even laid bets on the possibility that the sun would not shine on December 16” (The Rand Daily Mail, 1949c: 12). Botha’s disdain at someone placing bets on the sun not shining is understandable when one considers the final, and most dramatic, monument feature linking God and nation. The monument is designed with a small opening in the upper dome through which the sun shines. Each year on December 16 (the day of the vow) at midday, a beam of sunlight falls on the cenotaph in the centre of the monument and lights up the inscription “Ons vir jou Suid-Afrika” (We for thee, South Africa)6. This dramatic design feature brings together the features of sacrifice, God, and nationhood, and provides a temporal link to the past. As Delmont (1993: 88) argues, “[I]n conflating the spiritual symbol of altar with the symbolic grave of a war hero and the closing words of the national anthem, and the sunlight with divine blessing, the connection between God and country is overtly made”. The monument and its inauguration, therefore, makes a number of linkages between the Voortrekkers, their Christian ideals, and the Christian basis of the new nation. In the context of political debates in the 1930s and 1940s this representation of a Christian tradition in Afrikaner identity was crucial because it was within a Calvinist framework that Afrikaner nationalists successfully articulated and mobilised a Christian-nationalism (O’Meara, 1983). In response to the poor white question, debates in Afrikaner intellectual circles made sense of Afrikaner dislocation through developing a Christian-national weltanschauung. Of particular importance was the notion of volksebondenheid which held that “ties of blood and volk come first, and that the individual existed only in and through the nation” (O’Meara, 1996: 41). When conflated with the Calvinist principle “sovereignty of spheres” apartheid was given a moral basis with nationalists being able to argue that nations were divinely ordained and should remain separate from each other (Norval, 1996). Imagining community In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson (1991) discusses the important role of pilgrimages in developing ‘national’ communities and a national consciousness. Early pilgrimages inserted otherwise unrelated localities into a system of meaning, and those participating began to imagine themselves as forming some kind of (if not at this stage ‘national’) community. Not only did these pilgrimages have the effect

6

Each verse of the South African national anthem closes with this line.

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of imagining a community, they also mapped that community with a particular geographical scope. A number of activities at the Voortrekker Monument inauguration played a similar function to the early pilgrimages Anderson discusses. Of particular importance were three symbolic journeys: first, was the arrival of the ‘rapportryers’ (messengers) bringing messages of support from across the nation; second, the passing of the ‘flame of civilisation’ around the country before being placed permanently in the monument; and third, was the arrival of the 1938 oxwagon. The rapportryers were the first symbolic journey to arrive at the monument. Each rider brought messages from different regions of the nation and these were visually represented by each rapportryer carrying their state’s flag. Their journey around the nation allowed shared experiences to develop between different localities, and gave each locality a stake in the inauguration ceremony. This role in “bringing back a new national consciousness” (The Pretoria News, 1949c: 1) was widely commented upon in the media. According to The Rand Daily Mail (1949d: 13) the crowd “cheered vociferously as 25 rapportryers, accompanied by a commando of more than 100 men, cantered into the arena with the red, white, and blue Voortrekker flag at their head”. Through their journey the rapportryers “brought inspiration for the entire Afrikaner people” and came with messages from “practically every organisation, the Church, communities, and individuals” (The Rand Daily Mail, 1949e: 13). The arrival of the flame of civilisation and the oxwagon from the 1938 Trek reenactment were greeted in similar fashion. Unlike the rapportryers, neither of these journeys were national with both symbols making the short trip from Pretoria. However, both these symbols had traversed the nation in the 1938 celebrations. The Pretoria News (1949l: 5) reported that the flame “had been lit eleven years before beside van Riebeeck’s Statue in Cape Town, and had been carried by runners across the Cape, the Free State and the Transvaal” for the laying of the foundation stone. Since then, the flame had been “guarded by Pretoria University, and was now going to its final home in the monument”. The flame of civilisation and 1938 oxwagon, therefore, provide a number of important historical linkages: Firstly, their arrival marks the arrival of civilisation in the interior; secondly, they directly link the current celebrations with the feelings of nationhood established 11 years previously; thirdly, having previously travelled throughout the nation, the flame and oxwagon, like the rapportryers, generated shared experiences and a mapping of the nation’s geographical scope; finally, with the flame passing to its final resting place in the Voortrekker Monument there is a sense of the completion of a journey. It signifies that civilisation has conquered barbarism and the journey to nationhood is complete. Alongside these three symbolic journeys there were two other important representations of community evident in the reporting of the inauguration festival. These are found in the newspaper descriptions of ‘camp life’ that present the festival community as a microcosm of the wider national community. The first constructs a community based on deep seated traditional values. Casting its eye over the monument camp scenes, The Rand Daily Mail describes an idyllic lifestyle born from Voortrekker traditions and values. Thousands of people, it reports, were drawn to “a

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mammoth camp fire, symbolic of the traditional hospitality of the Afrikaaner people” and around the fire one finds campers “exchanging friendly greetings, singing lledjies, eating sausages, and meeting old acquaintances” (The Rand Daily Mail, 1949b: 1). The community spirit sees campers rejecting “their own private fires in front of their tents” and making “huge communal cooking places” the “kitchens of the camp” (The Pretoria News, 1949b: 1). At the camp, it seems, everyone lives in harmony. It is a time where “aged couples” are “helped by attentive young people” and “an old man assist[s] a blind young man across the square to a family grouped round a smoking camp fire” (The Rand Daily Mail, 1949b: 1). A second representation of community is that of Afrikanerdom as a modern society. A primary indicator of the nation’s modernity is the sheer scale of the festival and newspaper coverage dazzles the reader with festival facts and figures regarding its enormous size, popularity, and the planning involved in organising such an undertaking. The Pretoria News (1949f: 12) is in awe of the festival’s scale, reporting that, with over 180 000 people expected, the problems encountered “come down to planning a city” that would “enable the ”residents“ to live comfortably and under healthy conditions for the whole period of the festivities”. Value is placed on the provision of modern conveniences, health and sanitation standards, and the ability to cope with modern problems such as traffic congestion. The festival, we are informed, requires 23 miles of road for 13 000 cars, 540 taps and 32 shower blocks, and 1100 street lights powered by 17 miles of electric cable. The relaying of these dazzling organisational achievements constructs the festival as an indicator of modernity, progress, and of the achievements of civilisation in Africa. If the festival indicates, in some senses, a marking of progress, and indication of the South Africa’s place amongst western technological society, the current civilised modern state directly results from the ideals and sacrifices of the Voortrekkers. The discourses on community give Afrikaner identity a set of traditional values drawn from their Voortrekker ancestors while simultaneously demonstrating that the community has progressed and is ready to take its place in the modern world. These two features of contemporary Afrikanerdom sit quite easily with each other as The Pretoria News (1949a: 1) argues: In the most extreme shades of Technicolor, one refreshment stall advertised popcorn, hamburgers, hot dogs and other American delicacies, while the latest tunes to please the swing fans blared forth from a radiogram. Alongside a more modest stall advertises coffee and biscuits to the reel of Afrikaans folk-songs. There were listeners at each stall. The inauguration festival provided an important occasion for imagining a national community. The festival provided a space for a spectacular display and performance of nationalist symbols and rituals. Organised spectacle of this type is, according to McClintock (1993), a primary mechanism for inventing national imagined communities. Nationalism “inhabits the realm of fetishism” (McClintock, 1993: 70) and proceeds through the ritual display of fetish objects — flags, anthems, maps, mass rallies, folk dances, cuisine — prominent at the inauguration. Furthermore, the festival

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inserts its participants within technologies of vision common to the Great Exhibitions of the early twentieth century where the visitors themselves formed part of the spectacle and could literally see themselves forming part of a larger community (Bennett, 1995). With over 250 000 people attending, and the event relayed to the rest of the nation on radio, the festival succeeded in creating and displaying a new Afrikaner led nation. Moreover, the discourse on community spirit and traditional values in descriptions of camp life looked to the Voortrekker past in order to represent the nation’s foundational values. Its representation as simultaneously traditional and modern was important in giving an Afrikaner led nation credibility in the eyes of English speakers and capital because previously the Voortrekker’s journey was seen as a flight from civilisation and the liberal influences of the anti slavery lobby (Etherington, 1991). According to O’Meara (1996: 62) English speakers viewed “[Afrikaner’s] language, their culture, their Calvinism and their politics as pathetic hangovers from a pre-industrial age”. The representation of Afrikanerdom at the monument as bearers of a proud tradition yet forward looking and modern was clearly important in countering these images. The unified nation The fourth theme of the inauguration speeches was a plea for unity between the two white sections of South Africa’s population. In this respect the monument’s meaning began to transcend the rather parochial Voortrekker/Afrikaner identity scripted for it in other monument discourses, and it became a symbol for the future, and a symbol of unity and tolerance between the English and Afrikaner. The evening before the inauguration, the editor of The Pretoria News argued that: [T]omorrow has every chance of being something more than the inauguration of a monument, of even a monument to the Voortrekkers. It may well turn out to be a beacon on that road to tolerance and so to unity, without which this country will fail under the problems that lie ahead of it (The Pretoria News, 1949k: 4). Before proceeding with a discussion of this theme it is important to draw attention to the sources used in my analysis. Both The Pretoria News and The Rand Daily Mail are English language newspapers serving the English speaking community, and representations of ‘white unity’ found in these papers could be interpreted as a significant departure from the ‘official’ meanings sanctioned by the monument committee in the Official Guide and inauguration speeches. The newspaper’s are arguably carving out a space of belonging for English speakers within the new Afrikaner dominated nation. However, the theme of unity is not only found in the reporting of English language newspapers. It is also clearly evident in the speeches delivered at the inauguration, in the Official Guide, and is commemorated in the monument’s historical frieze. What this points to is the more general contradiction and undecidability within Afrikaner nationalism alluded to earlier whereby definitions of belonging sometimes excluded the English as culturally and ethnically different and sometimes included

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them as racially the same (Manzo, 1996). This tension is a recurrent theme in Afrikaner nationalist thought and illustrates the collectively incoherent attempts to articulate principles of belonging. This is clearly expressed by the Afrikaner Broederbond’s founder S.J. du Toit who described the Bond as an organisation “in which all who recognise Africa as their fatherland will live together and work as brothers of a single house, though they be of English, Dutch, French or German descent…” (quoted in Manzo, 1996: 80). I elaborate on the importance of this tension in the next section, here it is important to stress that the idea of white unity is not one confined to English language newspapers but has a long tradition in Afrikaner nationalist thought. The plea for white unity, therefore, was not without precedent. In the face of other more exclusive themes at the monument, white unity was constructed around three axis. The first of these involved presenting Voortrekker history in a way that emphasised the contributions of English speakers and the race unity that existed in the past. In a ceremony during the inauguration festival the Mayor of Grahamstown handed a bible to the inauguration committee. This gesture supposedly recaptured the spirit of unity from 1837 when the English settlers gave a bible to the Voortrekkers prior to their departure into South Africa’s interior (a scene also captured in the monument’s historical frieze). Speaking at the monument, Grahamstown’s mayor recalled that “for seventeen years Trekkers and Settlers had lived side by side…their difficulties had evoked a real mutual affection, and both sections had stood together to fight the evils of those days”. In presenting the bible he wished to “perpetuate that feeling of brotherhood which existed between our forebearers” and hoped that “the peoples of South Africa will follow the message therein contained, and will go forward to live in such brotherhood and single-mindedness that we shall take our true place among the nations of the world” (The Pretoria News, 1949g: 5). In other speeches there are numerous references to a strong past relationship between English settlers and the Voortrekkers. Smuts, speaking at the inauguration ceremony argued that native tribes were often defeated only because the English and Afrikaner fought together: …there was a considerable measure of cordial co-operation between the old Afrikaner people and the recently arrived English settlers in the eastern border area of the Cape. There was a good feeling and there was joint action in the Kaffir Wars. Even during the Trek there was strong English sympathy for the Trekkers in their uncertain undertaking…In Natal there was every evidence of good feelings and relations between the Voortrekkers and the few settlers at Port Natal, and in the battles which they later fought with Dingaan they fought together, and English blood was shed alongside Afrikaner blood. Of racial feeling between the whites there was no sign (Smuts, 1949: 3). The second axis around which white unity was constructed was in the newspapers claims to be reflecting grass roots feelings of empathy between the English and Afrikaners who recognise their shared South Africanism. Both Afrikaners and English speakers attended the festival and The Pretoria News’ roving reporter argued that it spurned a “a spirit of tolerance and understanding” between these two groups,

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and if this “grows and spreads [it] must have its effect on the country as a whole” (The Pretoria News, 1949n: 1). This feeling, however, is not recognised by the official festival organisers. Both of the newspapers criticise the decision to hold ceremonies and speeches in Afrikaans, and report that when the Mayor of Grahamstown “said a few words in Afrikaans to the effect that he could not deliver his speech in Afrikaans, he got as many cheers as anyone” (The Pretoria News, 1949j: 4). The organising committee is out of touch with the feelings of the populace who want “the two sections of the European peoples to share a common heritage, common beliefs and emotions and a common spirit of nationhood” (The Pretoria News, 1949i: 1). The key themes emphasised in the media discourse are the values shared by the two European population groups and most important here is their shared South African nationhood. Although “Afrikaans is the predominant language in the camp” The Rand Daily Mail (1949a: 1) reports that “a number of English speaking people are living in tent city” and “[A] family from Durban drove up to attend the inauguration because they want to be good South Africans”. The third axis around which unity is constructed is through the articulation of contemporary threats and dangers facing white South Africa. If the English and Afrikaner share a common South Africanism it is against the threats posed by the still unresolved Native question, miscegenation, and communism that this identity is formed. As Malan (1949: 7) argued: …the Godless communism which is the upsetting of everything the Voortrekkers built up and regarded as sacred, continues to rage like a destructive and deadly cancer in the dark. That which confronts you threateningly is nothing less than modern and outwardly civilised heathendom as well as absorption into semibarbarism through miscegenation and disintegration of the white race. As was the case with the other themes in the inauguration discourse, it is clear that the representation of a united history and citizenship is as much concerned with contemporary events as with the past. In this respect, Havenga (1949: 5), argued that “[T]he…great moral principle which [the Voortrekkers] handed down to us is the principle of equality and unity” and because of contemporary challenges “[I]n South Africa there is not a single leader who is not striving for unity between the two European sections of the community”. The monument and the 4 day festival is, in this formulation, an event that has allowed and signifies the coming together of the white populations. The inauguration ceremony provides “a climax of a pilgrimage unequalled in the history of Southern Africa” with the crowd witnessing “a passage of history which has brought the European people of the Union closer together than any single event in the story of this land” (The Pretoria News, 1949m: 1). The monument, therefore, symbolises much more than Voortrekker achievements; it symbolises a coming together and a nation reconciled and at peace with itself. In his speech on the final day, General Smuts compares the monument to a monument to Christ on the Argentine/Chile border said

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to symbolise ever lasting peace between the two nations. The Voortrekker Monument, he argues, must: …be a similar symbol, the Christ of Africa, a symbol not only of the past, but also of our reconciliation and ever lasting peace, and our pledge also in our colour relations to continue to strive after the just, the good, and the beautiful (Smuts, 1949: 6) As noted above, there is an obvious tension between the monument’s function in producing an Afrikaner identity and its symbolism here as a site of unity between English and Afrikaner. However, the South Africanism attempted at the monument was different to the broad South Africanism that characterised political society in the 1920s and 1930s which understood the interests of Afrikaans and English speakers as essentially the same. Here, unity is presented as the unity between two distinct ethnic groups and the dominant partner in this is the Afrikaner who is inviting English speakers to become part of the new Afrikaner led South African nation. The authentic nation A final theme at the Voortrekker Monument’s opening is a rhetoric of representational authenticity. This is primarily found in descriptions of the historical frieze and the care taken to accurately reproduce the lives of Voortrekker pioneers. Panel 1 of the frieze shows Voortrekkers packing their belongings onto wagons, and Moerdyk (1949: 49) notes that “[m]uch careful research was undertaken to ensure that everything was historically correct and that all the items did exist at the time. Experts gave advice about the oxen, sheep, wagons, furniture, and so on”. Similarly, panel 13 depicts the signing of a treaty between Rieteef and Dingaan, and Moerdyk assures us both the table and chairs are historically authentic; describing panel 10 Moerdyk informs the visitor “[t]he writing on the panel is a faithful reproduction of the original words on the Kerkenburg rock” (Moerdyk, 1949: 51). A further technique in the rhetoric of authenticity is the use of Voortrekker descendants as models for figures in the historical frieze. Panel 5 showing the Battle of Vegkop, for example, is one of many panels asserting its historical authenticity by using genuine Voortrekker descendants as models: In the middle stands a little boy priming a rifle from a powder horn. Paul Kru¨ger relates in his reminiscences that he took part in the Battle of Vegkop at the age of ten. The little boy who posed for this figure is a great-grandson of Paul Kru¨ger. Most of the other figures were posed for by descendants of the Voortrekkers (Moerdyk, 1949: 50). The use of Voortrekker descendants was not confined to the production of the historical frieze. In the monument celebrations numerous speeches and presentations made use of this technique to make connections between the Voortrekker past and present. During the celebrations Mr Justice C. Newton Thompson was chosen to

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speak before the massed crowds because he was the great grandson of William Rowland Thompson, the mayor of Grahamstown who presented a bible to the Trek leader Uys prior to their journey into the interior. Other scenes and celebrations made use of Voortrekker descendants (The Pretoria News, 1949e), original oxwagons (The Pretoria News, 1949d), bibles (The Pretoria News, 1949h) and, of course, the Voortrekker vow. According to Delmont (1993: 92), using Voortrekker descendants as models for the historical frieze and “stress[ing]…the authenticity and accurate representation of everyday objects” is a technique used to validate the recovery of a Voortrekker past as “truth” and based on historical “fact”; and she continues to argue that the sculptural “canon of naturalisation is…an ideal political tool particularly suited to a propagandistic message” (Delmont, 1993: 93). The function of this sculpting technique, however, is significant less for its ability to be ideologically manipulated and more the fact that the discourse at the Voortrekker Monument sought to represent itself as truth. By stressing the truth and authenticity of its representations the inauguration discourse follows a logocentric logic and works to exclude the possibility and legitimacy of forms of social division other than those presented at the monument.

Conclusion: authenticity, ambiguity, apartheid, and post apartheid What is clear from the Voortrekker Monument’s inauguration is the variety of meanings the event and monument carries. It was primarily an occasion through which an Afrikaner identity was produced on the basis of a heroic Voortrekker past, but was also a site for redefining South Africanism. The Voortrekker Monument and inauguration festivities (re)produced a specific Voortrekker identity as an originary moment in modern day Afrikaner identity. In doing so, it articulated a new conception of nationalism based on ethnicity and this effected a split in the previous South Africanism/European identity into different ethnic groupings. By giving architectural form to an Afrikaner nationalist history that redrew societal divisions along an ethnic axis, the monument celebrates a defining characteristic of apartheid: the specificity of apartheid lay in its articulation of ethnicity as the basis of nationhood and this new social division distinguishes apartheid from earlier segregationist policies (Norval, 1996). Although there are tensions between representations of white unity and Afrikaner difference in the monument discourse it was precisely this undecidability between these two grounds of social division that prevented apartheid discourses fully suturing the social structure (Norval, 1996). In the 1930s and 1940s the invention of ethnic groupings in South Africa was confined to Afrikaners and their attempts to make sense of numerous social dislocations. As this new form of social division moved from, in Laclau’s (1990) terms, myth (addressing the interests of a particular constituency) to a broader social imaginary structuring the whole of South African society, it was necessary for the principle of ethnicity to apply to all social groups. Therefore, further to splitting a unitary European identity, the singularity of the category ‘native’ was also put in question (Norval, 1995). Thus, in the period when Afrikanerdom reinvented itself,

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a series of reports and studies also disaggregated ‘natives’ into different ethnic or Bantu groupings. This vision later became spatially expressed through the policies of ‘Grand apartheid’ that forcibly promoted the ‘separate development’ of Bantu groupings in the ‘homelands’. There is, of course, nothing natural about such ethnic groupings: the social dislocations could have been articulated in other terms7. Although nationalisms constantly appeal to tradition and trace their roots to heroic pasts, this analysis of their construction reveals the Janus nationalist face that looks to the past but is also rooted in contemporary concerns. The Voortrekker Monument produced an Afrikaner identity by reconstructing Voortrekker history in the face of a set of contemporary problems and, in this sense, the production of a distinct Afrikaner identity was as much related to the 1930s poor white problem as to any historical basis of nationhood. Further to illustrating some processes involved in producing new forms of political identity in South Africa in the 1930s and 1940s, it is important to conclude by asking what this analysis of apartheid can contribute to contemporary debates in South Africa concerning ‘nation building’ and the search for new forms of identification suitable for the post apartheid era. Understanding the specificity of apartheid, therefore, is important if we are to think seriously about what the post in post apartheid might mean. The first four themes analysed all describe the content of Afrikaner nationalist thought. The final theme of authenticity, however, describes the logic of representation of nationalist thought, and it is important to attend to both the content of apartheid and its representational strategies. It is precisely this aspect of apartheid that Derrida points to in an essay written for the anti-apartheid art exhibition Art against apartheid. Apartheid, he argues, is the expression par excellence of western logocentrism and the search for purity, essence, certainty and truth: APARTHEID: by itself the word occupies the terrain like a concentration camp. System of partition, barbed wire, crowds of squared off solitudes. Within the limits of this untranslatable idiom, a violent arrest of the mark, the glaring harshness of abstract essence (heid) seems to speculate in another regime of abstraction, that of confined separation. The word concentrates separation, raises it to another power and sets separation itself apart:…By isolating being apart in some sort of essence or hypostatis, the word corrupts it into a quasi-ontological segregation. At every point, like all racisms, it tends to pass segregation off as natural — and as the very law of the origin…It institutes, declares, writes, inscribes, prescribes. A system of marks, it outlines space in order to assign forced residence or to close off borders. It does not discern, it discriminates (Derrida, 1995: 54). Apartheid, therefore, did not merely introduce ethnicity as the basis for ‘national’ groupings, but it also asserted the truth, essence, and rigidity of the boundaries it

7 Liberalism, National Socialism, Communism and Pan Africanism were all other forms of identification available.

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drew; and in doing so it denied the possibility of alternative modes of identification. To attain a post apartheid situation, therefore, implies moving to a system of representation that encourages diversity and ambiguity, and also resists closure. A post apartheid logic would recognise itself as perpetually incomplete and open to revision. As Norval (1995: 43–44) argues: A post-apartheid order would, therefore, only be properly post-apartheid if it succeeds in ordering itself around the principle of openness and the need for continuous self-creation, resisting forms of closure characteristic of the onto-theological principles of apartheid discourse. What a post apartheid order calls for is for political identities to instigate a new relationship with difference. The possibilities of this lie in the double movement facing the constitution of identity, what Connolly (1991: 9) terms the “two problems of evil”. The first refers to a structural necessity in identity construction; namely, “[t]he consolidation of identity through the constitution of difference”. The second, however, “[t]he self-reassurance of identity through the construction of otherness” is “a temptation that readily insinuates itself into that logic”. The problem for post apartheid political identities, therefore, is how to cultivate respect and tolerance for difference without constituting it as Other. According to Norval (1996), Laclau’s (1990) concept of radical democracy offers possibilities for such a relationship with difference. But given that a moment of exclusion is a structural necessity in identity construction, the task for “a democratic politics…[is] to ensure that as many differences as possible are drawn in before the inevitable moment of closure arrives” (Norval, 1996: 303). This raises important questions concerning the search for a new unifying national identity in post apartheid South Africa, and also poses questions concerning strategies for remembering apartheid — the past on which new identities are forged. In this reading South Africa requires forms of remembrance that are not grounded in a discourse of authenticity and closure, but seek to accommodate diversity, remain ambiguous, and open to contestation and revision. It also raises questions for geographers concerning the radicalisation of space as a political technology. Geographers can ask how Lefebvre’s (1998) “spaces of representation” can be transformed into spaces for representation and have much to contribute to questions concerning how space can function differently. On this issue, Young (1992) points to the counter monument movement in Germany as an interesting example of the radicalising of monuments and their relationship to public memory. Conventional monuments, he argues, “seal memory off from awareness” (Young, 1992: 272) and “in shouldering memory-work” they often “divest…ourselves of the obligation to remember” (Young, 1992: 273). The counter-monument movement, on the other hand, produces monuments where visitors are participants in the making of memory rather than consumers. One such example is the “Monument against Fascism, War and Violence — and for Peace and Human Rights” in Harburg. Built as a 12 m high and 1 m square pillar, this monument is plated with

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a layer of soft lead onto which visitors can add inscriptions. An inscription in German, French, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and English near its base reads: We invite the citizens of Harburg and visitors to the town, to add their names here to ours. In doing so, we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more and more names cover this 12 meter tall lead column, it will gradually be lowered into the ground. One day it will have disappeared completely and the site of the Harburg monument against fascism will be empty. In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice. This monument, therefore, produces a new technology of space where visitors engage with the past. What the monument produces is a democratic civic space that calls forth plural pasts (Norval, 1998), and produces democratic citizens empowered in the remaking of history. In its contemporary nation building project South Africa needs to build forms of memorialisation that move beyond the logocentric logic of apartheid through which the Voortrekker past was produced at the Voortrekker Monument’s inauguration. To be properly post apartheid South Africa must address the past through a democratic logic of inclusion and, like the counter monument movement in Germany, much imaginative work is being conducted on these issues in South Africa. Geographers, I would suggest, have much to learn from and contribute to these debates.8

Acknowledgements Thanks to James Sidaway, Marcus Power, and to three anonymous referees for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Thanks to Cheryl McEwan for gathering some of the material used, to the E.S.R.C. for funding my research, to the Centre for Southern African Studies at the University of the Western Cape for support and assistance while conducting my fieldwork, and to the Voortrekker Monument, Pretoria for permission to reproduce copyrighted material.

References Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities. New York: Verso. Atkinson, D., & Cosgrove, D. (1998). Urban rhetoric and embodied identities: City, nation, and empire at the Vittorio Emanuele II Monument in Rome 1870–1945. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88 (1), 28–49. Barnes, T. J., & Duncan, J. S. (1992). Writing worlds: discourse, text and metaphor in the representation of landscape. London: Routledge. Bell, J. (1999). Redefining national identity in Uzbekistan: symbolic tensions in Tashkent’s official public landscape. Ecumene, 6 (2), 183–213.

8 See Nuttall and Coetzee (1998) for an introduction to some of the ways in which South Africa is remembering its past. See Norval (1998) for a discussion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

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