David Goldblatt

South Africa: The Structure of Things Then

Click here to read Goldblatt's Introduction

After the war there was a time of hope. It seemed then that the values which South Africans had helped fight for would begin to thrive here and Black people would be freed from discrimination. Surely our men who had gone "up north", fought in the desert and in Italy, the men who had spent years in prisoner of war camps, would not tolerate anything less? Was not the defeat of fascism the triumph of humanism? So it seemed when I was in high school.

However, far from dismantling discriminatory legislation, the prime minister, Field Marshall Jan Smuts, who had led the country through the war and helped write the Charter of the United Nations, actually extended it. Yet change still seemed possible. Though steeped in White paternalism, his United Party did what was expedient and pragmatic rather than ideological; gradually [it seemed] they would muddle through to a better dispensation. Then the National Party won the parliamentary elections of 1948 and suddenly we were governed by ideologues who believed the Afrikaners to be a herrenvolk predestined to rule the country, who believed Blacks to be inherently inferior to Whites, who were blatantly anti-semitic, who had opposed our entry into the war and some of whom had openly supported the Nazis. I remember gloom and confusion among family and friends and a frightening foreboding. I was then 17 years old, in my last year of high school and increasingly obsessed with photography.

In the early 1950s, as the apartheid edifice began to emerge from Nationalist rule, I tried to photograph a few of the events surrounding the imposition of the system. The outside world seemed neither to know nor care what was happening and I took it upon myself to inform and to stir consciousness through the publication of my photographs overseas. I failed. Not only did I lack experience and skill and the nerve to operate cooly in situations of violence and confrontation but I seemed deficient in an essential ingredient: I had no driving need to record those situations and moments of extremity that were the stuff of the media. It was to the quiet and commonplace where nothing "happened" and yet all was contained and immanent that I was most drawn.

Discouraged, I concentrated for a time on family photographs, improving my command of the medium and university studies. When I emerged again in the 60s I knew that I could no longer respond to the situation as I had before. I was neither an activist nor a missionary. Yet I had begun to realise an involvement with this place and the people among whom I lived that would not be stilled and that I needed to grasp and probe. I wanted to explore the specifics of our lives, not in theories but in the grit and taste and touch of things, and to bring those specifics into that particular and peculiar coherence that the camera both enables and demands.

The first group of photographs that I attempted of structures was a series made in 1961 on places of worship on the Witwatersrand. I came to this from two starting points. The first was a fascination with the idea of faith. Notwithstanding recurrent nightmares during childhood about the infiniteness of everlasting hellfire and uncertainty over the domicile of my unbaptised Jewish soul in the hereafter, arising from an otherwise happy primary school education by nuns, I don't think I was ever able to believe in or pray to the deity with much conviction - except momentarily under extreme threat of imminent disaster. Neither nuns nor rabbi could ever enable me to transcend the banal with that leap of faith required of true believers. When I came to Bertrand Russell I found affirmation for what was, I think, an innate scepticism on the one hand and the realisation that I was not able to adopt an entirely rationalist position on the other. I was - am - then, generally sceptical of believers' beliefs but also in awe, and sometimes envious, of their ability to believe. If blind, unreasoning faith often repels me it sometimes moves and always intrigues.

Thus it was endlessly mysterious, even incredible to me that people - for the most part "ordinary", "practical" people, probably not much given to abstruse thought and discussion - should pour such effort and resource into the erection of structures devoted to so abstract an idea as God. The ubiquity and persistence of the phenomenon, the immensity of humankind's investment in God was to me quite awesome.

The second starting point for this early series of photographs of structures was an inchoate but growing awareness that whereas some structures seemed quite detached from this place, the Witwatersrand or, more broadly, South Africa, others grew almost viscerally from it. This seemed to have less to do with architecture than with indefinable qualities of "belonging". I wanted to explore these notions and bring them into the light with the camera.

In the event most of the photographs were poorly articulated and strained after effect. However things happened in their making and, in particular, in the photographing of a Hindu temple in Martindale, Johannesburg, which suggested and clarified a great deal about the qualities that were becoming important to me.

Martindale was a narrow strip of marginal land on which a ribbon of small shops clung to the side of an arterial road running into the city from the west. Most of the shopkeepers were Indians who lived behind or above their premises. Immediately to the south lay Western Native Township; to the north was Sophiatown. Both Western and Sophiatown had, for many years, been occupied mainly by Africans. Under the government's apartheid plans Western had been declared a group area for Coloureds and 13 000 Africans removed from there to Soweto. Sophiatown, which was one of the few suburbs of Johannesburg in which Africans had been permitted freehold title to land, was declared a group area for Whites; the African landowners were stripped of their ownership and, in the presence of a substantial force of armed policemen, 33 000 Africans were removed to Meadowlands, near Soweto.

In August 1961 little remained of Sophiatown but acres of rubble overgrown by kakiebos. It was yet to become the White suburb of Triomf - the triumph of apartheid. Near its southern border stood the temple, easily overlooked when driving into the city through this bitter yet strangely unremarkable landscape. A small, shoddy building, on an unkempt bit of land. With the sun behind it in the early morning there was no photograph and I decided to return later when it would be better lit. At 11am it was revealed with startling clarity. The temple had an extraordinary presence, a composure which seemed to emanate from a harmonic resonance between the devices of Hinduism which adorned it, and the building modes and materials of the Witwatersrand in which it had been constructed. Its gable and entrance porch reminded me of the somewhat more opulent yet still modest embellishments of the synagogue and the Methodist and Catholic churches in my home town, Randfontein, 40 kilometres to the west. It was finished in coarse stucco, the kind on which we had scraped our knees when clambering over backyard walls as boys. Seen in the raking winter light, it had a rootedness in that bleak place and yet a wholeness eloquent of the Hindu belief in the oneness of all life. The photographs flowed naturally, almost inevitably, from the subject itself.

When I went back about 18 months later to look again at the temple it was gone. Unknown to me, Martindale too had been declared a group area for Whites; the shopkeepers and their families had been removed to Lenasia, 32 kilometres beyond the city and their temple had been razed. Had I known of the government's plans I would probably have photographed something of the community's removal and the temple's destruction. However there was a sense in which the existing photographs seemed somehow to suffice for me: they seemed to hint, beyond the bearing of witness to the demolition, at the inestimable value of what was lost.

Until I photographed the Martindale temple I had often been troubled by an unease with the tonal qualities of my photographs. They were quite lacking in the subtle gradations of work that I saw reproduced in magazines and books from Europe and the United States. Now I began to realise that in trying to emulate those qualities I had been false to our light. In much of South Africa the light is hard-edged and intense and integral to my sense of the place. It is difficult to convey the excitement of this simple perception. Instead of fighting the light I began to embrace and work gladly within it. Congruence became possible between my awareness of what I knew so intimately and the photographs I attempted of it. Over the years I have used several modes of rendering tonalities under our light. There has been a never-quite-resolved tension between my sense of what is out there and my rendering of it in the print, between the complexity of reality and the sensuality of the print.

I think my experience of the Martindale temple was the first occasion on which I became aware with strong immediacy of a structure and, more particularly a place of worship, as an expression of values. For the Martindale community this was a place set apart, sanctified by the rites performed within it, the most visible and indelible assertion they could make of their faith in the dogma which they proclaimed and the beliefs and values associated with it. Because it is was so closely identified with what was sacred, because it was so public, because, once built, it was for all practical purposes immutable, and because it required so substantial a dedication of their resources, much care and thought would have gone into the choices that had to be made in regard to its building. From the first mooting of the idea of a temple to the raising of funds and selection of a site; from the balancing of size against needs and costs, to the ways in which ideas of what was traditional, hallowed, innovative, suitable, respectable and respectful were blended; from the selection of artisans, materials and appointments right through to the manner of throwing plaster onto a wall: the temple was the outcome of hundreds of choices. Held in its bricks and mortar was an intricate web of ideas and values which constituted the beliefs of this community regarding their relationship not only to the ineffable, but to themeselves within the world they lived in. It was, indeed, their self-image made manifest.

Gradually I came to see structures and their form as expressions of value. If it is a truism that all structures are necessarily the outcome of choices.made by their makers, and are therefore an expression of their makers' values, the quality of that expression is as varied as the people who make the choices.

The present work has grown out of and uses some of the photographs of earlier essays. It was a natural step to take into areas previously only touched upon. Its immediate beginning was in a visit to the Strand in April 1983. This seaside resort near Cape Town had long been popular with up-country Afrikaners. Some owned holiday cottages or had retired there, others had built blocks of flats; lodges, hotels, shops and cafes catered especially to Afrikaners and there were several Afrikaner Protestant churches. The town was heavily invested with "Afrikaansness" and I was attracted by the variety and strength of the ways in which this had been expressed in its buildings. After a few days of intense photography I decided to explore our structural heritage more generally, and by the end of that year I had bought a camper to enable me the better to do this. Then, for some years, whenever I could get away, I criss-crossed South Africa, seeking out and photographing structures.

The 80s were the most violent and perhaps the gloomiest years of apartheid. There were moments when it seemed improper to be doing something so remote from the terrible events of the day. But mostly I worked with the sense that it was imperative to put on film what seemed so immediatley and potently eloquent of the civilisation we had built. After 2 February 1990 it became evident that apartheid had ended and that this essay - happily - had reached its conclusion. It was about that other time. It remained to complete the photography and write the text.

Although this introduction and the extended captions are more explicit and detailed than I would have liked, they are no more than an attempt to give, for the reader who wishes it, an extremely condensed, highly selective insight to the "structural context", the densely complex matrix of cultural, social, political and economic interaction from which the subjects photographed emerged and in which they had their "being".

The particular importance I attach to places of worship as repositories and expressions of communally held beliefs and values is evident in the large proportion of these structures among the photographs. Of these, for reasons explained below, by far the greatest attention has been given to the Afrikaner Protestant Churches. Looking at many of them during my travels, I was struck by distinctive changes in their architecture which demanded explanation. Since very little has been written about these matters I have ventured an inexpert view.

The selection of subjects and of the photographs shown here is subjective and idiosyncratic and makes no pretence to being representative of anything other than my own concerns.The photographs in this book are about structures in South Africa which gave expression to or were evidence of some of the forces that shaped our society before the end of apartheid. Many of our structures tell much and plainly and with extraordinary clarity not only of qualities of existence and of the needs, conceits, longings and fears of those who built and used them, but often too, of vital beliefs and ideologies upon which lives here were contingent. Our structures do not dissemble. Perhaps this has to do with youth and naivety as well as a certain bluntness. This is not a society in which expression has been muted by obfuscating encrustations of centuries of art and refinement. Even when we attempt symbolism it has the quality of clumsy transparency rather than dissimulation. Our structures often declare quite nakedly, yet eloquently, what manner of people they were who built them and what they stood for. There was - is - a rawness to the forces at work here that is evidenced in much that we have built. I would like to sketch a few of those forces.

The establishment of the first permanent European settlement at the Cape in 1652 was the beginning of the time of White domination. Although substantial vestiges of that era will probably linger for many years, it ended effectively on 2 February 1990, with the speech by President FW de Klerk, in which he abdicated on behalf of the White minority from the dream and substance of continued White supremacy. I call the period 1652 to 1990 the Era of Baasskap. Its essential core is this: as Whites gradually settled the country that is now South Africa, they dispossessed Blacks, often violently, from the greater part of the land and subjected them to White domination by a long process of economic, social and political disempowerment. This was achieved, in the main, by the forces of Afrikaner expansion and British imperialism and by competitive and hostile interaction between the two.

From being simply a refreshment station for ships of the Dutch East India Company plying between Holland and the East, the Cape soon became a colony. It suited the Company to allow men who wished to farm on their own account to leave its employ and then to buy their produce. These were the first burghers and the progenitors of the Afrikaners. Except for some resistance by the Khoisan who fought to retain grazing and hunting grounds, but who were neither numerous nor powerful, land was easily acquired. What farmers lacked was labour. Since all but the poorest of.European immigrants could set up on their own account, few of them needed or were willing to work for others. At first the Khoikhoi, with whom they traded for cattle, showed little inclination to work as labourers. Then as their herds dwindled and their clans disintegrated under the pressure of European occupation some sought work. For the most part however the Company itself and the burghers became dependent on slaves imported from other parts of Africa and from the East for their .abour. It became endemic to Cape society that work - physical work - was done by slaves and Khoikhoi, people of colour. Aside from a small group of Free Blacks, those who owned land and labour were white. There was almost no mobility upward into that class. Thus were laid the racial foundations of Baasskap.

By the end of the 17th century proto-Afrikaners had settled the south-western corner of the country with wine and wheat and stock farming and had begun to move eastwards in search of grazing. Wandering patriarchal pastoralists or trekboers, accompanied by their slaves and Khoikhoi servants, extended White dominion eastwards until, in the late 18th century, they came into violent competition with powerful Xhosa chiefdoms whose need for land was pushing them in the opposite direction.

The Xhosa were the southernmost group of an expanding population of Nguni speaking African peoples who had lived in the eastern rainbelt for several hundred years. Clustered in numerous chiefdoms they cultivated the soil, mined it, kept cattle and other stock and hunted. Like the trekboers who opened up new farms for their sons as they grew to maturity, so the Xhosa set up new households and chiefdoms as extended families grew. The Cape's eastern frontier became extremely tense as Boers and Xhosa struggled for mastery of the territory. In nine brutal frontier wars between 1771 and 1877, the Xhosa were eventually crushed by British forces, dispossessed of much of their land and compressed into the remaining fragments. Unable to support their populations these lands became pools of labour for the expanding economy of White South Africa. It was a pattern of conquest and exploitation that would be repeated both by Afrikaner and British forces acting against other African groups in many parts of Southern Africa in the 19th century. Out of the fragmented Xhosa lands the apartheid government would eventually create two "independent" but wholly unsustainable "states", Transkei in 1975, and Ciskei in 1981.

Britain, in order to protect its sea route to India, took the Cape in 1795, lost it for a time to the Batavian Republic, was ceded it in 1806 and became the reluctant governor of a colony that had become a stagnant backwater of corrupt mercantilism in the wake of the recently bankrupted Dutch East India Company. Production was based on the labour of slaves and the coercion of Khoikhoi on land almost entirely in the hands of White overlords. Trade was hindered by a web of concessions, licences and monopolies and by the use of barter rather than cash. Government and the courts were fiefdoms for the private profit of those who administered them. Britain, increasingly in the thrall of capitalism, free trade and liberalism, introduced sweeping changes in the 1820s and 30s which began to bring the Cape into the increasingly liberal political economy of its empire. The thrust of the changes, although unevenly achieved, was to reduce corruption, abuse of power and inefficiency through the introduction of an independent judiciary and a professional civil service, and to stimulate economic activity by abolishing monopolies, rationalising taxes, improving communications, surveying land, registering title deeds, and freeing the Khoikhoi from compulsory labour and the carrying of passes, and permitting them to acquire land. The ultimate change was the abolition of slavery in 1834. 1

The effects of these developments on Cape society were traumatic but nowhere more so than among Boers in the turbulent eastern Cape. Trekboers could no longer rely on influence to obtain land and they now had to produce a cash surplus in order to pay wages, taxes, survey fees and quitrent. Denied the right to compel labour and without the means to pay for it, many farmers and their wives and children had to do that physical work which, almost since its inception, Whites in the Colony had shunned. If a farmer did attempt to coerce labour he could find himself the accused in a court in which he and his servant were at least theoretically now treated as equals. The emancipation of the slaves ended a deeply embedded institution as old as the Cape itself and resulted in considerable capital losses to slave owners. And then there were the Xhosa, seriously threatening White farmers' access to land and its secure possession, but, from the point of view of those farmers, not being decisively dealt with by the Government.

In reaction to what they found to be intolerable, groups of Boers took to their wagons and with their servants and livestock, trekked into the interior. Between 1834 and 1845 between 6 000 and 15 000 Afrikaners, most from the Eastern Cape, joined this mass exodus, or Great Trek. Over the next 40 years these Voortrekkers and their descendants took possession of vast tracts of the country. They conquered some Black polities, suffered defeat at the hands of others, and arrived at uneasy treaties with those they could not at first subdue. With guns, horses, determination and guile they gradually imposed dominion, carving out huge farms for themselves and establishing pre-capitalist republics governed by democracies of the elite - themselves - in unambiguous domination over the Africans they conquered.

The Trek was the beginning of a long struggle by Afrikaners to escape British values and domination. It was out of this concert of Afrikaner action and out of the need to define itself in opposition to what Britain stood for, that the beginnings of Afrikaner Nationalism emerged. Britain rapaciously pursued imperialist ambitions through 19th century Southern Africa in a confusion of treaties made and broken, annexations and violent confrontations with African chiefdoms and Boer republics, the culmination of which was the Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902. Arising from this the Boers increasingly nursed a deep sense of grievance and of difference which contributed greatly to their strident and xenophobic nationalism of the 20th century.

What in the 19th century had been an almost inchoate search by dissenting parties of Trekkers for Boer utopias, became in the 20th century a gradually more focussed and orchestrated quest for Afrikaner economic and political power with Afrikaner supremacy in a South African republic as the ultimate ideal. This quest was invested with the qualities of a divinely sanctioned mission by Christian-National ideologues who propagated the belief that like the Israelites, the Afrikaners were a Chosen People preordained to guide and lead South Africa.

Afrikaner hegemony was attained when the National Party came to power in 1948 and an almost monolithic synthesis of the State, the Party and the Afrikaner Protestant Churches began to emerge. The overwhelming strength of the Party derived from the deep commitment of tens of thousands of Afrikaners to a Christian-Nationalism of which, for many, the Party's rule was the exact expression. The longed-for republic was achieved in 1961.

Christian-Nationalism approached apotheosis in the policy of apartheid. For 300 years there had been muddled, ad hoc racial segregation based on naked domination sometimes ameliorated by benign paternalism. Now there was apartheid: segregation that was not simply systematic, but that was claimed, above all, to be "just" and in compliance with Christian ethics. Its proponents aspired to total apartness except in certain irreducible areas of common activity - principally those dependent on Black labour - which were to be rigidly controlled. Whites and Blacks would each enjoy their own way of life with full citizens' rights in their own designated areas. Under apartheid the patent inequity of the old order would thus be eliminated, the protagonists of human rights silenced, and the Afrikaner would be able to hold his head high in the world and live with his Christian conscience. No matter that the designated areas bore no relation whatever to the demographic preponderance of Blacks, or that the execution of the dream required social engineering on a vast scale, without regard to the wishes of those - almost exclusively Black - who were to be moulded to fit its designs. Apartheid was a radical creed; it demanded radical changes and whatever it cost to achieve them.

Apartheid had its roots deep in Afrikaner Christian-Nationalism and was actively supported and propagated by the Afrikaner Protestant Churches. It became an administrative and ideological system of immense complexity, applied with dedication and, particularly in regard to Black people, with considerable violence for some 40 years. Apartheid infected every aspect of this society. There can be no one in South Africa, Black or White, whose life was not profoundly affected by the tragic obsession of Afrikaner Christian-Nationalists with their own religious, national and racial identity, with their will to power, and, ultimately, with the expression of all of this in the ideology of apartheid.

Apartheid could not have become the all-embracing system that it did without the explicit support of a substantial number of White and Black South Africans who were not Afrikaner Christian-Nationalists, and without the passive involvement of the great majority of White and Black South Africans in its day to day functioning.

Broadly there were two kinds of explicit support that the government received from Whites. The first, in many variants, was expressed as the belief that the "firm" attitude of the government in its "handling" of the Black majority was the best means of safeguarding "Western Values". That this coincidentally assured the perpetuation of White privilege was seldom mentioned. The second came from a wide spectrum of professional people and corporations engaged in supplying, building and servicing the vast apparatus of the system. Apartheid was lucrative. Refusal to trade with it could involve substantial sacrifices which few were prepared to make. Many respected names of the "English" establishment and stock exchange listings were heavily involved in apartheid business.

There were Blacks who participated actively in the propagation and application of the system. Some may have done this from belief in apartheid. But for most, from police informers to the apparatchiks of the tribal authorities and bantustans, survival and the rewards of wealth, power and privilege were probably the persuading factors.

Perhaps the most significant "support" that apartheid received was the passive, often unwitting and, for many, unwilling involvement of the great majority of South Africans in its day to day application. Without this the system would have ground to a halt. To walk the streets or the veld, catch a bus, live in a house, rent an apartment, study, put a child in school, take a job, post a letter, go to hospital, use a public toilet, enter a railway station, eat in a restaurant, buy a beer, travel, copulate, marry, pay tax, register a birth or death, bury a loved one, indeed to live in South Africa at all required compliance with apartheid regulations. Most South Africans, Black and White, being ordinary people, did these ordinary things in a law-abiding way, and in so doing, gave their tacit support to the system. Compliance was "encouraged" through the fostering by the State of a climate of fear.Through the years the Security Police and other agents of the State acted with less and less restraint against those regarded as threats to "law and order" - especially if they were Black.

Non-violent mass resistance initiated by the ANC in 1952 and by the PAC in 1960 collapsed in the face of State suppression. There were small numbers of heroic activists, but there were not large numbers of people prepared to rise and, if necessary, to die in rebellion. Thus the Government was able, with impunity, to do what it did. That began to change with the revolt by the children of Soweto in 1976 and then with the campaign to make the country ungovernable in the 1980s.

In the 1970s and 80s countervailing forces led by Black liberation movements with White and foreign allies, punitive sanctions by foreign states and other organisations, particularly against the banking system and against South African sporting bodies, and a rising tide of revolution within the country, together with the depletion of the economy by the huge costs of apartheid and the increasing corruption of the ruling elite, eroded the power of the Afrikaner Christian-National State and its ability to enforce its policies. On the very brink of cataclysmic conflict between White and Black South Africans there occurred - against all reasonable hope that such a thing was possible - a time of extraordinary grace. Conciliatoriness, concern for the common good and enlightened self-interest among Black and Afrikaner leaders brought to a close, without major conflict, the rule of Afrikaner Nationalism and 342 years of Baasskap.

Congealed in the particulars of innumerable structures and not a few ruins throughout our land is evidence of much of this. Like geological accretions in the cooling crust of the earth they tell of the long era out of which we have come; we are in a new time. It is to be expected that a lot of our structural heritage will disappear, some will be adapted to other ideas and needs, and, as time goes on, many of the structures that survive, will do so as relics, their ideological origins and intentions forgotten or mythologised. While it is still possible to see them in their context this book explores fragments of that legacy, attempting to pin down in photographs something of what we were and became as it was evidenced and expressed in our structures.

The corbelled hut of the first photograph 2 almost certainly predates White occupation of the Southern Highveld, and the subjects of the last three come from the immediate post-apartheid era. For the rest, although some photographs were made after 1990, their content relates to the Era of Baasskap. Several of the extended captions follow their topics into the early post-apartheid years.

I am mainly concerned here with structures of public life. That most of the photographs relating to the lives of Black people come from the private rather than the public domain reflects circumstances during the Era of Baasskap. It was in Black homes that the struggle to retain values and traditions, to survive and transcend dispersion, dispossession, humiliation, and brutality was mostly evidenced. The public structures of African polities were destroyed by the conquerors. Public structures in contemporary Black communities were generally put there by the State or by missionaries or were those of which the State approved - any expressing what the State did not approve were invariably attacked.

Many of the South African structures of colonialism, imperialism, mining, industry, commerce and religion were the fairly predictable correlatives of similar developments in other parts of the world. While some are included here, I have given the greatest emphasis to structures of a South African genesis, and of those, as indicated earlier, I have been especially concerned with the churches of Afrikaner Protestantism. These, in my opinion, are in many ways the most telling structures to have emerged from the Era of Baasskap. They were peculiarly indigenous, not in the sense of a uniquely native architecture, but because, from about the middle of the 19th century, they arose in the form that they did almost exclusively out of the ethos and dynamics of Afrikaner life. Tall, unmistakable, prominently sited, in almost every village and town of South Africa and in many others of the sub-continent, they visibly exemplified and propagated Afrikaner values and world-views as these developed through the years. Changes in Afrikaner Protestant Church architecture precisely mirrored and expressed the rise, the triumph and the decline of the Afrikaner volk as the dominant force in the land. The Afrikaners are a small people; there can be few in modern times who poured so much of their resources and energies into their churches and few whose churches so starkly expressed their spirit.

Afrikaner Protestantism, which had such a profound influence on South African society, did not become a significant force until the second half of the 19th century. During that period the Dutch Reformed Church in the Cape, freed of the governmental control and interference that had stultified it for some 200 years and with better organisation, became far more actively evangelical. A proscription by the Cape synod forbidding its ministers from serving the Voortrekkers was revoked. Meanwhile the Trekkers, as they settled the interior, established parishes and kerkdorpe independently of the Cape synod. There were many tensions within the Church which were manifested in doctrinal and secular differences between various factions. But they were the concomitants of a new vitality resulting in the formation of the Gereformeerde Kerk [Dopper Church] and the Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk as well as an independent northern synod of the Dutch Reformed Church. There was unprecedented growth in Afrikaner Protestantism in this period. Some 223 new parishes and 75 kerk dorpe were founded. Church membership grew from about 92,000 in 1850 to about 383,000 in 1900, while the vigour of the movement was given its most visible and potent expression in a wave of church building such as had never before been seen here. Whereas some 35 Dutch Reformed Churches, including six mission churches, had been built in the entire period from 1652 to 1846, 97 were built, none of them mission churches, in the period 1847 to 1899.

Most of the new churches were substantial Gothic structures. Strongly vertical, usually steepled and spired, they celebrated devoutness, arrival and possession. If their lofty spires reached towards God they also told everyone for miles around whose God was master of those places, and who was chosen to act for him. There being no South African trained architects at that time, their designers were, for the most part, men who had trained in Britain, Germany and the Netherlands.

During the period between the end of the Anglo-Boer War and the start of the Second World War South Africa went through a difficult transition to modern statehood. After the formation of a unitary state in 1910 and an attempted rebellion by Boer bittereinders in 1914, the previously warring Boer and British factions painfully arrived at a series of uneasy accommodations in a parliamentary system from which all but a tiny fraction of the Black population were excluded [even those few would in time be disenfranchised]. The destruction caused by Britain's scorched earth policy in the Anglo-Boer War, devastating drought and livestock diseases, industrial revolution, industrial unrest, depression and the impoverishment of a large proportion of the population were some of the problems of the period. There was rapid growth in a landless and largely destitute class of Whites, some 300 000 in 1932, most of them Afrikaners, in a population of 1.8 million Whites. The culture which regarded physical work as beneath the dignity of Whites and miscegenation as bastardisation came increasingly under threat as Afrikaners found themselves competing with and living among Blacks in city slums. The State instituted a policy of employing indigent Whites on public works and railways which helped relieve White but probably worsened Black poverty. While membership of the Church continued to grow, most new parishes could only afford temporary places of worship. Architecturally the few new churches that were built were simply modifications of the established Gothic idiom.

It was during this period that Christian-Nationalist ideologues and the Afrikaner Broederbond laid the foundations for an Afrikaner identity based on cultural autonomy and political and economic power. The struggle for this identity was given great impetus by the Ossewa Trek, an event staged in 1938 by a front of Broederbond organisations led by the FAK and ATKV. This symbolic re-enactment of the Great Trek in commemoration of its centenary and of that of the Battle of Blood River was a huge success. Tens of thousands of Afrikaners were drawn into the regeneration of volk tradition and the re-enactment of history made heroic. The trek gave an unprecedented sense of unity and mission to Afrikaners and created the mass support which swept the National Party to power in 1948.

South Africa's entry into the Second World War on the side of the Allies - opposed by the National Party and by Nazi sympathisers within the Afrikaner right wing - probably delayed the full impact of the Afrikaner revival from being felt. However, there were two churches built during the war which were probably the first to break completely from Gothicism and were, I suggest, inspired by the Afrikaner renaissance. The first, inaugurated at Ladismith, Cape, in 1942 was remarkable for the purity of its modernism. The second, at Wolseley, Cape, was by the same architect and in similar idiom [it was destroyed in the earthquake of 1969]. Probably because of wartime shortages there were no immediate successors.

The 1948 victory of the National Party enabled a theocentric synthesis of Christian-Nationalism with Afrikaner political and economic power. It was orchestrated by the Afrikaner Broederbond, sanctified by the Afrikaner Protestant Churches, and dedicated to White, and in particular, to Afrikaner domination. The Afrikaner Protestants' belief in their divine destiny as a volk chosen by God to be leaders in this land and defenders of Christian-National values against atheism, communism, liberalism, humanism and racial miscegenation, became a driving force of enormous energy and influence. The Church flourished: 502 new parishes were founded between 1945 and 1961 in most of which new churches were built. The pain of defeat and hard times had been lived through and transcended. The new churches unambiguously asserted the ascendancy and triumph of the Afrikaner volk. Vertical, bold, often powerfully triangulated, they redefined the landscape. If the Gothic churches of the previous generation dominated with some grace these did so aggressively.

Liturgically, Afrikaner Protestant church architecture was based on the primacy of the preaching of the Gospel: Die Woord moet uitgaan, the Word must go forth. The preacher, who gave voice to it, was the focal point of the church. In many of the new generation churches he stood at the apex of a megaphonic structure: from him, through tall windows, the Word went out to the world. The Word was the Gospel according to Christian-Nationalism, a set of principles by which Afrikaner hegemony would take South Africa into a new and just dispensation. The paradox of ultra conservative religious bodies still imbued with a pre-1789 world view, embracing an extremely radical architecture was no paradox. Their's was a modern message with a radical core: apartheid.

In the 70s and 80s there was a marked change in church architecture which corresponded closely with the increasingly manifest failure of apartheid, the rising tide of opposition to it, and the weakening of the apartheid state. The symbiotic relationship of the Afrikaner Broederbond, the National Party, the State and the Afrikaner Protestant Churches, which had seemed almost monolithic, was broken by deep dissension and political fission. There were attempts by government to reform apartheid and much discussion on the morality of it within the Church. Defiant and defensive, Afrikaner Nationalists saw themselves deserted, standing alone against communist ambitions in Southern Africa and defending law and order against increasingly radicalised revolutionary forces at home. Latterday church architecture began to reflect these changes. Churches built in this time had few openings piercing their outer walls. The buildings became enclosing and inward-looking rather than outward-thrusting. No longer did the Word go out to the world, it went only to the Elect, the faithful within the laager.

Very little attention seems to have been given to the meaning of the architectural idiom of Afrikaner Protestant Churches. While some architects with whom I spoke were keenly aware of symbolic values in what they were doing, they worked within the received "language" of design acceptable in the Church at the time without questioning its origins or meaning. One that I met, Gerrie Steenkamp, deliberately stepped out of the language to try to find another. I suspect that his mentor, J Anthonie Smith, the designer of the Ladismith church [see 101] did so too. I reached him too late for an answer. The architect Daan Kesting in his PhD thesis wrote, "...Since the Church was the centre of the social and cultural existence of the Afrikaner, his national characteristic has become distinguishable in his church architecture ..." He went on to break up the history of the Church into somewhat different periods from those suggested here and then said, "It is striking that these eras of periodisation reveal an intimate relationship between church architecture on the one hand and socio-political and economic developments in South Africa on the other as an affirmation of the common destinies of Church and State in this country." 3 However he does not attempt to interpret the architectural language or to relate it to the history of its time.

Minutes of church councils that I have seen are singularly uninformative on the views of members about the architecture of their churches. They deal with the number of seats, costs, availability of materials, funds and so on. Parish histories and newsletters are only slightly more forthcoming.

I can offer no evidence for the relationship between the three stages of Afrikaner church architecture that I have distinguished above, and the development of the volk. I can only argue that given the Zeitgeist the architectural idiom of a later period would probably have been inadmissible in the preceding one. The Gothic churches of the late 19th century would have been unacceptably ornate and costly in the days before the Church was vitalised. Anthonie Smith's Ladismith church and those that followed after 1948, would have been far too radical a departure from Gothicism without the great lift of the volksgees, the spirit of the volk, sparked by the 1938 Ossewa Trek and the subsequent victory of the National Party. And if an architect had proposed to a parish in the 1950s that it build a 1970s-type windowless church, it is unlikely that his plan would have been accepted. The practical advantages - coolth in summer, warmth in winter, less glare, greater flexibility in the use of the space and so on - would not have been persuasive. The enclosed nature of the building would have been contrary to the triumphant spirit of the time. In the 1970s however, the ascendancy of Christian-Nationalism became less certain; there was confusion and, increasingly, a hunger for security. The advantages of the windowless church now became convincingly apparent.

Spiritually the new churches would do in the latter 20th century what the Voortrekker Monument was intended to do by its architect, Gerard Moerdijk, when he wrote of it in 1938, a decade before its completion:

...The monument must be a separate terrain, a place where the Afrikaner can come into his own, a place free of all foreign influences, protected from everything that can promote denationalisation. To secure this intense feeling of separation a laager of granite wagons will be built around the whole monument...
Unpierced walls in studiedly rough brick replaced the granite wagons. Christ's injunction, "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel..." provided as always, the underlying liturgical principle. Indeed every auditory, visual and emotional value of architecture and furnishings was dedicated to ensuring that the Word went out with the greatest possible effect. But "all the world" was now the congregation, the volk within the walls. They sat safe in the subdued light of a carpeted auditorium before the pulpit, the centre-piece of an architectural "arrangement" that arose cathedral-like behind it, to shed from high rafters, through artfully angled sky-lights, a celestial light on the preacher - the technology of the shopping mall in the service of God.

In 1990 the Era of Baasskap came to an end and the synod of the Dutch Reformed Church declared that apartheid had been an "error" [dwaling]. As far as I am aware no congregation or synod of the Dopper Church or the Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk has made a similar declaration.

The period 1652 to 1990 was the time of the White in South Africa. White power prevailed. That time has now passed. We are in a new time. What its values and spirit will be and how they will be expressed and evidenced in the structures brought forth has hardly begun to emerge.
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1 JB Peires, The British and the Cape, 1814-1834, in The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1840, edited by Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, Maskew Miller Longman, Cape Town, 1989.

2 Afrikaans-Protestantse Kerkbou, erfinis en uitdaging, University of Port Elizabeth, 1978, pp561,564.

3 Die Voortrekker Monument, in Gedenkboek van die Eeufees 1838-1938, Pretoria 1938.