Building Apartheid : On Architecture and Order in Imperial Cape Town [1 ed.] 9781317171041, 9781409446040

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Building Apartheid

Ashgate Studies in Architecture Series series editor: eamonn canniffe, manchester school of architecture, manchester metropolitan university, uk

The discipline of Architecture is undergoing subtle transformation as design awareness permeates our visually dominated culture. Technological change, the search for sustainability and debates around the value of place and meaning of the architectural gesture are aspects which will affect the cities we inhabit. This series seeks to address such topics, both theoretically and in practice, through the publication of high quality original research, written and visual. Other titles in this series On Frank Lloyd Wright’s Concrete Adobe Irving Gill, Rudolph Schindler and the American Southwest Donald Leslie Johnson ISBN 978 1 4094 2817 6 Memories of Cities Trips and Manifestoes Jonathan Charley ISBN 978 1 4094 3137 4 The Collaborators: Interactions in the Architectural Design Process Gilbert Herbert and Mark Donchin ISBN 978 1 4094 5504 2 Forthcoming titles in this series Beyond Anitkabir: The Funerary Architecture of Atatürk The Construction and Maintenance of National Memory Christopher S. Wilson ISBN 978 1 4094 2977 7 Architecture Post Mortem The Diastolic Architecture of Decline, Dystopia, and Death Edited by Donald Kunze, Charles David Bertolini and Simone Brott ISBN 978 1 4094 6221 7 Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital Project An Investigation into its Structural Formulation Mahnaz Shah ISBN 978 1 4094 4277 6

Building Apartheid On Architecture and Order in Imperial Cape Town

Nicholas Coetzer University of Cape Town, South Africa

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Nicholas Coetzer 2013 Nicholas Coetzer has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Coetzer, Nic. Building apartheid : on architecture and order in imperial Cape Town / by Nicholas Coetzer. pages cm. – (Ashgate studies in architecture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-4604-0 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Architecture and race – South Africa – Cape Town – History – 19th century. 2. Architecture and race – South Africa – Cape Town – History – 20th century. 3. Architecture, British colonial – South Africa – Cape Town. 4. City planning – South Africa – Cape Town – History – 19th century. 5. City planning – South Africa – Cape Town – History – 20th century. 6. Apartheid – South Africa – Cape Town. 7. Cape Town (South Africa) – Buildings, structures, etc. I. Title. NA2543.R37C64 2013 720.941΄09687355 – dc23 2013008985 ISBN 9781409446040 (hbk) ISBN 9781315570433 (ebk)

Contents

List of Figures   Preface   Acknowledgements   List of Abbreviations   1

The Agents of Empire   Pastoral Englishness and the Garden City Movement Country, Town, Suburb: Self, Other, Same Building Apartheid

ix xiii xv xvii 1 7 11 13

Part I Self/Countryside 2

A Common Heritage/An Appropriated History: Cape Dutch Architecture and the Union of South Africa   19 Cecil Rhodes, Herbert Baker and Groote Schuur 22 The Closer Union Society: Cape Dutch Architecture as a ‘Common Heritage’ 25 The South African National Society: Representing a National History in Monuments 27 Groot Constantia and other Wilful and Spurious Restorations 31 Slavish Copyists: Promoting and Disseminating Cape Dutch as a New National Style 33 Official Buildings and the Cape Dutch Style 36 Waning Enthusiasm 42 Conclusion43

3

Possessing the Land/Possessing the History: Cape Dutch Architecture as a Marker of Western Civilization and the Absencing of Others   49 Markers of Civilization and the Absencing of Others 50

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Convenient Contradictions: Cape Dutch as Vernacular and High Art, as Local and Ancient Mediterranean 55 Great Men: Romantic Portrayals, Dubious Lineages and Manor Houses 59 Literal and Invented Possessions: The Agents of Empire as Landed Gentry 63 Possessing Simulacras of Settler History: the Cape Dutch Revival Style 68 Conclusion74

Part II Other/City 4 From City to Cityscape: On Aesthetics and Order in Town Planning, Tourism, ‘Slums’ and Building Materials  

83

The Aesthetic Motivations for Town Planning at the Cape 84 Laissez Faire and the Aesthetic Drive of Subdivision and Town Planning at the Cape 87 Razing Neighbourhoods: The Town Planner as Scenographic ‘Setter of Architectural Gems’  89 Unsightly Vistas: Tourism, Slums and the City as a Visual Product 93 ‘Unsightliness’ as a Category for the Removal of Otherness  95 Municipal Structuring of the Appearance of Old Cape Town  98 ‘Inefficient Metallic Monstrosity’: Corrugated Iron and ‘Other’ Materials 101 ‘Temporary’ Buildings, Corrugated Iron Areas and Rural Ideals 103 Compromises to the Building Regulations: Rural Ideals and Aesthetic Concerns 105 Conclusion107 5

Ascribing Otherness and the Threat to the Self: Representations of Slums and the Social Space of Others   113 Ascribing Otherness: ‘Kennels’, ‘Hovels’, and Other Animalistic Associations  114 Contamination and the Threat to Civilization and the Self 118 Loose Boundaries: Miscegenation, and the Threat of ‘Contact’ 121 The Misuse of Space: Congestion and Function 124 Mapping the Interior and the Periphery 127 Conclusion128

Part III Same/Suburb 6

Models of the Self: ‘Model’ Cottages, Slum Clearance and the Garden City Movement   Historical Background to the Housing Problem The ‘Home’ and the Illegitimacy of ‘Other’ Dwelling Types and Building Materials  Competitions, Exhibitions, Models and Public Events Density: Municipal Structuring of Class and the Villa and Cottage as Ideal

139 141 143 148 155

Contents

vii

Housing Legislation and the Assisted Housing Schemes 158 Wells Square Slum Clearance and the City’s First Garden Suburb Housing Projects 163 Conclusion175 7 Distortions in the Mirror: Segregation, Control and Garden City Ideals at Langa Native Village   181 The Visible Presence of Natives in the City and the Making of Ndabeni 183 Going Round in Circles or Squares: How to House ‘the Native’ 188 The Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 191 Distortions in the Mirror: Garden City Ideals at Langa Native Village 192 Conclusion208 Conclusion: The Production of the City as a White Space: On Architecture and Order   Postscript: Post-Apartheid/Apartheid/Pre-Apartheid   

213 219

Bibliography   Index  

225 235

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List of Figures

1.1  Adderley Street, Union celebrations, 1910. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: AG6876 1.2  Strand Street with tram and Koopmans de Wet house to the right. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: E7871 1.3  Cape Town c.1860–1880 from Signal Hill – a Dutch colonial town. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: M623 1.4  Milner’s Kindergarten – Herbert Baker standing second from the right. Museum Africa, Johannesburg: MA19752006-p48 2.1  Morgenster – typical of Cape Dutch baroque-gabled homesteads. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: E477 2.2  Schoongezicht, home of John X. Merriman. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: E910 2.3  ‘The Birth of a Notion’ – Groot Constantia as icon of the Union of South Africa. Courtesy of the South African Institute of Architects: SAAR, April 1934

2.4  Cecil Rhodes’s The Grange (above) remodelled into Groote Schuur (below) by Herbert Baker, c.1890s. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: E3862 and M717 2.5  Herbert Baker – Groote Schuur plan. Courtesy of the University of the Witwatersrand, Architectural Archive 2.6  Tongaat High School – replica of the Old Supreme Court building in Cape Town. Photograph by the author 2.7  Gerard Moerdyk – 1934 winning design for the Prime Minister’s residence, Pretoria. Courtesy of the South African Institute of Architects: SAAR, April, 1934 2.8  Front gable of the South African pavilion, Empire Exhibition, London, 1924 (left, courtesy of the South African Institute of Architects: SAAR, December, 1924) and front gable of Groot Constantia (right, photograph by the author) 2.9  Empire Exhibition, 1924 – ‘Voorhuis’ interior of the City of Cape Town exhibition space. BC206, F.K. Kendall and Earle Collection (University of Cape Town Libraries), portfolio of images

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2.10  South Africa House, London – Cape Dutch ‘Voorhuis’. Photograph by the author. Reproduced under the South Africa Government Printer’s Authorisation No. 11610 dated 17 September 2012 2.11  South Africa House, London – Gwelo Goodman, Groot Constantia (left) and partial image of Jan Juta, Vergelegen (right). Photographs by the author. Reproduced under the South Africa Government Printer’s Authorisation No. 11610 dated 17 September 2012 2.12  Groot Constantia gable as frontispiece – first Congress of the Institute of South African Architects. Courtesy of the South African Institute of Architects: SAAR, December, 1928 3.1  South Africa House – alabaster relief carving designed by Herbert Baker, 1933. Photograph by author. Reproduced under the South Africa Government Printer’s Authorisation No. 11610 dated 17 September 2012 3.2  Frank Kendall – Boschendal, new ‘slave bell’ 1934, and ‘slave bell’ memorial, Colerain, Eastern Cape. BC206, F.K. Kendall and Earle Collection (University of Cape Town Libraries), 145 and 429 3.3  Groote Schuur, relief carving above the front door – the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape. BC206, F.K. Kendall and Earle Collection (University of Cape Town Libraries) 3.4  Vergelegen, front elevation. Photograph by the author

3.7  Kendall and Morris – Lourensford, c.1925. BC206, F.K. Kendall and Earle Collection (University of Cape Town Libraries), portfolio of images 3.8  Kendall and Morris – plan of Lourensford. BC206, F.K. Kendall and Earle Collection (University of Cape Town Libraries) 3.9  Frank Kendall – Luncarty, c.1918. BC206, F.K. Kendall and Earle Collection (University of Cape Town Libraries) 3.10  Frank Kendall – plan of Luncarty. BC206, F.K. Kendall and Earle Collection (University of Cape Town Libraries) 3.11  Frank Kendall – House Hockly, Greenfield Road, Kenilworth, 1930. BC206, F.K. Kendall and Earle Collection (University of Cape Town Libraries) 3.12  C.P. Walgate – Stellandal, c.1926. Independent Newspapers Archives: Cape Times, 21 December 1930 4.1  District Six laissez faire development, aerial photograph 1935. City of Cape Town: Strategic Development Information & GIS 4.2  Coffee Lane, an Old Cape Town ‘slum.’ Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: E7979 4.3  Town Planning Scheme No.5, 1934. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: KAB CCC 3/CT-4/2/1/1/1325

3.5  Vergelegen – Arts and Crafts side additions by C.P. Walgate. Photograph by the author

4.4  Constitution Street, encroaching stoeps. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: KAB CCC 3/CT-4/2/1/1/1333

3.6  Baker and Kendall – Lidcote, proposed addition c.1912. BC206, F.K. Kendall and Earle Collection (University of Cape Town Libraries)

4.5  Realignment in District Six at Clifton and Hanover Streets. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: KAB CCC 3/CT-4/1/4/80(C37/4)

List of Figures

xi

4.6  Kimberley Location, Report of the Tuberculosis Commission, 1914. Reproduced under Government Printer’s Authorisation No. 11602 dated 20 August 2012

6.7  Cottage for Mr R. Delvin, 1922 under the Municipal Provision of Homes Ordinance. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: KAB CCC 3/CT-4/1/4/425

4.7  Vestiges of District Six at Walmer Estate, Cape Town. Photograph by the author

6.8  Assisted Housing in brick, 1924, Type D1 (left) and standard wood-and-iron with additional room, 1930 (right). Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: KAB CCC 3/CT-4/1/4/425

5.1  Wells Square, ‘A Hotbed of Horrors.’ Architect, Builder & Engineer, vol.1, no.3, (October, 1917) 5.2  ‘The Hungry Children of District Six.’ Independent Newspapers Archives: Cape Times, 24 June 1936 5.3  ‘Miserable Pondokkies of Cape Flats’ – informal housing at the periphery of the city. Independent Newspapers Archives: Cape Times, 26 June 1936 6.1  Cape Town Housing Week parade – from shacks to model cottages. Independent Newspapers Archives: Cape Times, 12 August 1929 6.2  Central Housing Board, Report dated 31 December 1920, plan Type 1, three-roomed semi. Reproduced under Government Printer’s Authorisation No. 11602 dated 20 August 2012 6.3 The Cape Argus Model House competition, second place winner, J. Lockwood Hall. Independent Newspapers Archives: Cape Argus, 20 January 1928 6.4  ‘The Parade House’ on display on Cape Town’s Grand Parade. Architect, Builder & Engineer, September 1927

6.9  Wells Square, from Thom’s Survey, 1898. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service. KAB CCC 3/CT-4/2/1/1/1333 6.10  Wells Square slum clearance proposal A (above) and B (below), 1916. Hatching indicates buildings to be removed. Note the two street lights indicated by ‘bulls-eyes.’ Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service. KAB CCC 3/CT-4/1/5/1008 6.11  Maitland Garden Village, 1919, Phase One on the left and Phase Two un-built on the right and Cottage Type B and C1. City of Cape Town: Strategic Development Information & GIS 6.12  Roeland Street Housing Scheme, 1919 with Type A cottages. City of Cape Town: Strategic Development Information & GIS 6.13  A close up of Old Cape Town, Langschmidt, Long Street in 1844. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: M507

6.5  The ‘entry’ of the AB&E to its own housing competition. Architect, Builder & Engineer, December 1927

6.14  Wells Square and Roeland Street Scheme – relative densities (notes by the author), aerial photo 1926. City of Cape Town: Strategic Development Information & GIS

6.6  Winner of the AB&E housing competition, J.H. Brownlee. Architect, Builder & Engineer, December 1927

6.15  Wells Square after ‘slum clearance.’ Independent Newspapers Archives: Cape Argus, 11 November 1931

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6.16  Wells Square aerial photo showing Canterbury flats, 1935 (left, notes by the author) and Canterbury flats today (right, photo by the author). City of Cape Town: Strategic Development Information & GIS 6.17  Bokmakirie, ‘sub-economic’ housing project, 1932. City of Cape Town: Strategic Development Information & GIS 7.1  Map locating Maitland Garden Village, Ndabeni, Pinelands, Langa, and Bokmakirie. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: KAB Map M4/1532 7.2  Ndabeni, ‘Better Class Houses’ 30 September 1902. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: KAB PWD 2/1/27 7.3  Ndabeni Native Location ‘CT Black People 2 and 3,’ date unknown. National Library of South Africa: Cape Town Campus 7.4  Ndabeni, layout 1902 (left) and aerial photograph, 1926 (right). Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: KAB PWD 2/1/27 and City of Cape Town: Strategic Development Information & GIS 7.5  Pinelands Garden City, Cape Dutch revival cottage, at Links Drive and South Way. Photograph by the author 7.6  Langa layout, from Drainage plan, 1923. Key: A. School, B. Meat market, C. Fruit and vegetable market, D. Compound for 200 single women, E. Churches, F. Picture theatre, G. Police station, H. Admin, K. Compound for 2,000 single men, L. Church house. Notes by the author. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: KAB Map M3/4005 7.7  Hampstead Garden Suburb interim layout. Courtesy of the London Metropolitan Archives. ACC/3816/P/03/033

7.8  Raymond Unwin – Layout of Gretna and Eastriggs munitions supply townships, c.1917. National Archives, UK: Mun 7 7.9  A.J. Thompson – Pinelands, layout of initial development, 1920. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: KAB Map M4-1902 7.10  Langa layout, c.1926. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: KAB Map M3-4008 7.11  Langa layout, aerial photograph, 1935. Notes by the author. City of Cape Town: Strategic Development Information & GIS 7.12  Langa compound details c.1924. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: KAB Map M1-3375 7.13  Langa, compound of single huts for men, c.1924. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service. KAB Map M1-3375 7.14  Eastriggs, temporary huts. National Archives, UK: Mun 7 7.15  Langa, details of two-roomed blocks, 1932. Records in the custody of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service: KAB Map M2-2522 8.1  ‘New Rest’ housing on the N2 highway – ‘From Shacklands to Dignity’ faded sign. Photograph by the author 8.2  NE 51/9 apartheid-era housing type. Courtesy of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research: Original drawings created for and used in the CSIR publication Research Studies on the Costs of Urban Bantu Housing, Series DR10 8.3  Mofolo township layout, Soweto, 1953. Courtesy of the University of the Witwatersrand, Architectural Archive

Preface

My education in architectural history began with Dr Barrie Biermann – a likeable professor who possessed a genius for perfectly drawing the history of architecture on the blackboard in chalk. Biermann’s cut-away axonometrics (placed side-by-side with elevations and plans) were drawn from memory, the duster often deployed as a proportioning device. It was largely – but not exclusively – the history of Western architecture that Barrie reproduced so brilliantly. There were occasional references to South African architects or buildings along with the topic of his doctoral thesis, 1700s Cape Dutch architecture. A book of his even linked the architecture of those homesteads and the wine they produced. I was aware of these buildings and the beauty of their surroundings but Barrie really made them ‘come alive.’ My political education in architecture began in 1990 with a Second Year trip to the Lamontville Location – a ‘black’ suburb of Durban. Though I was aware that my education was political, that my whole life was political – the country was in a revolutionary upheaval after all – it was really the first time I had thought of architecture as ‘political.’ Our guide, a resident, pointed to the towering pylon ‘street’ lights all over the township and told us they were there so security police could swoop in at any time of night to round up ‘subversives.’ With lights that powerful it was always daytime there and everyone was visible. The lights were purposefully so high up it was impossible to knock them out. For all that, Lamontville didn’t seem such a bad place to live, although the houses were smaller than in any ‘white’ suburb. There was a palpable sense of community and people had ‘done-up’ their houses giving them a kind of individual identity. There were fences and trellises with vines growing. There were two-storey houses. And this was why our class had visited: to see how people had adapted an apartheid house type – called the 51/9 – to their own needs. We would design an additional garden flat out back that could be leased to individuals for extra cash or grandparents could move into. Our design studio laboured over the next few months trying to find ways to extend and alter a house unit that was almost impossible to add on to, thanks to its extremely efficient planning. It was quickly

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apparent that houses can have a punishing impact on the people who live in them by constricting and defining their opportunities. Years later I was told that Barrie Biermann was one of the designers of the 51/9 back in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Not that Barrie was the Albert Speer of apartheid architecture – it was just another uncomfortable paradox in a complicated country; how had such a humble genius worked for the apartheid state? How did Barrie equate the 51/9 with Cape Dutch architecture? It got me thinking about the continuity between the two. Are they really two sides of the same coin? This book attempts an answer. Nicholas Coetzer

Acknowledgements

In 1995 Professor Dennis Radford helped me get from Durban to Denver. Once there Professor Peter Schneider and Professor Mark Gelernter (University of Colorado) generously put me on track for a Ph.D. at the Bartlett School of Architecture (University College, London) where I was fortunate to be supervised by Professor Iain Borden. His easy-going engagement, excellent advice and scholarship stay with me. Thanks also go to Professor Murray Fraser (The Bartlett) for his robust criticism and equal-measure enthusiasm. The British government is to be thanked for awarding me an Overseas Research Scholarship which substantially reduced my Ph.D. tuition fee, and for allowing me to take up part-time employment as an architect during that time. This book was made possible through sabbatical and special research leave granted by the University of Cape Town; the generous Norwegian AGSA grant (under the guidance of the excellent Academic and Non-Fiction Authors’ Association of South Africa and their Grant Scheme for Authors); and the support of Valerie Rose and Emily Ruskell at Ashgate Publishing, UK. Most of the research for this book was undertaken at the Cape Archives in Cape Town and at the African Studies Library and the Manuscripts and Archives Library at the University of Cape Town. The staff members at these institutions have been very helpful in finding me both the information I needed and the information I did not know I needed. Many people have offered insights, corrections and help along the way: Iain Low, Diane Ghirardo, Stewart Harris, John Rennie, Noëleen Murray, Terence Swarts, Peter Guise, Ian Black, Steven Cairns, Diane Coetzer, Desireé McCall, Sharon McCall, Alex Moore, Catherine Coetzer, Robert Gubb and Pen and Vine for Pembroke. A special thanks to Brandon Edmonds for his editing excellence. And finally, to my wife Katie Irvine for her photo-editing skills, her endless generosity, support and inspiring intellectual companionship.

For KK and F. and my father, Owen Coetzer, who told some good stories.

List of Abbreviations

CA

Cape Argus

CCC

Corporation of the City of Capetown

CHB

Central Housing Board

CHL

Citizens’ Housing League

CIoA

Cape Institute of Architects

CNL

Commission on a Native Location for Cape Town

CPPA

Cape Peninsula Publicity Association

CUS

Closer Union Society

CT

Cape Times

H&EC

Housing & Estates Committee

HMC

Historical Monuments Commission

I&PC

Improvements & Parks Committee

KAB

Cape Town Archives Repository

MGV

Maitland Garden Village

MOH

Medical Officer of Health

NAC

Native Affairs Committee

NUAA

Native (Urban Areas) Act

PH&BRC

Public Health & Building Regulations Committee

RIBA

Royal Institute of British Architects

SAAR

South African Architectural Record

SANS

South African National Society

SCSC

Slum Clearance Special Committee

UCT

University of Cape Town

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1 The Agents of Empire

A British South Africa may go a long way to consolidate the British Empire. That, and all that, is involved in the details, sometimes dull details, of your municipal life, in your water supply, your tramways, your parks, your schools, in your attaining for yourselves the highest standard of civilized life. You cannot let the enormous population which is going to accumulate here, accumulate in a city, of which part may become a pest house. Lord Milner, The Cape Times,14 January 1902 Nothing in the history of architecture is more appropriate than that it should have been another man of great imagination, often referred to as ‘The Architect of Empire,’ that is to say Cecil Rhodes, who gave Baker his first opportunity. ‘An Imperial Architect.’ The Times, 6 February 1946 The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main objectives between them.1 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

When Herbert Baker arrived at the Cape in 1892 he was neither particularly wealthy nor well-known as an architect. His brother was already in Cape Town with the ambition of making ‘a fortune’2 in fruit farming and Baker had followed thanks to a ‘restless desire to strike out a path for my own in life.’3 Soon on the pathless slopes of Table Mountain the future Imperial Architect would meet The Architect of Empire, Cecil John Rhodes. As Baker recounts, this ‘accidental’4 encounter was the ‘happy meeting [that] determined my fortunes.’5 From Rhodes’ initial patronage and ten productive and successful years in Cape Town, Baker went on to many enviable commissions around the Commonwealth, a knighthood for his troubles and the title of ‘Imperial Architect’ in his Times obituary. But back in 1892 Baker was, like so many recent ‘immigrants’ from England, an ‘ignorant adventurer,’6 simultaneously following in the wake – and forging the bow – of Empire as it steamed its ambitions relentlessly around the globe. The discovery of diamonds in Kimberley and gold in Johannesburg jolted Cape Town out of its

2

1.1 Adderley Street, Union celebrations, 1910

Building Apartheid

colonial somnambulism. Ambition chimed with the tangy clang of steam trains filled with those headed for Kimberley to cash in. The gold rush was a rousing wake-up call for the self-governing colony – recently built on agricultural exports and a foppish short-lived trade in ostrich feathers. Cape Town was suddenly the rowdy cosmopolitan gateway through which a surge of adventurers would pass (Figure 1.1). As Bickford-Smith notes The Mineral Revolution was the major motive force behind economic and demographic change in Cape Town in the late nineteenth century. Such change brought a number of challenges to Cape Town’s ‘traditional system’ of class and ethnic relations. More immediately, it confronted Cape Town’s dominant class with the material problems caused by rapidly increasing urbanization and the strains this imposed on the town’s resources.7

The Cape, though under British control since 1806, had never been particularly English in population or appearance. Apart from developments in Adderley and Strand Streets,8 Cape Town most resembled the Dutch colonial town it had always been. Now, with gold in those faraway hills, the city abounded in Englishmen in bowler hats. By 1904, one in seven Capetonians – about one in three White residents – was born in Britain.9 By 1892, English middle-class values dominated the town;10 the ‘Clean Party’ had already initiated municipal reforms, installing water-borne sewerage, paving the roads and covering over open canals. There were many other visible signs of ‘civilization’ swallowing the remnants of rough Dutch infrastructure; the newly completed hydro-electric Molteno Dam powered the tram headed to Sea Point (Figure 1.2). As it trundled through the city the tram passed plate-glass shopfronts displaying goods from the outreaches of Empire, the supporting steel

1.2  Strand Street with tram and Koopmans de Wet house to the right

1.3  Cape Town c.1860–1880 from Signal Hill – a Dutch colonial town

4

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columns and beams of these grand four-storey Victorian buildings hidden behind the festoons and garlands of fussy plasterwork. A few stores even had elevators. It was not quite Regent Street but a creditable version nevertheless. A trip on the southern-suburbs train line to Simonstown, where Baker’s cousin was admiral in command of the Royal Navy, showcased the spanking new homes of the English – impressive Gothic-revival villas glimpsed through dappled oak and plane trees, set back from the noise of the train line. Apart from the worrying intrusion of corrugated iron roofing, this stretch of the Cape was a ringer for England, and England at its best – sans the elemental drama of Table Mountain looming in the background. But England at its worst awaited Baker below the slopes of Table Mountain and Devil’s Peak in the wind-ravaged belt avoided by the wealthy, known as District Six. Permanently bent trees were crooked signposts pointing to its ‘uninhabitable’ status. District Six also bore the marks of a laissez faire development, hastily constructed speculative housing, without an overarching urban plan. This was Cape Town’s most cosmopolitan community, home to immigrants from all over Europe – largely Jewish immigrants from Lithuania – but home chiefly to those mixed-race descendents of the Cape’s slaves from Mozambique, Madagascar, Indonesia and India and their European masters. Already there was anxious talk of the ‘slums’ forming here, like those at Whitechapel in the East End of London. The BoKaap, an older area on the slopes of Signal Hill, began to have a distinctly ‘Malay’ identity thanks to the predominance of mosques in the area. The census of 1891 separated out this group of 11,106 Muslims – mostly originating from the Indonesian archipelago – from the ‘Mixed and Other’ who numbered 35,913. Since black Africans in Cape Town were mostly employed as dock labourers they located themselves in lodgings close to the harbour in District 1, around Chiappini and Rose Streets, duly noted as ‘slum’ hotspots. The census put the number of black Africans at 1,107 or 1 per cent of Cape Town’s population. Altogether, these ‘non-European’ groups constituted half of Cape Town’s total recorded population of 97,283. Baker’s serendipitous arrival at the Cape followed the passing of the city’s first building regulations promulgated in 1889.11 Cape Town’s 32 architects practicing at the turn of the century were almost all12 trained, like Baker himself, as apprentices in England or Scotland where they would have encountered the genus of these building regulations and bylaws aimed at wrestling all unruly development back into line. In these terms, jerry-rigged houses like those of District Six were standing in the way of progress and reform. So too were the remnants of ‘Old Cape Town,’ the sundried-brick two-storey buildings of the Dutch colonial town (Figure 1.3), whose cracking mud plaster and metre-wide whitewashed walls revealed nothing of the potential ‘slum’ life hidden within. Most of the Cape descendents of the Dutch – the Afrikaners as they were now beginning to be called – were farmers who made up the majority of the White population of the Cape Colony. Those who remained in the city as store-owners and merchants did not tend to commute with the English down the picturesque southern-suburbs line but stayed in the city proper. As the predominant property owners in the town centre they had fought the ‘Clean Party’ over financing municipal reforms from an increase in the city centre’s property rates. Now, from

The Agents of Empire

5

their yellow klinker-brick stoeps – islands of solidity in the still muddy streets of the town – they contemplated the benefits of their allegiance with the British in the Cape in favour of their ‘cousins,’ the Boers, who had trekked beyond the reach of the British and formed the republics of the Orange Free State and what was informally known as the Transvaal. A little further up Table Valley were some remaining old Cape Dutch homesteads where some of the Cape’s Afrikaner elite, like Jan Hendrik Hofmeyer – Onze Jan – had hatched his plans at Welgemeend to support Rhodes as Prime Minister of the Cape in 1890. However there was an Imperial intrigue far bigger than local municipal politics brewing at the almost southern tip of Africa, the ‘Cape of Storms.’ As Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, Rhodes had plans to expand British – and thereby his own – influence northwards, to increase mineral rights and leverage power beyond the edges of White settlement in the Transvaal. The ‘scramble for Africa’ was a race that had only just begun and would be over in a convulsively bloody instant. As Pakenham notes ‘In 1890 most of the continent was still ruled by Africans, and barely explored. By 1902, five European Powers had grabbed almost the whole continent.’13 The discovery of gold in the Transvaal in 1886 had also given sharp focus to a subsidiary of Rhodes’ expansive plan: to unite the two British colonies of the Cape and Natal with the Boer-dominated South African Republic and Orange Free State. Not only was Germany’s colonizing presence in East Africa an expanding menacing blot on the clean strategic line from Cape to Cairo, but an allegiance between the Boers and Germany threatened to unravel the British Empire and Rhodes’ interests in southern Africa completely. It was clear why he had plotted the ill-fated coup of the Transvaal in 1895 but it took a terrible war of concentration camps and scorched earth14 before Johannesburg and all the gold beneath it was under the control of the British. On the slopes of Table Mountain then, Baker could not help but get himself entangled in the infamous ‘red line’ that would extend from ‘Cape to Cairo’ which Rhodes was plotting from his brooding point below Devil’s Peak. By 1902, Baker found himself swept up by this Rhodes-ian line of opportunity that led northwards to the reconstruction of Johannesburg, becoming an informal member of Lord Milner’s ‘Kindergarten,’ even designing the ‘Moot House’ where some of its members lived and where meetings were held.15 These were young Oxford graduates, inspired, like Rhodes and Milner, by the Slade inaugural lecture of John Ruskin to ‘found colonies as fast and far’ as possible with the aim of advancing the ‘power of England by land and sea.’16 This band of nine men, averaging less than thirty years old at the time, not only set about reconstructing Johannesburg but also conspiring the Union of South Africa through the influential magazine The State.17 It often appears (like an extra member) in Kindergarten group photos, brandished as the propagandist weapon it was, with Herbert Baker, the Imperial Architect, looming in the back row (Figure1.4).18 The South African War was almost over in 1902 when Milner gave his rallying cry (noted at the beginning of this chapter), but the battle for the Union of South Africa – the union of British and Boer at the exclusion of ‘the native’ and their interests and rights – was just beginning and it would be fought for, and through, the values of the British Empire. As Symonds notes:

6

1.4 Milner’s Kindergarten – Herbert Baker standing second from the right

Building Apartheid

The young men who went out to South Africa carried with them the fundamental belief, shared by most of their Oxford contemporaries, in the inherent superiority of British civilisation and in Britain’s duty to carry the forms of that civilisation throughout the world. Their attitudes to race had been simply expressed. Curtis in his diary in 1901 noted that ‘it would be a blessed thing for us if the negro, like the Red Indian, tended to die out before us.’19

Lionel Curtis, the Kindergarten’s most precocious member, was the real author of Lord Selborne’s Memorandum, a galvanizing document leading to the Union of South Africa in 1910.20 Aspects of South Africa’s racist future are written into that document: No reasoning man can live in this country and doubt that the existence here of a white community must, from first to last, depend upon their success or failure in finding a right solution of the coloured and native questions, or, in other words, upon the wisdom they can shew in determining the relative places which the white, coloured, and native populations are to fill. History will record no nobler triumph than that of the people of South Africa if they extend the hand of sympathy to the coloured people, who are differentiated from the natives by their infusion of white blood, and to the educated native, and if they succeed in peacefully leading on the upward path of Christianity and of civilization the vast tribes who are beginning to emerge from barbarism.21

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The politely named ‘Native Question’ was to be answered by policies of control and the hardening of hierarchies within culture and the political economy. Order was to be made of the contradictions and chaos of the Union of South Africa, its fractious colonies and republics, creolized communities, protectorates and tribal lands. The imperative of Empire, as ever, was to reform subjects and assign them – literally – their ‘relative places’, and bring order. The journey Herbert Baker takes us on from Cape Town to Johannesburg thus introduces the scales of order that this book engages with. From the ‘dull details’ of municipal life to the grand narratives of a ‘nation,’ a desire for order – a state without contradiction – was the underpinning ambition for the agents of Empire as they bumped into a world that did not quite follow the contours of the ideology of Empire. Architecture was the instrument through which order was to be made, or at least, made apparent. In this book we will journey back to 1900s Cape Town to find evidence of what this order would look like, what it would be made of, what form it would take, but first let us take a detour to England where this ordering vision originated. Or, perhaps more precisely, Oxford. Pastoral Englishness and the Garden City Movement A few years after his Slade inaugural lecture inspired Oxford students to build the Empire, John Ruskin inspired some of them to build a road. The Hinksey Road diggers included many future leaders, such as Kindergarten principal Lord Milner, and Oscar Wilde, who wryly noted of the project: ‘And what became of the road? Well, like a bad lecture it ended abruptly – in the middle of the swamp.’22 The road was more than an excuse to distract the lads, it was to teach them the value of labour and handcraft, the value of the landscape as a place of cultivated beauty, and to highlight the need to improve the conditions of what was generally thought to be a rural slum on the edge of Oxford.23 For Ruskin, as for his gothicized contemporary AWN Pugin, England was to be wrestled back into shape; the ravages of the industrial revolution, real and imagined, that had assaulted England’s pastures green were to be put right – one festering quagmire at a time. And so the diggers set about breaking rocks and draining the swamp until Ruskin went off to Venice and the project fizzled out moribund in the middle of the swamp. The Hinksey Road project was symptomatic of the anxious idealism of the era; the realization of the elite that the wealth of the country was being built on a diseased body, a quagmire threatening to engulf the populace. Moreover, it threatened the very survival of an increasingly mythologized rural England. As William Morris wrote in 1892 of the ‘foemen’ ruining the Earth in ‘May Day’ Unlovely of aspect, heart-sick and a-weary On the season’s fair pageant all dim-eyed we gaze; Of thy fairness we fashion a prison-house dreary And in sorrow wear over each day of our days.

Factories were defiling the land, and indeed, those that laboured in them. The need to return to the virtues of labour and handcraft – contemplative and aestheticized

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rather than mindlessly repetitive – was the essential bond24 between Ruskin and Morris who was also an Oxford grad. Both found medieval England, with its crafts and guilds, to be the lost past of England’s future. But idealism and Romanticism were no match for modernity and relentless industrial capitalism polluting England’s waterways and fouling its air. Ultimately, idealism’s project of restitution had to be abandoned; the ‘diggers’ could, in the end, only stand by and watch the Hinksey Road be rebuilt by skilled labourers. The ideas of Morris, and Ruskin, are key (if complicated) antecedents of the order about to be enforced in Cape Town. They are part of the deep well from which the imperatives of Empire are drawn. In the folklore of architectural history, Morris is recognized as the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement who tellingly also instigated the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings – key parts to the story that unfolded at the Cape. But more so, Morris and Ruskin are illustrative figures representing an unresolved contradiction between progress and tradition, the desire for civilization and a return to older times exemplified in the tension between their political beliefs. By 1892, Morris was socialist in orientation whilst Ruskin chivalrously dreamt of a return to feudalism through the ‘Guild of St. George.’ Their differences mirror wider turn of the century colonialist anxieties and debates over paternalism and liberty, stewardship and democracy, and most deeply the tension between revering a traditional ‘African’ sensibility and a more modern one. And yet, amidst the Blakean horrors of industry, there was an unequivocal hatred for modern civilization in the air. As Morris writes of Ruskin’s influence in ‘How I became a Socialist’ ‘Apart from my desire to make beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is a hatred of modern civilisation.’25 It took another Oxford undergrad, Raymond Unwin, to realize the retro medieval future-vision exemplified in Morris’s utopian novel News from Nowhere, the antidote to the poison of modern civilization. Unwin was the Manchester secretary for Morris’s Socialist League and contributed to its journal The Commonweal. For Unwin, medieval villages and Arts and Crafts cottages were the ideal models to combat the ‘slum’ conditions besetting the working classes and poor in the inner cities of England. The Victorian city, once a source of civic pride and the locus of democratic engagement and civic duty, had become shameful, a demoralizing zone of darkness and danger, with the revolutionary events of the Paris Commune still fresh in memory. By the 1890s, attitudes towards the urban poor were shifting somewhat from the punishing social Darwinism of reformers such as Octavia Hill who held that the working class was genetically prone to degeneracy – given the ‘slums’ that they were ‘happy’ to occupy – and thus best managed through regimes of socialization and vigilant supervision. And yet, since Darwinism had prompted the idea that the very environment in which these organisms lived had a direct influence on their physical, spiritual, and moral health it followed that if one could alter the environment in which these sickly and degenerating individuals were trapped, they might emerge reformed, perhaps even wearing the robes of the rather guileless characters described in News from Nowhere There were houses about, some on the road, some amongst the fields with pleasant lanes leading down to them, and each surrounded by a teeming

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garden. They were all pretty in design, and as solid as might be, but countryfied in appearance, like yeomen’s dwellings; some of them of red brick like those by the river, but more of timber and plaster, which were by the necessity of their construction so like mediaeval houses of the same materials that I fairly felt as if I were alive in the fourteenth century; a sensation helped out by the costume of the people that we met or passed, in whose dress there was nothing ‘modern.’ Almost everybody was gaily dressed, but especially the women, who were so well-looking, or even so handsome, that I could scarcely refrain my tongue from calling my companion’s attention to the fact. Some faces I saw that were thoughtful, and in these I noticed great nobility of expression, but none that had a glimmer of unhappiness, and the greater part (we came upon a good many people) were frankly and openly joyous.26

The blunt physicality of architecture, it seemed, could magically heal social ills. And the architectural antidote to the poison of modern civilization was Unwin’s revisioning of the medieval and picturesque cottages of yeomen. While Morris penned his retro-utopia, a clerk in the Houses of Parliament was drawing diagrams. With an economy of means suited to the project, Ebenezer Howard provided England and the world with an implementable vision to fix abiding social problems, a vision summed up in a contradictory catch-phrase, the ‘garden city’. Howard’s diagram with the three magnets of ‘country,’‘town’ and ‘town-country’ are well known but worth reiterating. Whilst town and country each had their merits the town-country – the Garden City – would exclusively showcase the pros of each. The Garden City was of an attractively limited size with work opportunities and leisure time to be spent amidst the edifying benefits of nature, a winning combination sure to entice not only the wretched inhabitants of the inner city but also the middle-class and the well-to-do elite. As Tristam Hunt notes,27 the Garden City movement can be traced back to Ruskin who admonished ‘you must have lovely cities ... limited in size, and not casting out the scum and scurf of them into an encircling eruption of shame, but girded each with its sacred pomoerium and with garlands of gardens, tall blossoming trees, and softly-guided streams.’28 The key to Howard’s vision was his understanding of the value of land. The luck of geography or the logic of density allowed the wealthy to accrue unearned capital through property investment rather than through land improvements. This lucrative rentier logic drove the overcrowding and misery in the inner-cities where the poor were exploited by subletting, rack-renting, and having to squeeze themselves into the ever-diminishing resources of locality. Howard’s solution was to purchase cheap land outside the city through a trust into which residents would pay rent that would service the capital and interest of the financers of the housing project in turn. The cumulative increase in land value would be enjoyed by the residents of the Garden City as a whole with excess rent reinvested into improvements and infrastructural upgrades. More importantly, Howard’s deeper ideological plot was to decrease the number of renters in the inner-city which would collapse land values and ultimately see the demise of cities themselves. For this to work, however, the Garden City had to generate sufficient employment opportunities within its sylvan groves to avoid becoming little more than another soulless commuter suburb which Howard derided as a fundamental part of the problem.

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The inaugural Garden City, designed in all eagerness by Raymond Unwin and his partner Barry Parker, already suggested that Howard’s vision was not easily achieved; Letchworth, despite fledgling industries, quickly became a de facto commuter suburb of London populated in the popular press by sandal and sackcloth wearing vegans rather than the healthy mix of social classes that Howard imagined. In fact, the Garden City idea soon degenerated into ‘Garden Suburbs,’ Hampstead Garden Suburb the case in point. At Hampstead, Unwin was freed from the complications of factories and civic infrastructure, and designed the picturesque medieval village he longed for. The ramifications of Hampstead Garden Suburb were great; armed with that model and his rationally-grounded polemic Nothing Gained by Overcrowding Unwin managed to caucus the 1909 Town Planning Act into the statutes which included the relatively low densities of 12 dwellings to the acre as a norm. The Victorian city, with its teeming opportunity and runaway filth, was to be replaced by the genteel anti-urban mediocrity of the suburb, a neutered zone of gardening and polite disinterestedness. Howard’s clear but flawed diagram of Country, Town & Town-Country would be messily fulfilled in reality by the repetition of Country, Town, Suburb. Howard’s Garden City idea – transformed through the hands of Raymond Unwin with Ruskin and Morris in the background like wallpaper flickering in tallow light – was not just a rescue plan aimed at redeeming the working class from the slums. It was also intended to be a cultural and social restitution of the medieval past. The world, it seemed, with its factories, labour unions and godless mean-street multitudes, had lost its way and was headed to social calamity, possibly even revolution. The medieval English village, as Standish Meacham notes, offered a static hierarchical model wherein each individual had a role to play in a carefully structured ‘organic society, based on the mutual responsibility and obligation that myth insisted informed social relations before the coming of industrialization and the city.’29 Recreating the physical structure of the village, it was hoped, would induce inhabitants to become their better selves, to duly perform assigned roles on the perfect stage-set of a happily settled community. Away from the temptations of drink and carousing, they might take up selfimproving hobbies like morris dancing and tennis. As much as Ruskin and Morris abhorred the mass-produced bric-a-brac of Victorian industrialization – the founding rubbish-heap layers of consumer culture – they lamented the loss of ‘authentic’ cultural practices based, in their minds, largely on craft. It was hoped that the Garden City residents would fill their homes and hearts with useful selfmade items and humbly enact their own English heritage in small daily ways. It would be a guided restitution of Englishness. Standish Meacham explains: In accepting the inevitability of an enfranchised working class, garden city reformers employed Englishness to institute an exclusionary hierarchy. They would use the garden city to define what was English and what was not . It is important to acknowledge, however, that the high-minded proponents of garden cities saw that ‘other’ not so much in terms of social category – the working class – as in terms of cultural deprivation. All were welcome to work their way from the wasteland of cultural otherness into the light and authority that was Englishness. Light and authority, be it noted: the crossing required a willingness to surrender

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old cultural baggage at the behest of an elite that felt no compunction in insisting on its own definition of what was best. Englishness thus implied a cultural paternalism that again connected the present to the past.30

To be English, it seemed, one had to escape the dirt and democracy of the city and embrace the heirarchical role-playing of the medieval English country village resuscitated through the Garden City. Nobody was to be denied a correcting dose of culture – or more precisely, a dose of correcting culture.

Country, Town, Suburb: Self, Other, Same That paternalistic impulse motivating Garden City reformists – setting aside the anarchistic and socialist credentials of William Morris – points to a simple contradiction at the heart of rudimentary identity politics. Identity is not an essence but is formed through relations with Others; the Self is formed by the Other, or rather, the Self is formed not only by what it is but also by what it is not.31 The slums and rookeries of England’s cities marked the working class as different – as Other – and helped legitimize the class structure that privileged a select few – who were in turn ‘obliged’ in their stewardship of the many. So flattered is the Self by its own image – the assured cultural conviction of Lord Milner or Lionel Curtis or any of the other agents of Empire in the South African context – that it sets about re-crafting Others into the Same. Here lies the essential contradiction of Empire; the need to simultaneously mark out Others to legitimize their exploitation while insisting they improve themselves into a more palatable likeness of the subjugating Master. It is the uneasy voyage any ‘civilizing’ mission undertakes. As Robert Young puts it: In Western philosophy, when knowledge or theory comprehends the other, then the alterity of the latter vanishes as it becomes part of the same... . In all cases the other is neutralized as a means of encompassing it: ontology amounts to a philosophy of power, an egotism in which the relation with the other is accomplished through its assimilation into the self.32

Or not quite. In identity politics there is always a residual Otherness, never complete assimilation. The much maligned suburbs are a case in point. They were seen as an uncomfortably compromised version of the true home of the Englishman; the country manor house. An embarrassing reality, a mediocre attempt at a full and proper life, with every pretentious ornamented gable belying their inadequacy; it is the Same as the Self, but not quite. Homi Bhabha, writing on Empire, finds in this discomfort a form of resistance on the part of the colonized Other. For Bhabha, the ‘mimic man’33 is the mirror through which Whiteness recognizes both its tenuous construction and its potential unravelling. By being ‘not quite/not White’ and yet clothed with all the affectations of Englishness, the ‘mimic man’ is a troubling glitch insisting on the contradictions of colonialism. The fraught ambition of rendering the colonized subject as simultaneously Other and Same is mocked by the ‘mimic man’. In fact, the ‘mimic man’ exposes the constructed nature of identity itself and how easily it might unravel. All the more reason then, in the Garden City,

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for the retro medieval village to script and control the stage of enunciation, to choreograph the roles and dress up its actors in a ready-made and pre-fabricated past, one that was removed from the contradictions of the present. With morris dancing and maypoles everyone was wearing a costume, everyone was already authentically inauthentic. For all the posturing of the medieval village, the real English Self wasn’t to be found there; he was more likely to be the benevolent squire up in the manor house, intervening in the affairs of the Garden City ‘village’ when its under-refined inhabitants went off script. The landed gentry had long been abandoning their life in the city in favour of stately piles in the country, but alarming new neighbours awaited them. For the country estate had also become the hunting ground of the nouveau riche beneficiaries of Empire.34 In the stage-set of medieval Englishness, the owners of mines and manufactories were readily able to buy themselves the role of lord of the manor. Those on top of the pile were better able to jump clear off the heaped up mass of exploited bodies that globalization fed off and the messier and more tangled up the world got, the stronger the need to retreat from it into nature and a sentimentalized version of the past. The necessary entanglement of Self, Other and Same is exemplified in the figure of Octavia Hill, the housing reformist, who was also a force behind establishing the National Trust in England; the preservation of England’s country estates was of the same restorative impulse driving the clearing of slums and the reordering of England’s Others into guileless medieval yeomen. It is also hardly surprising that the first edition of Country Life magazine was published in England in 1897 when Garden City housing projects were just beginning to gain traction. While it offered useful information on golf and racing and country estates for sale, Country Life also produced lavish photographic spreads of old and new country estates, many designed by Edwin Luytens and his peers. In the manor house, the true English Self was unassailable, and here were the pictures to prove it. Even the middle class could now take a wistful restorative retreat into the pages of Country Life to assuage the niggling sense that in their suburbs they were ‘not quite.’ Howards’ triad of Country, Town and Suburb is thus compellingly symmetrical with the schema of Self, Other and Same. It is the basic structuring logic of this book. The example of Country Life brings to light further methodological procedures that this book follows. The photographs of country houses in Country Life are a constitutive example of what Michel Foucault calls ‘the order of discourse.’35 As representations, heaped in esteem by the format and founders of the magazine, the photographs gain a legitimizing power. They are the necessary counterpoint to the ‘slummer journalism’ articles written in the tabloids at the time. How photographs are framed or presented with captions, or how narratives are constructed, is a necessary part of the legitimizing or delegitimizing of social and cultural practices, of bringing order, in this case, to the turbulence of Empire building. Edward Said’s Orientalism offers an example of Foucault’s ‘discourse analysis;’ how an archive of representation can be investigated and analysed for its underlying ideological motives. But representations are fluid and transferrable and can reach extensive audiences whereas the reality of the physical object – the lived experience of the

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slum or the manor house – cannot. Consequently, this book investigates words and images as well as the physical artefacts of architecture, the spatial implications of buildings, villages, towns or even, building regulations as it traces the ordering ambitions of the agents of Empire. The final category of ‘spectacle’ considers the use of bodies and material objects coming together during significant and publicly recognized events, in other words, where buildings as objects were used and manipulated through visits by officials, or through their display in public space. Images, words, space, events and artefacts, make up the archive to be investigated in the following pages. They build the story of how the agents of Empire36 used architecture to construct Cape Town into the ordered Imperial landscape of Country/Town/Suburb and Self/Other/Same.

Building Apartheid The story of apartheid begins officially in 1948 and congeals around the increasing choleric blood of Afrikaner nationalism. This book traces an essential prequel to that well-known story. As I will show in the following chapters, architecture played a significant role in the ambitions of the Union of (White) South Africa and Empire, not only through the articulate symbols provided by architects such as Herbert Baker but through its attention to the ‘dull details’ of municipal life throughout what was intended to literally become ‘British South Africa.’ This story is mostly located in Cape Town though we travel as far afield as Pretoria and London. It was in Cape Town that the symbols of Union and Empire were placed side-byside with the machinations of municipal ambitions, where the Garden City ideal – that utopian vision of Englishness – found initial traction in South Africa. Here the ‘alien’ land that Empire found itself in at the Cape was slowly transformed – deformed – through words and deeds into little bits of England – with the Otherness of Africa conveniently corralled into ever-increasing micro-managed spaces. It is clear that it was through the imperative of Empire – the proselytizing zeal of Englishness as the model of civilization – that a segregated and racialized city was born, that a prototypical and unrefined model of apartheid was implemented by the British at the Cape. Of course Empire doesn’t ‘do’ people do, and they did this at times intentionally and conspiratorially and at other times with all the disinterestedness that a cultural hegemony exerts through its agents.37 To be sure, Building Apartheid is not a history of the project of apartheid itself, but rather a history of how the agents of Empire, operating through the imperatives of Empire, laid the solid foundations onto which the ugly edifice of apartheid was built. But Building Apartheid also tangentially inspects the ambitions of architecture, that seemingly innocuous but totalizing presence in our lives. It gets at the match and mismatch between idea and reality. All architecture is utopian: it imagines a future not yet lived, but nevertheless planned and studied and projected. It promises to resolve social contradictions by offering a formed ideology with normative stage-sets for better selves. It invites us to inhabit its edifying vision of us, which we only ever fail to do. Unlike the softer ideological instruments of paper and celluloid, architecture is relentlessly present, it is really real, grasping and

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entangling our bodies – not just our minds – within it. For architecture exists three times: firstly as drawing, secondly as built metaphor, and thirdly as dumb mute matter with nothing meaningful to say. As it moves through these steps – one two three – in its attempts to paper over the contradictions of society it becomes less convincing; each building, each constructed space, demonstrates the failed ambitions of its totalizing agenda. More or less.

Notes 1

Said, E.W., Culture and Imperialism, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), p.xiii.

2

Baker, H., Architecture and Personalities, (London: Country Life, 1944), p.19.

3

Baker, H., Architecture and Personalities, p.19.

4

Baker had met Rhodes before through his brother; one should always be doubtful of an architect accidentally meeting wealthy potential clients.

5

Baker, H., Architecture and Personalities, p.24.

6

Morris, W., News from Nowhere, Chapter 15, an ignorant adventurer ‘breaking up whatever traditional society there might be in the doomed country, and by destroying whatever leisure or pleasure be found there.’

7

Bickford-Smith, V., Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town, (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1995), p.38.

8

Radford, D., ‘The Architecture of the Western Cape, 1838 to 1901,’ unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1979, p.19.

9

Bickford-Smith et al, Cape Town. The Making of a City, (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 1998), p.213 and p.220.

10 Bickford-Smith et al, Cape Town. The Making of a City, p.213. 11 Radford, D., ‘Bylaws and Buildings: Regulating the Colonial City in South Africa,’ SA Architect, (March, 1998). 12 Radford, D., ‘The Architecture of the Western Cape, 1838 to 1901’ shows the exceptions to be William Black articled in Australia; Fred Cherry articled in Dublin; Anthony M. De Witt articled in Dordrecht; Herbert T. Julius Schroeder and Johann E Seelinger articled in Berlin; Herbert Jones and Daniel McInthosh being articled in Cape Town to Charles Freeman. 13 Pakenham, T., The Scramble for Africa, 1876-1912, (Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 1991), jacket sleeve notes. 14 Coetzer, O., Fire in the Sky: The Destruction of the Orange Free State, 1899–1902, (South Africa: Covos-Day Books, 2000). 15 Kendle, J.E., The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), p.21. 16 Ruskin, J., ‘Conclusion to Inaugural Lecture (1870)’ in Boehmer, E. (ed.), Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870s–1918, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p.18. 17 Nimcocks, W., Milner’s Young Men: The ‘Kindergarten’ in Edwardian Imperial Affairs, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1968), p.121.

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18 Kendle, J.E., The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union, p.21. 19 Symonds, R., Oxford and Empire, (London: Macmillan, 1986), p.75. 20 Kendle, J.E., The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union, p.23. 21 Selborne, W., A Review of the Present Mutual Relations of the British South African Colonies, 1907, (Pretoria, 1907), p.93. 22 Wilde, O., ‘Art and the Handicraftsman’ in Essays and Lectures by Oscar Wilde, (London: Methuen and Co., 1908). 23 Eagles, S., After Ruskin: The Social and Political Legacies of a Victorian Prophet, 1870–1920, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p.99. 24 Faulkner, P., ‘Ruskin and Morris,’ in The Journal of the William Morris Society, vol. xiv, no.1, (Autumn, 2000). 25 Morris, M. (ed.), The Collected Works of William Morris, 24 vols., (London: Longmans Green, 1910), XXlIl, p.279. 26 Morris, W., News from Nowhere, (London: Longmans Green, 1897), p.24. 27 Hunt, T., Building Jerusalem. The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, (London: Orion Books Ltd, 2005), p.422. 28 Ruskin, J., Lectures on Art, (1870) (London, 1910), p.143. 29 Meacham, S., Regaining Paradise. Englishness and the Early Garden City Movement, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p.5. 30 Meacham, S., Regaining Paradise. Englishness and the Early Garden City Movement, pp.7–8. 31 In this book I point to the problematic nature of these historically constructed and politicized identities by using capitalization, that is, of Self, Other, Same, and also, Coloured, Native and White, Whiteness, etc. 32 Young, R., White Mythologies. Writing History and the West, (London: Routledge, 1990), p.13. 33 Bhabha, H., The Location of Culture, (London: Routledge, 1994), pp.85–92. 34 Aslet, C., The Last Country Houses, (New Haven and London: Yale U.P., 1982) p.157. 35 Foucault, M., ‘The Order of Discourse’ in Young, R., Untying the Text. A Post-Structuralist Reader, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). 36 Coetzer, N., ‘The Production of the City as a White Space,’ (University College London: Uwnpublished Ph.D. thesis, 2004), Appendix A. 37 Althusser, L., ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’ in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. (London: New Left Books, 1971); Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, (London: Penguin Books, 1977); Foucault, M., ‘The Order of Discourse.’

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Part I Self/Countryside

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2 A Common Heritage/An Appropriated History: Cape Dutch Architecture and the Union of South Africa

What is our main object? The co-operation of both the European races, in order along that path to form a South African Nation.1 General Botha, 1911

The tourist trail in and around Cape Town promotes its own ‘big five’ in competition with the safari-tourism of the more ‘African’ hinterland: Table Mountain, Robben Island, Cape Point, the penguins and, the winelands. Backs cooling against the whitewashed walls of old Cape Dutch homesteads, tourists and locals sip sauvignon and pinotage under hundred-year-old oak trees. With their symmetrical gabled façades and thatched roofs set against the drama of ragged mountains, these 250 year old Cape Dutch homesteads are easy icons of the Cape and its tourism industry (Figures 2.1–2.2). But back at the end of the nineteenth century these rough remnants of the Cape’s Dutch colonial past – these farmhouses – were not particularly valued or appreciated, their hand-plastered walls were crumbling under the strain of a new era. They had reached a state of decay, alteration and destruction2 that signified their loss of cultural capital in the face of Victorian aesthetics, building styles and values.3 Yet, by 1910 they were the focus of a concerted building preservation program and many were being documented and mapped out through drawings and photographs. Importantly, official and government buildings were starting to be built in a Cape Dutch revival style, as a de facto South African national style. What led to this dramatic turnaround in the ‘fortunes’ of Cape Dutch architecture? In many ways the building preservation movement in Cape Town reflected similar concerns in England, like the formation of the National Trust,4 whilst the search for a national style was a common pursuit throughout Europe at the time.5 But the answer to the question really lies underground. And in concentration camps. Gold put Rhodes’ expansionist vision of Empire on a collision course with the Boer republics. The South African War quickly devolved into a guerrilla war, eventually won by the British through a scorched-earth policy that left thousands of women and children dead in concentration camps. How were these bitter foes uneasily

2.1  Morgenster – typical of Cape Dutch baroque-gabled homesteads

2.2  Schoongezicht, home of John X. Merriman

A Common Heritage/An Appropriated History

21

united in only a few years to bring about the Union of South Africa? The necessity of overcoming such fierce antagonism was understood by General Botha who, after having fought against the British in the South African War not more than ten years before, asked the following rhetorical question at the Bloemfontein Congress of the South African Party in 1911: ‘What is our main object? The co-operation of both the European races, in order along that path to form a South African Nation.’6 Whilst General Hertzog stated: ‘This is the beginning, the practical beginning of the existence of a South African nationality and national life,’7 even though he later went on to establish the Afrikaner and republican oriented National Party.8 Two issues need to be clarified. Firstly, English and Cape politicians were firm believers that this nationalism was a necessary component of the strengthening of the British Empire; only a common identity would secure South Africa’s ongoing contribution to the fiscus after the conflict. Secondly, South Africa was not unique, at this point in history, in its emergent nationalist rhetoric; the rise of nationalist agendas throughout the world was endemic to the period.9 Unlike other ‘nations,’ though, English and Afrikaans speaking South Africans arguably had little in common, except, and this was the crux of the matter, their European culture, a heritage made more poignant by being so far flung in ‘darkest’ Africa. Cape Dutch architecture, or rather, Cape Dutch homesteads were icons of this ‘common’ European culture. But they were not ready-made or unproblematic symbols of English/Afrikaner identity. In fact, the English were only present at the Cape at the beginning of the nineteenth century, just as the production of Cape Dutch homesteads was on the wane. They had had very little to do with the production of Cape Dutch architecture. And the same could be argued with regard to the Afrikaners. Though largely the descendents of the original Dutch and other non-English settlers at the Cape, they had developed a distinctly non-Dutch identity forged at the frontier of the Great Trek and its resulting tribulations. The 150-odd years of Dutch administration prior to the occupation of the Cape by the British formed the perfect material for the representation of a history that saw this period as primarily European – and hence open to mutual claims by the British and the Afrikaner alike. The work needing to be done, and indeed, partly the subject matter of this chapter, was to represent Cape Dutch architecture and Cape Dutch homesteads in particular as part of a common heritage. The symbolic representation of the new nation was partly to be formed through mutual custodianship of a set of buildings that neither the English nor Afrikaner had so much as a hand in making – like a feuding couple pragmatically ceasing hostilities to care for an abandoned baby on their doorstep. The ‘birth of a nation’ had a proxy, an abused orphan to be nurtured back to health (Figure 2.3). As we will see, the (predominantly) English motivators of the building preservation movement and the promoters of Cape Dutch as a national style had motives beyond securing a common English/Afrikaner identity. The Cape’s past was claimed as their own; it was never a common heritage, only an appropriated history. The aim of developing a common English/Afrikaner identity through the idea of a common heritage was itself supportive of the strengthening of the British Empire’s role in South Africa – whether what was being promoted was in effect a common heritage or an appropriated history, the intended results were the same.

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2.3  ‘The Birth of a Notion’ – Groot Constantia as icon of the Union of South Africa

Cecil Rhodes, Herbert Baker and Groote Schuur The Premier of the Cape, Cecil John Rhodes, chose the site of the former Dutch East India Company’s barn in Rondebosch, established by the Cape’s first Dutch Governor, Jan van Riebeeck, as his new residence in the early 1890s (Figures 2.4– 2.5). Not only did he change the Anglo name of the house existing on the site from The Grange to Groote Schuur (a name reflecting its origin as a Dutch built barn, a return to origins), but he also chose to have the residence refurbished in 1892 in the defunct Cape Dutch style, a style arguably forged by the Dutch ancestors of the Afrikaners. Rhodes was aware of Herbert Baker’s interest in the old Cape Dutch homesteads in and around Cape Town and commissioned him to achieve the ‘restoration.’ Not quite a replica of a Cape Dutch homestead, the alterations by Baker relied on florid gables, shuttered windows and whitewashed stucco to achieve the ‘restoration’ required; and in his biography of Rhodes, Baker notes the transparent political overtones of the project, not only in flattering the Afrikaner elite and their ‘heritage’ but in attempting to recover the ‘lost’ civilization and early material culture of the original settlers: His friends and the public were at first inclined to laugh at him for building and furnishing his house in the manner of those of the old Cape colonists; some even said that in reviving the forgotten arts of the Dutch he was currying the favour of their politicians. Merriman even, his most cultured friend, asked me why I did not build him a ‘fine Tudor house.’ But to the few to whom he confided his ideas on such matters there could be no doubt as to his genuine sincerity and idealism. He was impelled, I am convinced, by a deeper feeling of sympathy for the history of the early settlers and of respect for their achievements in civilization, in contrast to his dislike of the Victorian art and industrial materialism of his age. The encouragement he gave to the revival of the arts was prompted as much by

2.4  Cecil Rhodes’s The Grange (above) remodelled into Groote Schuur (below) by Herbert Baker, c.1890s

24

2.5 Herbert Baker – Groote Schuur plan

Building Apartheid

the sense of benefit to South Africa as by the pleasure that it gave to himself or to those he entertained with so much hospitality. Did he not too by inspiring a renaissance of their early arts and culture call forth the self-respect of the Dutch people, as also by his friendly collaboration with Hofmeyr and the Bond he helped them to develop their political consciousness.10

Despite being burnt down in 1896, Groote Schuur enjoyed a second restoration, back to Baker’s original design. Again Baker brings a positive spin in his biography on Rhodes suggesting that the rebuilding in more durable material gave longevity to Rhodes’ ambition for union – especially as the Premier bequeathed Groote Schuur as the residence of the Prime Minister of a future united South Africa: But he would, I believe, not have been displeased in thinking that when, on the formation of the Union of South Africa, it became the home of the Prime Minister of the Union, it would be three Dutch South Africans who first dwelt there. Surely Groote Schuur and the aura of its genus loci can have no small influence in the consummation of Rhodes’ ideals for the future of South Africa?11

Groote Schuur, Van Riebeeck’s barn, initialized the restoration and preservation of Cape Dutch homesteads, but more importantly, established Cape Dutch as a talisman through which the Union of South Africa could be motivated. The restoration pulled a bygone era to the surface and celebrated a common heritage that had never existed.

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The Closer Union Society: Cape Dutch Architecture as a ‘Common Heritage’ Of all the institutions most involved in the promotion of Cape Dutch architecture as the embodiment of a common English/Afrikaner identity, the Closer Union Society was the most active before and within the first few years of Union in 1910. The Closer Union Society was formed in 1908 with W.P. Schreiner as president with the aim of promoting a nation after the imminent political union because: ‘A handful of leaders may fashion a state, but they cannot create a nation.’12 As already mentioned in Chapter 1, the Closer Union Society and its propaganda mouthpiece The State were the work of Milner’s Kindergarten in Johannesburg. It was largely through The State that Cape Dutch buildings, the geriatric remains of a bygone colonial era, were plucked from their bucolic vales, invigorated and rudely thrust centre stage into the limelight of Empire as symbols of the union of South Africa. Francis Masey, a partner in the firm first established by Herbert Baker, started an eight-part series of articles titled – with unmistakable clarity as to its intentions – ‘The Beginnings of Our Nation’ in the first issue of The State in 1909.13 Rich in photographs of Cape Dutch architecture (thanks to the work of Arthur Elliott), the series ran across eight articles in the monthly editions from January to October 1909 that saw most of the writing focused on Cape Dutch architecture owned by the Cape’s political elite. Masey’s first article was simply an introduction to Cape Dutch architecture and carries some sentiment regarding the need for preservation of the homesteads undergoing serious depletion in their numbers, integrity and artefacts which were being removed and sold out of the country. But it was with the focus on the Drostdy (magistrate’s house and office) at the small town of Tulbagh in the Cape that the idea of Cape Dutch homesteads being symbols of a common English/Afrikaner identity really began to be voiced.14 The second edition of The State carried a poem dedicated to the Drostdy penned by F.C. Kolbe, whose great-great-grandfather, it was noted, was the magistrate of Stellenbosch, a town formed out of Cape Dutch buildings. In the poem the Drostdy, with its ‘stately halls and courtly manners,’ symbolizes the European past at the Cape which demands to be emulated in the present – and therein lies the common mission of English and Afrikaner alike: Relic and emblem of a storied past. Thrice happy they whose lines in thee are cast Thy records summon all in thy embrace To emulate the virtues of the race. Thy stately halls of courtly manners tell, Where only Ladies Bountiful should dwell. Thy solid frame is pledge of future glory, And links our doings with our country’s story. F.C. Kolbe, ‘To the Drostdy at Tulbagh.’15

The ‘our doings’ – perhaps the impending act of Union but certainly the structuring of a common English/Afrikaner identity and a new nation – is the necessary conclusion of the past symbolized by the Drostdy. However, ‘Thy records summon

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all in thy embrace,’ hints at the Drostdy as much more than just a symbol. Masey took pains to point out that the Drostdy was the literal manifestation of the joining of the Dutch and British administration of the Cape: ‘Whilst it proved to be the last building begun upon Dutch soil in South Africa, it was destined to be the first completed upon the passing of the Cape into the hands of the British.’16 There was, so suggested by Masey, at least one Cape Dutch homestead that the British had a hand in making. In the very next edition of The State, Masey deepened the symbolic meaning of the Drostdy as a unifier of Afrikaner and English: To-day particular interest is attached to the old house, for, as has already been pointed out, it perhaps more than any other official building in South Africa represents the link between the past and present which under the Act of Union we are consolidating … It is interesting to note that its present owner [Meiring Beck] was a member of the National Convention [for Union], which finally linked up the differences between the new regime and the old regime of which his old house saw so much long ago.17

Meiring Beck, who owned the Drostdy and participated in the convention that forged the Union of South Africa, brings together the two ‘races’ already spiritually unified through the Drostdy and its history. It is useful to include a fairly extensive quote taken from an article written by Meiring Beck himself titled ‘South Africanism’: There is scarcely a single point in which you will not find striking similarities in the modes of thought and expression between Dutch-descended and Englishdescended South Africans … The problem for those guiding the destinies of the British Commonwealth is not how to banish for ever the phantom of a South African nation but how, by fostering the national spirit, to drive into grooves sympathetic to common interests rather than into grooves out of harmony with those interests … In building up South African character let us cultivate pride in our own history and in the history of our forefathers. Let us accept each other’s history as a common heritage.18

The imperialist bent of the Closer Union Society recognized the importance of fostering and guiding a common English/Afrikaner identity in the interests of Empire. The sentence ‘let us accept each other’s history as a common heritage’ came from a man who owned and lived in one of the material artefacts of that (imagined) common heritage. Cape Dutch homesteads were being promoted as the material manifestation of this common English/Afrikaner identity. Even John X. Merriman, Prime Minister of the Cape and the main proponent of union over federation,19 owned the Cape Dutch homestead of Schoongezicht (Figure 2.2).20 With the end of Masey’s marriage and his acrimonious split from Herbert Baker in 1910,21 Dorothea Fairbridge22 took over the series in August 1911 and ran twelve articles until December 1912 entitled ‘Old South African Homesteads’. This formed the basis of her opus The Historic Houses of South Africa.23 Her series was drawn to more picturesque and gabled homesteads such as Morgenster and did not actively promote them as symbolic and material expressions of a common English/Afrikaner identity. Monthly editions carried Fairbridge’s reports of her visits to specific Cape Dutch regions and the discoveries she made there. Her journeying constitutes

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a literal mapping-out of Cape Dutch homesteads recounted in narrative form. Fairly extensive details of ownership, from the very first settler of each homestead through to the owners of the day, many of whom were English, meant genealogy met geography in her odyssey and established lineage through location. In 1922, Fairbridge published The Historic Houses of South Africa. It was an extensive and exhaustively illustrated (photographs, drawings and colour plates) survey of many of the Cape Dutch homesteads. The book included a Foreword written by the then Prime Minister, J.C. Smuts, which included the following statement: The old houses of South Africa are a common heritage of which all South Africans are proud, and are precious links binding us all together in noble traditions and great memories of our past.24

That ‘all South Africans’ meant all white South Africans is fairly certain since the citizenship of ‘non-Whites’ was not a pressing concern at the time. Smuts confirms this when lionizing the happy outcome of antagonistic South African history: It is, for the greater part, a record of struggles in the face of difficulties, and those difficulties overcome and shaped to noble uses, even as the dogged spirit in which her two white races more than once met in collision is being fused into an equally determined spirit of patriotism which has a wider outlook than that of race.25

The above quote gets at a tendency emerging in the discourse around Cape Dutch architecture and homesteads, a conscious attempt to find in Cape Dutch history elements common to both English and Dutch. It was an appropriation by the English of Dutch history at the Cape. A new unifying narrative that conveniently turned the 270-odd years since the initial European settlement at the Cape into a tale of commonality that would lend itself to ruling political interests seeking to forge a nation.

The South African National Society: Representing a National History in Monuments The South African National Society (hereafter National Society) was the first institution, along with the Cape Institute of Architects (hereafter CIoA), to promote the preservation of Cape Dutch homesteads as places of national importance. Around Christmas 1904, at a meeting in Cape Town presided over by Chief Justice Sir Henry de Villiers (later Lord), the South African Association formed the National Society.26 On 18 February 1905, a constitution was drawn up at the first general meeting and officers were elected with an impressive membership list.27 By 1922 there were 168 members in Cape Town, 74 in Durban and 13 in Pietermaritzburg, a geographical tally that hinted at the fact that English-oriented South Africans were the main motivators. Its membership lists were studded with the South African elite and by 1930 the National Society was prestigious enough to have the

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Building Apartheid

Governor-General of the Cape and Princess Alice attend its 25th anniversary at the Castle in Cape Town.28 It is worth quoting the aims of the National Society at length since it shows how the body was more than intent on preserving Cape Dutch buildings (amongst others), but would act as a didactic organ: To endeavour to inculcate respect and affection for the natural beauties of the country, to preserve, as far as possible, from destruction, all ancient monuments and specimens of old Colonial architecture still remaining in South Africa, and to keep systematic records of such in cases where they cannot be saved; to compile a record of old furniture, and other objects of interest still in South Africa, and to take all possible methods to discourage their removal from the country; to promote love and care for the trees and save unnecessary destruction; to endeavour to regulate the gathering of wild flowers so as to avoid the danger of the extinction of any species; to collect records, and endeavour to acquire archives of historic interest; to make known by means of lectures and printed matter circulated throughout the country, the object of the Society, and to endeavour to promote in legitimate manner reverence for the natural beauties of the country, and a conservative spirit towards the remains and traditions of old colonial life.29

That the National Society was not simply a group of antiquarians with a sentimental love of the ‘beautiful’ was apparent very early on. The very name of the organization suggests a preservation agenda in service to grander nationalist goals. By the 1910s it had inaugurated a series of public lectures and ‘Half Hour Talks with the object of inculcating in the minds of the people, a spirit of respect and desire to preserve’.30 The report of the National Society’s 25th anniversary considered this need to ‘inculcate’ arose from the fact that in the early years ‘The people as a whole had not realized the necessity of retaining our monuments of the past. As the years passed it was necessary to educate them to what should be looked upon as a national duty.’31 Cape Dutch architecture and Cape Dutch homesteads were to be a major part of both the preservation and nationalist agenda. One of the first exhibitions the National Society organized was a display of ‘Colonial furniture and antiquities’ in Cape Town32 and an early successful project was motivating for the preservation in 1913 of Koopmans-de-Wet house, an urban Cape Dutch house. The list of protectors confirms the active involvement of both the English and Afrikaner elite at the Cape, including the wife of Louis Botha, the first Prime Minister of South Africa.33 As early as 1906, along with the Koopmans-de-Wet house, the National Society had been pressing the government to turn Groot Constantia, the Cape Dutch homestead of Simon van der Stel (‘the father of the nation’), and a government vintners college at the time, into a museum.34 In 1925 it was gutted by a fire and the National Society, along with the Historical Monuments Commission, formed a committee appointed by the government to restore Groot Constantia.35 Yet the National Society was far more than an institution lobbying support for building preservation. It actively enabled and funded projects that would bolster the material identity of the Union. When Herbert Baker’s former partner, Frank Kendall,

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published his findings on The Restoration of Groot Constantia,36 the National Society paid the considerable publishing costs37 of some 1000 copies.38 It made payments in 1935 to Herbert Baker’s erstwhile partner, James Morris, for architectural services restoring the Cape Dutch Drostdy or Magistrate’s Home at Tulbagh which had also suffered a fire.39 A year before they covered some of the costs needed to restore the doors and doorway at the Cape Dutch homestead in Cape Town known as the Normal College.40 The National Society spent members’ subscriptions directly on preservation work and propaganda. Two projects really crystallize the National Society’s drive to make the Cape Dutch homestead into a generic national icon. The first was in 1906 commissioning photographer Arthur Elliott to document and survey Cape Dutch homesteads in the Western Cape.41 Elliott made the project a personal obsession and ultimately produced a photographic archive of Cape Dutch homesteads of enormous proportions. In 1936, the Historical Monuments Commission recommended that the Government purchase Elliot’s entire collection – of which Cape Dutch homesteads made up a fair proportion – of 9,368 images to be held at the State Archives building where they remain today.42 The second National Society intervention was fierce lobbying for Act No. 6 of 1923 which established the Historical Monuments Commission.43 Although the Historical Monuments Commission initially had limited powers in motivating for the government’s involvement in the preservation of historical monuments, the Act was revised in 1934 as the Natural and Historical Monuments Relics and Antiques Act which allowed the Historical Monuments Commission to make recommendations to the Minister of Education to proclaim national monuments.44 Cape Dutch homesteads subsequently made up an inordinate amount of the national monuments of South Africa.45 With settler history being actively reconfigured as the story of shared civilization and history, uniting English and Afrikaner, the preservation of the material legacy of Cape Dutch homesteads, because of their useful ‘historical’ associations, was clearly part of the attempt to promulgate a new common English/Afrikaner identity. Cape Dutch homesteads were supposedly pure representations of the time gone before and this was the nationalist rationale for preserving them. A true recording of the past more so than any written text – ‘fossilized history’ as the editor of the Architect, Builder & Engineer, W.J. Delbridge put it.46 Historical buildings could become mechanisms for establishing a shared national history grounded in settler mythology. Kendall, in a public lecture organized by the National Society, with an emphasis on Cape Dutch homesteads, commented that: A nation’s history is written more faithfully and impressively in its architecture than in any book. It is therefore incumbent upon each generation to hand on to posterity those monuments with which fortune has endowed it.47

Writing in 1911 about the loss of the ‘stately’ double-storied urban dwellings to commercial development, Graham Botha, Archivist for the Union of South Africa and later the first Grand Master of the Southern Africa Grand Lodge, hoped that those remaining would not ‘share the same fate of those already demolished for they are the silent recorders of the past.’48

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Building Apartheid

The biggest threat in rural areas, however, was not destructive venal development, but fire. Thatch burns. In 1931, a fire claimed Parel Vallei, one of the Van der Stel brothers’ homesteads. The Architect, Builder & Engineer recorded the event in an editorial titled ‘A National Calamity’ and motivated for the protection of Cape Dutch buildings.49 But it was the fire that decimated Groot Constantia on 19 December 1925 that brought preservation and the importance of turning the building into a museum into the public eye. Although the government had (at least since 1917) been considering Groot Constantia as ‘something in the nature of show buildings,’50 the fire and subsequent restoration meant the production of Groot Constantia as a museum became an urgent cause. The January 1926 edition of the Architect, Builder & Engineer reported that ‘This is a national architectural calamity of the first degree,’51 and then went on to ‘plead with all the force of which we are capable that the Government should immediately restore this historic building,’52 Support also came from the Cape Town City Council. Though the projected costs were set to rise from £8,000 to £12,000 it did not stop the call to comprehensively restore the building, in fact it made arguments more strident. As Councillor S. Caldecott motivated: ‘It will cost twelve thousand pounds. It will cost that much (maximum) to rebuild this fine expression of the early white conquerors for the honour of their descendants.’53 He was explicit about the symbolic importance of Groot Constantia in building a common English/Afrikaner identity: More especially, and more closely, it touches the descendants of the men of the race that built it, the compatriots of Van der Stel. But unless we, whose language and ways of thought, though allied and close, are other than theirs, are insincere in our profession of a desire to fuse and to mingle our traditions and pride with theirs in a common love of country, it touches us also. Groot Constantia can be restored.54

The publication of Kendall’s restoration work on Groot Constantia, which, as noted earlier, the National Society helped fund, included a Foreword by Senator F.S. Malan – then President of the National Society and, from 1910 to 1924, Minister of Mines and Industry – that ramped up the didactic intent of both the restoration and the book: It was felt by the Society that this restoration would not only preserve a priceless national asset, but would also afford an unique opportunity for impressing upon the public by a direct object lesson, the importance, from a national point of view, of preserving the best types of one of the few really artistic creations, namely Cape Dutch Architecture, on which our southern continent prides itself … May the publication of this handsome record of Mr. Kendall’s work, now satisfactorily completed, not only be of assistance to the architectural profession, but also be prized by all who love our storied past as enshrined in our ancient national monuments.55

Having Groot Constantia preserved as part of a ‘national’ heritage reinforcing a common English/Afrikaner identity, is only part of the story that emerged following the fire at Groot Constantia. It is but a prime example of the generally wilful and

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spurious restorations that took place at this time. Cape Dutch homesteads would increasingly be deployed as icons of an ideal commonality retroactively posited by nationalists as the motivating theme and guiding light of settler history.

Groot Constantia and other Wilful and Spurious Restorations It suited the unifying ambitions of the agents of Empire that the greatest Cape Dutch building was designed by the ‘greatest governor of them all,’ Simon van der Stel. But history would have it otherwise and Frank Kendall was the architect appointed to discover the ‘heartbreaking’ truth of it.56 During his investigations, thanks chiefly to the unveiling effects of the fire, Kendall established that the house had been considerably altered into its form just before the fire – long after the death of Van der Stel. His original home was far humbler, a fact not only confirmed by Kendall’s archaeological investigations, but also through the reinterpretation of a drawing by Van der Heydt made in 1741. This illustration was previously thought to be an inaccurate rendering of Van der Stel’s residence since it depicted hipped roofs rather than the gables that were thought at the time to characterize the place. Kendall now took Van der Heydt’s illustration of an un-gabled and fairly humble abode to be an accurate illustration of the house during Van der Stel’s time. Kendall published these revelations in his The Restoration of Groot Constantia and sorrowfully upends the commonly held view that Van der Stel designed Groot Constantia: ‘... although it goes to my heart to do so, I must dispel this illusion.’57 Not only was Constantia assumed to have been ‘built’ by Van der Stel and promoted as such by numerous individuals such as the Town Clerk, J.R. Finch, in the official guide to the Cape Peninsula,58 but it was also taken by architects of significance such as J.M. Solomon to be the ‘prototype of all the Cape homesteads.’59 Not to mention the craven idea that the ‘father of the Nation,’ as Van der Stel was generally regarded, thanks to his policy of introducing settlers to the Cape, had not lived in majesty as had previously been supposed. The conflation of ‘great man’ and ‘grand building’ assumed and promoted since the beginning of the discourse on Cape Dutch architecture was exposed for the wilful propaganda it was. As required through the terms of his appointment, Kendall consulted the joint committee of the National Society and the Historical Monuments Commission which was ‘called upon to see that the restoration was conducted on lines which would preserve the traditions and appearance of the old Manor House without improvements’.60 The committee agonized over restoring the dwelling to the Van der Stel period which meant tearing down its affecting gables. They also considered restoring it to a condition just before the fire, which ‘would mean immortalising a lean to iron roof at the back with a modern excrescence obviously out of harmony with the original conception.’61 In the end, though ‘“Constantia at its best” was the formula agreed upon as most effectively meeting the real end in view’.62 Exactly what ‘the real end in view’ was is not stated but suggests the general desire to restore the original conflation of Simon van der Stel and Groot Constantia through the restoration of the building to its ideal Self.

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2.6  Tongaat High School – replica of the Old Supreme Court building in Cape Town

Certainly the opening ceremony of Groot Constantia confirmed that this wholly ideological restoration was successful. It was the major event of 1927. As the Administrator of the Cape, Fourie, noted in his opening speech, there were many institutions represented: representatives of the Senate, the House of Assembly, the Provincial Council, the Judiciary, the Magistracy, the Municipalities of Cape Town, Wynberg, and Simon’s Town, the Divisional Council of the Cape, the University, the Church, the Press, the Publicity Association, the Chamber of Commerce, the Army, the Navy, the Mountain Club and the Consulates of foreign countries – and not forgetting the South African National Society and the Historical Monuments Commission.63 In a speech blithely sidestepping the controversy over the attribution of the gables to Van der Stel, Fourie pinned the value of the building on its association with the ‘great governor’ whilst understandably admiring the wine cellar’s ‘beautiful pediment’. He ended his speech hoping the museum ‘may long serve its purpose of ministering to the inspiration, instruction and delight of many generations to come.’ Kendall’s was not the only restoration that returned Cape Dutch homesteads to their imagined ideal. Welgemeend, the homestead of ‘Onze Jan’ Hofmeyr, leader of the Afrikaner Bond and occasional friend of Rhodes, was intended to have the facelift of a gable it never originally had,64 specifically in order to commemorate the ‘great’ man – as the plaque on its wall so clearly states. In another instance of spurious restoration, Rhodes’ cottage at Muizenberg had the original corrugated iron roof removed and replaced with thatch65 – a material and image more in keeping with the ‘great’ man approach. Another example lies in the somewhat maverick work of Robert ‘Gwelo’ Goodman, an England-born South African artist. Goodman, who was notably a friend of the architects James Morris and Frank Kendall, as well as Dorothea Fairbridge,66 contrived a Cape Dutch restoration of his own. He began painting Cape Dutch homesteads in 191967 and by 1923 they formed the major subject of his exhibition in Grahamstown.68 As an amateur

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architect, he focused most of his attention on the Cape Dutch style. When his friend, Judge Newton-Thompson, bought the much-altered Cape Dutch homestead of Newlands House where Goodman had stayed in the 1920s, Goodman offered his services in restoring the place to its Cape Dutch origins69 – designing a pair of Cape Dutch gables at the new entrance to the dwelling. His architectural career promoting Cape Dutch architecture did not end there. Thanks to his friendship with the sugar-baron Douglas Mackeurton,70 he was invited to design many buildings in the plantation town of Tongaat in Natal, and not only set Cape Dutch as the style for most subsequent designs there, but also literally copied some well known Cape Dutch buildings. Tongaat High School, sweltering in the out-of-context subtropical heat of ‘Zululand,’ is a near exact replica of the Old Slave Lodge/Supreme Court building in Cape Town (Figure 2.6).

Slavish Copyists: Promoting and Disseminating Cape Dutch as a New National Style That the opening decades of the twentieth century were awash in nationalisms the world over is brought home in the explicit agenda of so many ‘nations’ establishing, concocting and recovering national styles of architecture in the period. The new Union of South Africa was certainly caught up in this general mania – though this agenda was not immediately apparent in the early years of the discourse emerging around Cape Dutch architecture in general and Cape Dutch homesteads in particular. Immediately after the Union of 1910, the National Society organized a series of public slide lectures, given mostly by Frank Kendall, as basic introductions to Cape Dutch architecture. Even though Kendall made it clear at these lectures that ‘a style in architecture may be described as a concrete expression of national character,’71 there is little evidence to suggest that Kendall or the National Society were at that stage actively promoting Cape Dutch as the basis for a new national style. The lectures were more aimed at establishing a common English/Afrikaner identity through the symbol of existing Cape Dutch homesteads and urging their preservation and restoration rather than demanding that all good folk should be patriotically adding whitewashed gables to their houses. Nevertheless, Cape Dutch architecture as an historical event was unerringly represented as an original, and particularly South African, style. Baker considered it as much when he wrote that it emerged when the French classical revival ‘mingled with the architecture of Holland and Belgium (which) has helped to create a South African style.’72 An article in the Architect, Builder & Engineer titled ‘Old Cape Craftsmanship,’ in considering Cape Dutch architecture and craftsmanship, offered a slightly more nationalist reading. Admitting this architecture had emerged out of a greater European tradition, the article also suggested ‘there is much of an original style in it. Of all the dominions, we are the only one to possess an unique style. It should be our duty to develop it’.73 Charles Percival Walgate, another key Cape Dutch ideologue, came a bit closer to the possible use of Cape Dutch as a national style when, commenting on the importance of preserving historical buildings, he made the following comment: ‘The value of such remains in fostering a national

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Building Apartheid

spirit, and founding a national style is incalculable. It is a fact accepted by critics all over the world that the buildings of the Cape constitute a separate and highly developed style of architecture.’74 However, promoting historical Cape Dutch as a particularly South African architectural style did not amount to literally advocating it as the national style for the future. For Baker, it was open to liberal reinterpretation, reinvention – not something to be copied gable for gable, garland for garland. Baker had, in his years at the Cape, developed a Cape Dutch revival style that, apart from being un-typically double storied, carried simple visual cues of Cape Dutch homesteads: whitewashed walls and gables. Supposedly following the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movements, Baker saw within the Cape Dutch homestead the organic development of a style that had emerged as a response to local climatic, material and cultural conditions and the strictures of its place; style was not as important as rooting the building to place.75 But the sincerity of Baker’s canvassing for the correctness of organic or place-based architecture – a prototypical ‘critical regionalism’76 – is unconvincing when, after moving to Johannesburg, he designed many houses there in the manner of the Cape Dutch revival style he had pioneered in Cape Town. Yet people were willing to credit Baker for the development of Cape Dutch as the basis for a national style. In fact, in dedicating his The Restoration of Groot Constantia, Kendall writes: ‘To Herbert Baker who awakened an interest in the arts of the old Cape settlers and laid the foundation of a national architecture in South Africa.’77 Even if Baker had moved on to adventures in classical revival in the Union Buildings in Pretoria and the Empire Grand Manner stylings of New Delhi, others were still willing to advocate Cape Dutch as a national architectural style in his name. Charles Walgate spoke at a meeting of the Cape Architectural Students Association, stressing that it was ‘a greater thing’ to work towards a national style than to pursue an individual one.78 He went on to stress that students needed to gather ‘pictures and books and drawings’ to bring the style into focus. The article appeared in the Architect, Builder & Engineer which, along with many other publications and events, was providing enough drawings, books and pictures on Cape Dutch architecture to do exactly that. Walgate, as an assessor of architectural students’ work, was involved in prescribing Cape Dutch homesteads as the basis for measured drawing exams half a year later79 which suggests he was literally helping students build up this visual data focused on Cape Dutch homesteads. Prof. A.E. Snape, lecturer to architectural students at the University of Cape Town in the 1920s and co-editor of the Architect, Builder & Engineer, gave no doubt as to where he thought the sources of a ‘national culture’ lay: ‘In South Africa we inherit from the old Dutch examples of architecture a graceful simplicity and clear ideals which suit this country admirably. And though we must not be slavish copyists, yet here is our inspiration on which we must develop.’80 These were also the sentiments of Rex Martienssen who later became South Africa’s most venerated modernist architect. In an article written in 1928 following a tour of Cape Dutch homesteads by students from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, Martienssen wrote that ‘the ideals [of Cape Dutch] must remain unbroken. The spirit live on,’81 but it was crucial that ‘we must not copy, we must find our own solutions to the problems we will meet.’82

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35

However being literal ‘slavish copyists’ was certainly one of the techniques employed by educational and institutional promoters of the Cape Dutch style in their attempts to inculcate awareness and veneration for the original homesteads. The Cape Institute of Architects (CIoA) inaugurated a prize-giving scheme of measured drawings of ‘old buildings in the Cape Colony,’83 with the first prize being awarded to Fred Glennie in 1912 for his set of drawings of Groot Constantia wine cellar.84 The didactic intent of the CIoA regarding Cape Dutch architecture is indicated by the fact that 100 copies of the 12 drawings of this competition were made, costing £32,85 a considerable expense at the time. Whether these were intended for sale or distribution to members is not as relevant as the CIoA’s intention to distribute images of a part of the Groot Constantia homestead to a fairly large audience. Cape Dutch homesteads were a dominant part of the measured-drawing lists prescribed by the CIoA. Perhaps even more revealing was the focus on gables: the 1913 competition was limited strictly to a composition of six ‘Dutch gables to ½ scale and full size details’86 whilst the competition of 1914 prescribed ‘two gables and two pediments, ½ scale and full size details.’87 This near obsessive focus on gables meant other features such as slave lodges and outbuildings making up the homesteads were ignored; the problematic social space of settler homesteads was erased in favour of the exact measurements of ‘high’ architecture. The measured drawing competition continued as an annual event in the Cape at least until 1922, whereupon the competition was opened to students from all over the country.88 A sub-committee of the CIoA, including Delbridge, Kendall and Walgate, made up the Royal Institute of British Architects (hereafter RIBA) board of assessors of students’ work at the University of Cape Town after its establishment in 1922.89 Cape Dutch architecture in general and Cape Dutch homesteads in particular, dominate the lists of legitimate subjects as part of the measured drawing component of work to be submitted at least for 192390 and 1924.91 It was also noted at the bottom of the list for 1923 that ‘students should measure drawings not in CIoA sketch Book’92 which is indicative of the intention of the CIoA to have most of the Cape Dutch homesteads and other historical buildings measured and mapped out. The archiving CIoA was not alone. In 1920, thanks to a grant made by the government,93 the Pretoria, and later Afrikaner nationalist architect, Gerard Moerdyk, had made ‘an extensive tour of the Cape and surveyed the most important of these [Cape Dutch] buildings.’94 These drawings were later lost at the High Commissioner’s Office in London. In 1928 Professor Pearse took a group of 11 architectural students from Johannesburg on what Rex Martienssen called an ‘Architectural Pilgrimage.’95 Judging from Martienssen’s report, there is little doubt that Pearse intended to have the students survey and draw as many of the homesteads as possible.96 Among other parts of the Cape, they spent as many as five weeks in the Cape Dutch rich region of Paarl, met some of the main promoters of the preservation and nationalist movement such as Dorothea Fairbridge and Lady Florence Phillips, and also studied Herbert Baker’s Cape work.97 Pearse later made extensive use of their measured drawings in his Eighteenth Century Architecture in South Africa. 98 The measured drawing competitions gave the agents of Empire precise architectural details from which increasingly accurate facsimiles of Cape Dutch homesteads could be constructed. Hence the use of the façade of Groot Constantia for the Empire Exhibition

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Building Apartheid

in 1924 – examined in the next section. The measured drawings were a literal mapping out of Cape Dutch homesteads, mirroring the production of knowledge of the buildings and their use in the politics of nationalism and Empire.

Official Buildings and the Cape Dutch Style Kendall, at a lecture before the Society of Artists in 1925, was exaggerating when he suggested that ‘scarcely a house is erected to-day that does not bear signs of Cape Dutch influence.’99 But in the mind’s eye of some of the agents of Empire, Cape Dutch, as a national style, was a fait accompli. In a letter to the editor of the Cape Argus in 1923, Lady Phillips, whose Cape Dutch homestead, Vergelegen, was nearing completion of its restoration and addition, mentions the imminent creation of the new Union Art Gallery in the ‘Cape Dutch style’: South Africa is fortunate in already having a national style in architecture and furniture and metal work – the heritage of the early Dutch. These precious relics of the past, left us by a nation renowned for the purity of its taste, should be guarded and treasured by us all.100

Despite all efforts to promote Cape Dutch architecture as a national style, however, it enjoyed limited success in the Cape and less so in the rest of South Africa, and did not dominate the production of new domestic architecture. As we shall see in Chapter 3, Cape Dutch as a revival style was only ever afforded great interest by those actively promoting it – largely those who were involved in shoring up the Empire, the agents of Empire. As late as 1929, the President of the Transvaal Institute of Architects, in his Valedictory Address, still seemed to be searching for a national style that could foster a common English/Afrikaner identity: It should be the object of every student and every architect to attempt to develop a National style of architecture in South Africa. In a community composed of many races with diverse views, this is no simple task. Our responsibilities in this direction are nevertheless great, and it is the duty of all of us to develop, wherever possible, styles most suitable to this country, with the purpose of eventually evolving that character in our work which will lead to a definite National character.101

There were some important areas where Cape Dutch had a large impact on defining what a South African identity might constitute, and this was in the region of official and institutional buildings. That the Union Buildings in Pretoria, designed by Baker, had only nominal Cape Dutch elements such as windows, doors and brass work,102 would seem to suggest that the arguments for Cape Dutch as a national style did not hold true even for Baker himself. This was not the case. Consider, for example, the competition for the design of the Governor-General’s residence in Cape Town at which Herbert Baker was one of the three assessors. That the editor of the African Architect – which later transformed into the South African Architectural Record – expressed some resentment that ‘about one-third of the drawings [exhibiting] the style and characteristics peculiar to one of the assessor’s,’103 suggests that Cape Dutch was

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37

2.7 Gerard Moerdyk – 1934 winning design for the Prime Minister’s residence, Pretoria

the style pursued and deemed appropriate. A report by E.H. Waugh in a later edition of the African Architect confirms this.104 Although no award was made on the basis of what was considered to be deficiencies in planning, the assessors’ report almost literally referenced Groot Constantia as a model for what the assessors had in mind as appropriate architecture for the King’s representative in the country, namely, ‘the home of an English gentleman, who occasionally has to entertain in a princely style.’105 Similarly, the competition for the Prime Minister’s new residence in Pretoria, as drawn up by the Public Works Department in 1935, drew criticism for the inclusion of the following sentence which was understood to be requiring the building be in the Cape Dutch style: ‘It is suggested that the design might be on simple lines, while not slavishly following, yet suitably based on the fine old traditional work of this country.’106 That the article criticizing these strictures appeared in the South African Architectural Record was indicative of that magazine’s deepening modernist leanings. Notably though some individual or individuals in the government and the Public Works Department had deemed it appropriate that the Prime Minister of South Africa should live in a Cape Dutch style dwelling whilst resident in Pretoria, to which Gerard Moerdyk’s winning entry obliged (Figure 2.7).

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2.8  Front gable of the South African pavilion, Empire Exhibition, London, 1924, and front gable of Groot Constantia

Building Apartheid

Representations of a South African identity through national or governmental building projects using Cape Dutch as a stylistic source was not limited to projects on home soil. The South African government and its provincial subsidiaries used the whitewashed gable and other Cape Dutch characteristics as the basis for a number of projects overseas. The prime example is the South African pavilion at the Empire Exhibition in Wembley, London, in 1924. Covering 50,000 square feet, the pavilion was constructed following the detail design of London-based Simpson & Ayrton Architects,107 and Baker’s somewhat curmudgeonly approval of the design in his capacity as an honorary consultant.108 Inevitably, Cape Dutch gables appear in the design along with an almost exact replication of the front gable of Groot Constantia at the pavilion entrance (Figure 2.8). Differing slightly in proportion and missing the attic-height window above the door, the entrance gable of the pavilion is a clear copy of Groot Constantia’s entrance gable. At a time when the conflation of the ‘father’ of the nation and ‘his’ house had not yet been discredited, the design suggests a move to represent South Africa to the rest of the Empire and the world as the realization of a ‘grand’ history with the literal replication of its ‘grandest’ and ‘oldest’ building. In essence, Groot Constantia was represented as the archetypal South African building, which in turn became emblematic of South Africa’s part of the British Empire. The South African pavilion at the Empire Exhibition housed a central zone made up of museum areas extending from the entrance towards two cinemas near the back flanked by exhibition areas tagged ‘Education’ and ‘Natives’. This central zone effectively split the pavilion into two halves, the right half covering agriculture, and the left industry. Mixed with general areas were exhibition spaces dedicated to cities, as well as Rhodesia as a virtual colony of South Africa. Cape Town, along with

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Durban and Port Elizabeth, was one of the three cities represented at the pavilion. With two main areas of around 3,000 square feet in total, Kendall was given the task of setting up the exhibition space for the city of Cape Town, perhaps following Baker’s initial concept for this.109 It was an attempt to recreate the typical ‘Voorhuis (or Entrance Room) of the Cape Dutch house (Figure 2.9), complete with publically sourced furniture of the period.’110 This was linked by a pergola to another main exhibition space where a series of large photographs showed off Cape Town and its surrounds. The entrance door, placed along one of the main passageways of the pavilion, was purposefully aligned with a similar door on the opposite wall of the room allowing clear sight of the photographs displayed on the wall beyond.111 Although hardly a perfect replica of a front hall in a typical Cape Dutch homestead – the addition of two walls running between the paired windows on either side of the entrance door would have given a more correct proportion – Kendall, and the City of Cape Town as the client, did go to considerable effort and expense to render the project as authentic as possible. The doors and windows were manufactured in Cape Town, copying an undisclosed original house, bearing a marked resemblance to the doors and windows at the Oude Pastorie in Paarl. The wall at the entrance was specifically constructed 15 inches thick so as to provide the necessary deep

2.9 Empire Exhibition, 1924 – ‘Voorhuis’ interior of the City of Cape Town exhibition space

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Building Apartheid

window jambs and reveals, whilst hollow ceiling beams were constructed at three feet intervals to simulate the appearance of typical ceiling construction.112 Kendall made a considerable effort to have a steel column within the space of the room relocated, but to no avail.113 Following a public appeal,114 items of original Cape Dutch furniture and paintings and illustrations to be displayed on the walls were sent to London on loan. At Baker’s suggestion that Kendall himself should go ‘home’115 (not forgetting that Kendall had been born in Australia) to London to supervise the project, the City Council ended up paying Kendall’s partner James Morris £100 to oversee the job.116 The ‘Voorhuis’ was used, significantly, as the reception room for the Royal Family during their visit to the South African pavilion in July 1924,117 whilst its windows and doors eventually made their way back to Cape Town where they were used in the post office at Sea Point.118 There were other instances of the promotion of Cape Dutch icons at the Empire Exhibition. Dorothea Fairbridge specifically prepared a pamphlet on The Old Houses of the Cape of Good Hope and their Furniture to be provided along with other Cape Peninsula Publicity Association brochures.119 The list of the 74 photographs put on display by the City of Cape Town includes an extensive number of Arthur Elliot photographs of Cape Dutch homesteads.120 Significantly, there is a photograph listed illustrating a ‘Malay Mosque,’ and the last photo, literally an afterthought indicated by the changed ink on the original, depicts a ‘Native Group.’ That Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula was intentionally represented as a picturesque instance of a grand European tradition, somehow taking in Cape Dutch architecture, with only a token nod to marginalized Others, is made very clear by the list. Nevertheless the Cape Town exhibition was a great success. The City’s representative in London wrote as much to Kendall and added: ‘In regard to the Exhibition the only feeling for all of us connected with the British Empire who have seen it is one of pride that we belong to one of the Nations represented in it.’121 Clearly Cape Dutch architecture had provided a convincing display of the continuity between South African nationalism and the British Empire. In fact, ‘an old Dutch Homestead’ would be used in another Empire Exhibition at Bellahouston Park, Glasgow in 1938.122 Cape Dutch architecture also constituted a significant part of South Africa House in London’s Trafalgar Square and confirmed its usefulness in projecting a relatable South African nationalism to the British Empire. Baker’s original design showed a central Cape Dutch gable and tiled roof but this was rejected by the Fine Arts Commission.123 Although Baker modified the design to fit in with the other buildings around Trafalgar Square, the building’s windows and doors are clearly Cape Dutch in origin. A reception room is even called a ‘Voorkamer’ in the official pamphlet124 and with its wooden beamed ceiling, flagstone floor, and furniture, goes some of the way to recreate a Cape Dutch interior (Figure 2.10). Paintings and relief sculptures continue the Cape Dutch theme: Goodman contributed paintings depicting Cape Dutch homesteads such as Groot Constantia and Jan Juta contributed a pastoral mural depicting Vergelegen, with Willem Adriaan van der Stel and slaves toiling in the estate (Figure 2.11).

2.10  South Africa House, London – Cape Dutch ‘Voorhuis’

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2.11  South Africa House, London – Gwelo Goodman, Groot Constantia (left) and partial image of Jan Juta, Vergelegen (right)

Building Apartheid

Waning Enthusiasm For architects, the Cape Dutch gable in the form of Groot Constantia reached its apotheosis as an emblem of national architecture when it appeared on the menu of the first South African Architect’s Congress in 1928 (Figure 2.12). By the mid-1930s opinion amongst architects, particularly in the increasingly modernist South African Architectural Record, was starting to turn against Cape Dutch as the prevailing and dominant South African style. Certainly Professor A. Winter-Moore felt that a nation formed a national art and not vice versa: ‘In the meantime I suppose that we shall continue to ape the Cape farm house in our public buildings.’125 Although the South African Architectural Record had published numerous pin-up style photographs of Cape Dutch homesteads – submitted by latterly celebrated modernist architects such as Norman Hanson126 – and a few articles extolling the virtues of the Cape Dutch style over the years127 (especially as its earlier incarnation as The African Architect),128 it began to promote modernism and the International Style above Cape Dutch vernacular traditions in the 1930s. The South African Architectural Record even published a satirical cartoon in 1933 lampooning Herbert Baker as the midwife to Geoffrey Pearse’s birth of Groot Constantia (Figure 2.3). The joke plays on the discovery that the building originally revered as Simon van der Stel’s was constructed under the auspices of a later owner and was also a friendly jibe aimed at Pearse’s recent publication celebrating eighteenth century architecture in South Africa.129 Although Pearse’s book did not focus on Groot Constantia or on Cape Dutch architecture solely, the punning title of the cartoon, ‘The Birth of a Notion,’

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acknowledges the role architects, planners, editors and academics had played in using Cape Dutch architecture to promote ideas of nationhood. The initials listed in the ‘Visitor’s Book’ on the wall are those of the architects and students Pearse voiced his indebtedness to in the Preface of the book and who had accompanied him on the Cape Dutch ‘pilgrimage’ in 1928. In contrast to the South African Architectural Record’s emerging modernist agenda, the Architect, Builder & Engineer, largely through its editor, W.J. Delbridge, had always been more firmly rooted in Arts and Crafts ideologies and its location in the Cape had made the dissemination of Cape Dutch style and the veneration of the old homesteads a near moral agenda. As late as 1934, it was running articles promoting Cape Dutch as appropriate to the development of a new civic and monumental tradition, if not a national style, and even advocated, contrary to the spirit of Arts and Crafts, deceit in materials where necessary: ‘We can build in concrete and thatch over that if fire is an issue.’130 However, aside from an article in 1938 praising the Elliott Exhibition of architectural and other photographs which architects were urged to see so as to ‘inspire them to carry on worthily [the Peninsula’s] best traditions,’131 the magazine shows an increasing lack of interest in Cape Dutch architecture from the late 1930s until the Second World War conclusively ended its production in 1941.

Conclusion In imagining a common English/Afrikaner identity at the beginning of the Union of South Africa, no doubt inspired by building preservation and nationalist architectural movements in England, local architects, politicians, historians and journalists chose Cape Dutch architecture. It was claimed by its predominantly English motivators, through various symbolic and rhetorical means, in an act of appropriation, as literally a common English/Afrikaner heritage. The English conjured a retroactive presence, alongside the Dutch, as the original settlers of the Cape. These Cape Dutch homesteads were represented as a common inheritance needing care and attention – acts of preservation, it was understood, would bring English and Afrikaner together. The preservation movement actively secured museums and monuments to substantiate this sudden common heritage and created a permissible climate for wilfully mannered and propagandistic restorations that saw gables as emblematic of an idealized and Romanticized history.

2.12 Groot Constantia gable as frontispiece – first Congress of the Institute of South African Architects

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In correlation with the preservation movement, Cape Dutch architecture, and particularly the gable of Groot Constantia, began to define a national style and to be used in official buildings and helped locate South Africa and its settler history un-problematically in the logic of the British Empire. This chapter focused on representations of Cape Dutch architecture as a positive symbol around which an English/Afrikaner identity could be structured. However identity formation generally needs a negative to define itself against – it is by what it is not. A closer reading of settler history and nationalist-preservationist discourse around Cape Dutch architecture in the following chapter shows how this style comes to be defined as a counterpoint to the ‘barbarity’ of ‘Africa.’

Notes 1

KAB A.583, vol. 63: F.S. Malan, Newspaper clippings.

2

Baker, H., Cecil Rhodes, p.64.

3

Radford, D., ‘The Architecture of the Western Cape, 1838 to 1901.’

4

Hill, W.T., Octavia Hill. Pioneer of the National Trust and Housing Reformer, (London: Hutchinson, 1956), pp.145–50.

5

See, for example, Makela, T., ‘Imagined Affinities,’ (University of Princeton: Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, 1991) and Dixon, R., Victorian Architecture, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978) for a general overview.

6

KAB A.583, vol. 63: F.S. Malan, Newspaper clippings.

7

Ibid.

8

Davenport, T.R.H., South Africa: A Modern History, p.175.

9

See, for example, Eddy, J. and Schreuder, D., The Rise of Colonial Nationalism. Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa first assert their Nationalities, 1880–1914, (London: Allen & Unwin, 1988).

10 Baker, H., Cecil Rhodes, p.25. 11 Baker, H., Cecil Rhodes, p.34. 12 The State, vol. 1, no. 1, (January, 1909), p.25. Chimes with Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (London: Verso, 2006). 13 Ibid, p.55. 14 It may be argued that the Drostdy’s Neo-Classical style, brought to the Cape by Louis Michel Thibault, should separate it from the general Cape Dutch canon which tended more to the Baroque. My use of the phrase ‘Cape Dutch homestead’ is not intended to denote a precisely defined style but the general idea emerging during the period of study of the existence of a number of typically one-storey rural dwellings that were generally more than one hundred years old with recurring visual characteristics: being painted white, having gables and thatched reed roofs. 15 The State, vol. 2, no. 9, (September, 1909), p.304. 16 Ibid., p.305. 17 The State, vol. 2, no. 10, (October, 1909), p.423. 18 The State, vol. 5, no. 3, (March, 1911), p.373.

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19 Davenport, T.R.H., South Africa: A Modern History, p.165. 20 The State, vol. 1, no. 6, (June, 1909), p.652. 21 Walker, M., A Statement in Stone. The Early Buildings and their Architects: Muizenberg, St. James, Kalk Bay, 1987–1927, (Cape Town: Kalk Bay Historical Association, 2010), p.52. 22 Merrington, P., ‘Pageantry and Primitivism: Dorothea Fairbridge and the “Aesthetics of Union”’, in Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 25, no. 4, (December, 1995), pp.643–56. 23 Fairbridge, D., The Historic Houses of South Africa, (London: Oxford University Press, 1922). 24 Fairbridge, D., The Historic Houses of South Africa, p.x. 25 Ibid., p.xi. 26 KAB A1414, vol. 31C: National Society 25th Anniversary, April 1930. 27 See Coetzer, N., ‘The Production of the City as a White Space,’ (University College London: Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 2004), Appendix B. 28 KAB A1414, vol. 31C: National Society 25th Anniversary, April 1930. 29 KAB A1414, vol. 31C: National Society Annual Report, 1922. 30 KAB A1414, vol. 31C: National Society 25th Anniversary, April 1930. 31 Ibid. Emphasis added. 32 KAB A1414, vol. 31C: National Society Annual Report, 1907. 33 See Coetzer, N., ‘The Production of the City as a White Space,’ (University College London: Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 2004), Appendix C. 34 KAB A1414, vol. 31C: National Society Annual Report, 1906. 35 Kendall, F.K., The Restoration of Groot Constantia, (Cape Town: Juta & Co. Ltd., 1927) p.12. 36 Ibid. 37 KAB A1414, vol. 31A: National Society Annual Report Balance Sheet, 1932–1933. 38 UCT Manuscripts and Archives BC 206: Box 138, 1929.03.05, Letter from Juta & Co. to Kendall. 39 KAB A1414, vol. 31A: National Society Annual Report Balance Sheet, 1934–1935. 40 KAB A1414, vol. 31A: National Society Annual Report Balance Sheet, 1933–1934. 41 KAB A1414, vol. 31C: National Society Annual Report, 1906. 42 SAHRA Historical Monuments Commission Minute Book 1, 12 October 1936. 43 KAB A1414, vol. 31C: National Society 25th Anniversary, April 1930. 44 Oberholster, J.J., The Historical Monuments of South Africa, p.xix. 45 Frescura, F., ‘National or Nationalist? A Critique of the National Monuments Council, 1936–1989,’ in Frescura, F. (ed.), Conserving a Heritage: Proceedings of a Conference on ‘Conservation in the Eastern Cape’ (Port Elizabeth: University of Port Elizabeth, 1986). 46 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 9, no. 6, (January, 1926), p.1. 47 Cape Times 3 September 1913: ‘Colonial Dutch Architecture.’ 48 Cape Times 6 May 1911: ‘An Old Dutch Building.’

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Building Apartheid

49 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 15, no. 1, (August, 1931), p.1. 50 UCT Manuscripts & Archives BC 206: Box 142, 1919.06.02, letter from Kendall to F.M. Glennie regarding remarks made by Mr Smith, the Secretary of Agriculture, in his Report for the year ending 31 March 1917. 51 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 9, no. 6, (January, 1926), p.3. 52 Ibid. 53 The South African Nation 17 April 1926: ‘Groot Constantia – A Matter of Pride.’ 54 Ibid. 55 Kendall, F.K., The Restoration of Groot Constantia, pp.5–7. 56 UCT Manuscripts and Archives BC 206: Box 45, 2 February 1926, Letter from Shand of the Public Works Department to Kendall. 57 Kendall, F.K., The Restoration of Groot Constantia, p.13. 58 Finch, J.R., The Cape of Good Hope. Being the Official Handbook of the City of Capetown, (Cape Town: City of Capetown, 1909), p.172. 59 Transvaal Leader 23 February 1914: ‘Architecture in South Africa.’ 60 Kendall, F.K., The Restoration of Groot Constantia, p.12. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Cape Times 22 September 1927: ‘Groot Constantia.’ 64 Since removed. I am grateful to Stewart Harris (researcher) for pointing this out to me. 65 Fransen, H. and Cook, M.A., The Old Buildings of the Cape, (Cape Town: A.A. Balkema, 1980), p.124. 66 Newton-Thompson, J., Gwelo Goodman. South African Artist, (Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1951), p.41 and p.44. 67 Newton-Thompson, J., Gwelo Goodman, p.41 and p.47. 68 Ibid., p.41 and p.69. 69 Ibid., p.41 and p.87. 70 Merrington, P., ‘Cape Dutch Tongaat: A Case Study in “Heritage”’ Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 32, No. 4, (Dec., 2006), pp. 683–99. 71 Cape Times 3 September 1913: ‘Colonial Dutch Architecture.’ 72 Trotter, A.F. and Baker, H., Old Colonial Houses of the Cape of Good Hope, (London: B.T. Batsford, 1900), p.5. 73 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 3, no. 12, (July, 1920), p.15. 74 South African Nation, July 11, 1925, p.23. 75 Cape Times 15 May 1905: ‘South African Architecture.’ 76 Lefaivre, L., and Tzonis, A., Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalised World, (London: Prestell, 2003). 77 Kendall, F.K., The Restoration of Groot Constantia. 78 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 5, no. 11, (June, 1922), p.7.

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79 KAB CCC A1659 vol. 1/1: CIoA Sub-Committee, 15 February 1923. 80 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 6, no. 4, (November, 1922), p.17. 81 South African Architectural Record, vol. 13, no. 50, (June, 1928), p.32. 82 Ibid. 83 KAB CCC A1659 vol. 1/1: CIoA, 13 July 1911. 84 Ibid., 7 March 1912. 85 Ibid., 27 August 1912. 86 Ibid., 13 May 1913. 87 Ibid., 18 March 1914. 88 Ibid., 10 May 1922. 89 KAB CCC A1659 vol. 1/3: CIoA, 1 May 1922. 90 KAB CCC A1659 vol. 1/1: CIoA Sub-Committee, 15 February 1923. 91 Ibid., 27 August 1924. 92 Ibid., 15 February 1923. 93 UCT Manuscripts & Archives BC 206: Box 145, 12 January 1926, Letter from G.E. Pearse to Kendall. 94 Pearse, G.E., Eighteenth Century Architecture in South Africa, (London: B.T. Batsford, 1933), p.vii. 95 South African Architectural Record, vol. 13, no. 50, (June, 1928), p.29. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid., pp.29–30. 98 Pearse, G.E., Eighteenth Century Architecture in South Africa, p.vii. 99 Cape Times 17 July 1925: ‘Cape Dutch Style of Architecture.’ 100 Cape Argus 23 December 1926: ‘Union’s New Art Gallery.’ 101 South African Architectural Record, vol. 14, no. 53 (March, 1929), p.27. 102 Grieg, D., Herbert Baker in South Africa, (Cape Town: Purnell and Sons, Pty, Ltd., 1970), p.186. 103 African Architect, vol. 3 no. 6, (November, 1913), p.276. 104 African Architect, vol. 3 no. 9, (February, 1914), p.313. 105 African Architect, vol. 3 no. 6, (November, 1913), p.276. 106 South African Architectural Record, vol. 20, no. 3, (March, 1935), p.84. 107 Building, 4th quarterly part, (December, 1924), p.101. 108 UCT Manuscripts and Archives BC 206: Box 36, 26 September 1923, letter from Baker to Kendall. 109 Ibid., 26 September 1923, letter from Baker to Kendall. 110 Ibid., 10 January 1924, letter from Kendall to Wayt. 111 Cape Times 8 November 1923: caption to plan showing pavilion layout.

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112 UCT Manuscripts and Archives BC 206: Box 36, 10 January1924, letter from Kendall to Wayt. 113 Ibid., general letters between Kendall and Simpson & Ayrton Architects. 114 Cape Argus 11 October 1923: ‘Cape Town’s Home at Empire Exhibition.’ 115 UCT Manuscripts and Archives BC 206: Box 36, 6 November 1923, letter from Baker to Kendall. 116 Ibid., 4 January 1924, letter from Morris to the Chairman of the Internal Arrangements Committee. 117 UCT Manuscripts and Archives BC 206: Box 36, 21 July 1924, letter from Wayt to Kendall. 118 Cape Argus 2 December 1935. 119 UCT Manuscripts and Archives BC 206: Box 36, 1 July 1924, letter from Kendall to Wayt. 120 Ibid., List of Photographs. See Coetzer, N., ‘The Production of the City as a White Space,’ (University College London: Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 2004), Appendix D. 121 UCT Manuscripts and Archives BC 206: Box 36, 21 July 1924, letter from Wayt to Kendall. 122 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 21, no. 9, (April, 1938), p.2. 123 McNab, R., The Story of South Africa House, (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 1983), p.25. 124 Office of the High Commissioner of the Union of South Africa, South Africa House, ([London]: Office of the High Commissioner of the Union of South Africa, 1933). 125 South African Architectural Record, vol. 20, no. 1, (January, 1935), p.7. 126 South African Architectural Record, vol. 15, no. 59, (September, 1930) and South African Architectural Record, vol. 15, no. 60, (December, 1930). 127 See for example, South African Architectural Record, vol. 13, no. 49, (March, 1928), ‘The Old Domestic Architecture of Cape Town,’ p.3. 128 See for example, African Architect, vol. 2, no. 10, (March, 1913), ‘Editorial Comments,’ p.149. 129 Pearse, G.E., Eighteenth Century Architecture in South Africa. 130 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 17, no. 11, (June, 1934), p.3. 131 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 21, no. 6, (January, 1938), p.3.

3 Possessing the Land/Possessing the History: Cape Dutch Architecture as a Marker of Western Civilization and the Absencing of Others

As I sit and sip ‘Schoongezicht,’ the thought comes – is it not possible that the released component elements of long dead and gone occupants, duly absorbed by the soil and reabsorbed by the vines, may pass into the wine of the country, such is this excellent Heritage, and assume within ourselves fresh life and shape? Why should not the personalities of the departed live again in our wine, as their intellects may be said to in the architecture bequeathed to us, such as we have been enjoying to-day.1 F. Masey, ‘The Beginnings of our Nation.’

The entrance to South Africa House in London leads directly off Trafalgar Square. Away from the buzz of traffic, in the dimly-lit vestibule, it takes a while to notice the carefully construed ‘South African’ elements of the design for the ‘home’ of the High Commission in London. Here Herbert Baker went to great lengths to control and design all aspects of the interior, using South African stone and timber, as well as commissioning various artists to paint and sculpt the interior into vibrant South African life – or Baker’s version of it at least. Of particular interest is a small alabaster carving (Figure 3.1), located in the library, into which Baker poured an inordinate amount of symbolism, deploying a variety of signifiers in its design2 none of which are representative of ‘Africa.’ Three ships are seen arriving in Table Bay, each signifying in turn the Portuguese, Dutch and British explorers and settlers at the Cape. The four medallions festooned with marine rope at the bottom are representations of Ancient Greek mythological figures given an Empire-in-Africa mythical twist – the ‘Mountains of the Moon’ and the source of the Nile. Table Mountain is depicted as Adamastor, the demon in Portuguese poet Camoens’ ‘Lusiad,’ a dangerous wind Baker turns into Prometheus the acme of adventure and conquest. Titan rides upon the petrified winds of the Adamastor, and below them, nestled in a grove of English oaks and Mediterranean pines, lies Groote Schuur, the home Baker designed for Cecil Rhodes at the Cape. As the architect of South Africa House, Baker could afford to inveigle one of his first designs into a bas-relief carving at the very epicentre of Empire, a home returning home. More significantly, through a simple anachronistic twist, Baker places

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3.1 South Africa House – alabaster relief carving designed by Herbert Baker, 1933

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Rhodes at the beginning of the mythical founding of South Africa with the arrival of settler ships. Empire, it seemed, had always been present at the Cape. Forever embedded in Africa and awaiting discovery; as inevitable as the gods and as old and natural as the land itself. But how did Empire manage to stake such an unequivocal claim to this land?

Markers of Civilization and the Absencing of Others In 1919, F. Clarke, Professor of Education at the University of Cape Town, published an article titled ‘Memorandum on the Teaching of History’. The race-edifying role of history as a primary school subject was clearly laid out: The model scheme issued by the Department is based on the view that the central theme of South African history is the struggle of ‘Western’ Civilization to establish itself in a barbarous land. That struggle is not yet over; civilization is not yet securely established. Every South African citizen from the time of van Riebeeck has been a missionary of civilization, and every South African child to-day must be trained to be a missionary in the same sense.3

Clarke’s article goes on to spell out an idea explored in the previous chapter that Afrikaner and Englishman alike share a common history situated in the broader narrative of Western civilization and European history: ‘The civilization we inherit is a common possession, and we shall make poor South African citizens of our children if we do not help them to see their own place and the place of their country in the

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whole’ [original emphasis]. That last phrase ‘the place of their country in the whole’ locates South Africa as a synecdoche of Empire, a faraway piece of Europe, and fully part of Empire’s vast civilizing project. The article suggests that one of the best ways of highlighting this common civilization is to tell the story of ‘great’ names throughout the country’s history and to visit, depict and preserve the physical monuments of the past. Clarke dramatizes an imaginary school class where the teacher asks: ‘Does anyone know when this school where we now are was built? Have you not seen the date in the gable?’ Evidence indeed of an ideological ‘conspiracy’ aimed at achieving White social and cultural hegemony in support of Empire; it explains the explosion of newspaper articles in the early 1900s, radio broadcasts and lectures made by architects and other agents of Empire focussed on early Dutch settler history. While conspiracies might make for good reading, they put too much agency in the hands of individuals and overlook the simple role that an unknowing cultural production can play in the thickening of power. Michel Foucault’s theories of dispersed power offer a structuralist understanding of social and cultural ‘conspiracies’ at work, how newspaper journalists, historians and teachers ‘conspire’ unknowingly – and occasionally very knowingly as Clarke’s article demonstrates – in the discursive production of social and cultural hegemony, from newspaper articles to the sort of books stocked in libraries. As Edward Said shows in Orientalism, their work is as ‘natural’ and self-evident to them as breathing, and yet it is a thoroughly constructed edifice, a vernacular without a masterplan that ultimately becomes purposive, accreted slowly, one newspaper article, one exhibition, one drawing, one radio broadcast at a time. In the sections that follow we will discover how Empire stole so comfortably into ‘Africa.’ How, too, discourse on early Dutch settler history and Cape Dutch architecture, with its fetishized gables, eased Empire into ‘foreign’ soil, bedding it down and rooting it into the land. From Clarke’s article it is fairly easy to see how, as President of the CIoA, Charles Walgate delivered a radio-broadcast lecture on 30 September 1935 titled ‘Architecture of the Cape,’ in which he sought to impress upon his audience the importance of preserving Cape Dutch homesteads since they marked where ‘settlers pushed civilisation.’4 He goes on to marvel: ‘how they came to be built by people who were struggling against savage neighbours … is a mystery.’5 Similarly, Graham Botha, the Chief Archivist of South Africa and proselytizer of South African settler history at the time makes no bones about revering the original settlers who … laid out their farms, planted vineyards and orchards, and tilled the soil, and it was from here that the banner of civilisation first was carried out into the Beyond. In delightful and well-chosen spots these original founders of our South African nation built their homes and furnished them with taste. Some of their homesteads, fortunately, have been spared to us, and to-day attract sightseers from overseas as well as from within our own borders.6

As the Argus art critic notes of the material culture within Cape Dutch homesteads:

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One glance at these heavy chairs, teak cupboards, kists, bedsteads and all the solid comfort that is expressed in wood, reveals much of the character of those civilized Dutch who entered a barbarous land.7

In particular, gabled Cape Dutch homesteads were seen as emblematic of civilization, of the ‘late flowering of the Renaissance’8 in Africa – and it is worth noting the metaphor of rootedness of Western civilization in the soil of Africa. They were iconic and singular yet determined by the lexicon of the classical architecture of the Renaissance and so suited the taxonomic urge at the heart of colonial projects. Those classifying and ordering impulses of a foreign power trying to stabilize its hidden and liminal territories; gables were individuals in a collective, evidence of opportunity within rules – much like the desired attributes of what it meant to be English and civilized. Time and again, the gabled Cape Dutch homestead was represented as a cipher for Western civilization and became the focus of preservation efforts; their preservation was tantamount to the preservation of civilization itself – a loss of the dwellings was akin to the loss of Self. That the kinds of picturesque and gabled homesteads being revered by Walgate, Botha and others, were in fact geographically and historically a very limited segment of settler dwellings, was a nuance lost on the propaganda effort.9 They were also perfect evidentiary markers of civilization: their prominent gables radiated a spatial marking of territory, the dated gables – as Clarke’s article notes – a roll-call of battles won in the territorial expansion of ‘civilization’ into Africa. Moreover, the whitewashed walls were a brightness in the landscape that fitted well with the tired trope of bringing light to the ‘dark continent.’ Lewis Mansergh, the Public Works Department Secretary, used the metaphor of Cape Town as a source of light to the rest of the continent in a public lecture on the history of Old Cape Town: ‘From Cape Town radiates the whole history of the civilization of the Southern Continent, of the whole Union, and beyond. The facts of the origin and foundation of the Town are therefore of interest to us all. They are matters in which we can all take pride and pleasure equally as we do to-day in the advancement and progress of the modern town.’10 In Mansergh’s statement it is apparent that civilization not only radiates geographically from Cape Town, but historically too; the advances of the past legitimize progress in the present of the ‘modern’ town. In the official 1909 Council guide to Cape Town, Lord Curzon intones: ‘You have what is fitting in the City whence civilisation has radiated in South Africa, the City richest in Historical associations.’11 A thought present again in the Mayor of Cape Town, R.J. Verster’s welcome speech upon the arrival of Edward, the Prince of Wales, in 1925: Our city was the first corner stone to be laid on the edifice of civilisation which has been raised in this vast land. From it and through it have passed the influences which have tamed the wilderness to man’s use and have brought barbarism itself within the folds of civilisation.12

And with that the Prince was taken on a tour of Groot Constantia and the Cape Dutch regions of Somerset West, Stellenbosch and Paarl where the originary edifice of civilization was constructed and dated on its gables.

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‘Barbarism’ might have been brought within the folds of civilization, but it was certainly kept out of the werf walls of Cape Dutch homesteads; from the very beginning, discourse on Cape Dutch architecture sought to erase the possible input of Others in their construction. Herbert Baker writes on the gables in Alys Trotter’s first book on Cape Dutch architecture: The Company sent workmen from Holland both to the Cape and Batavia, and it is unlikely that such artistic skill would be exhibited by the Malay slaves … All honour to the early Cape settlers, who, with little learning and inferior materials, so beautifully adapted the houses of their native land to the needs of their adopted country.13

When the work of slaves on the production of the Cape Dutch dwellings was noted, it was disparaging, and worked in praise of the settlers themselves. The editor of the Architect, Builder & Engineer writes on ‘Our History’ after the fire of Groot Constantia: The very presence of such fine old works in our midst is an inspiration. They show how much can be accomplished with the lowest form of labour and the poorest type of materials, for most of our old Cape Homesteads were constructed by slaves and built out of mud bricks … even from an historic point of view a nation’s story may be enshrined in buildings constructed by poor workmen out of poor materials and yet be so wrought into pleasantness as to remain memorials for a great period of time of events that are, perhaps, more fitly recorded in architectural form than in any other way; for architecture is on the one hand fossilized history.14

Not all discourse on Cape Dutch architecture was as lavish in its praise. An article on the Cape Dutch revival in the modernist-leaning African Architect sardonically summed it up as ‘much ill-directed enthusiasm towards local manifestations of the Flemish Renaissance.’ Although praising the use of local materials, the unsigned author goes on to lament finding ‘half tones, half doors, half windows, half shutters and half heartedness, for the work is the work of slaves.’15 The text invites the reader to complete the rhythm of ‘halfs’ and to fill in the status of the slaves as half-caste, whilst giving this identity of slave-hood as the reason for the buildings not being in the ‘grand manner.’ As fast as Cape Dutch architecture was being written into the pages of popular history, the fundamental input of slaves in their production was White-washed out. A telling invariable of histories dealing with Cape Dutch architecture and the settler history of the Cape in general is the lack of acknowledgement of slavery in the development of settler society and its homesteads. Trotter’s book on the history of the Old Cape Colony records how Simon Van der Stel ‘toiled’ to build Groot Constantia but avoids the part slaves may have played in this.16 A few years earlier she’d even commented in a Cape Times article that ‘slavery at that early time was, on paper, a comparatively mild affair.’17 It is hardly surprising then that her Old Cape Colony has no illustrations of slave-lodges, its Herbert Baker line-drawings zoom in soft-focus directly onto the aesthetically distinctive gables themselves, leaving slave history literally out of

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3.2  Frank Kendall – Boschendal, new ‘slave bell’ 1934, and ‘slave bell’ memorial, Colerain, Eastern Cape

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the picture. Similarly, J.M. Solomon, in his lecture on ‘Architecture in South Africa,’ records that ‘The labourers were called from their toil by a bell hung in a beautiful belcote.’18 To the agents of Empire, slave bell-towers were elegant free-standing aesthetic marvels not symbols of oppression and suffering; slaves conveniently became ‘labourers’ and slave-bells became a ‘beautiful belcote’ so the less savoury aspects of settler history were intentionally underplayed through this fetishizing of architectural elements. The fetishizing of slave bell-towers extended into the contemporary landscape under construction in the twentieth century itself (Figure 3.2). Appleyard, the Manager of Rhodes Fruit Farms, commissioned Kendall to design two new slave bell-towers at the Cape Dutch homesteads of Good Hope and Bien Donne19 and in a letter to the Wits University Professor Geoffrey Pearse in 1924, Kendall was happy to report that the manager was ‘moved with the laudable idea of putting up an attractive Bell Tower on each of the Rhodes Farms which has not already got one.’20 Ten years later Appleyard commissioned Pearse to design a new slave bell-tower for the homestead of Rhone.21 Another followed at Boschendal. Whilst a similar type of bell-tower had occasionally been used for churches in the original settler landscape at the Cape, these examples show a purposeful ‘completing’ of the homesteads was undertaken to restore them to an iconic, aestheticized ideal. Walgate collaborated with Baker in designing a bell-tower for the new Noordhoek residence of the Administrator of Rhodesia, Drummond Chaplin.22 As late in his career as 1930, Baker was considering a slave bell-tower in his design for the house of mining-magnate Wallace Mein in California.23

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The Cape Dutch slave bell-tower as a typology was even used by Mrs Kirby as a memorial to her son at Coleraine near Kirkwood in the Cape Province in 1937.24 The irony of Kendall designing a slave bell-tower as a memorial – given Kendall’s wilful amnesia with regards to slave history in general – is rich indeed. Convenient Contradictions: Cape Dutch as Vernacular and High Art, as Local and Ancient Mediterranean Whitewashing slavery, while retracing settler history through the curving gables of Cape Dutch homesteads, was useful to the project of Empire in establishing the longevity and inevitability of European entry into southern Africa while affirming the enlightening triumph of ‘civilization’ over ‘barbarianism.’ But there were subtler elements to the discourse around the Cape Dutch homestead and the landscape they were located in that was contradictory and muddled. The Cape Dutch revival was a concerted signifying effort that reflected the tenuous nature of any imperial project in foreign lands; it became an open cipher slipping through associations and meaning in different contexts, covering over Empire’s vulnerability with rhetorical bandages. Cape Dutch was often simultaneously vernacular architecture and high art, and the landscape it was set in was understood as thoroughly indigenous and ancient and Mediterranean. Attributing buildings to specific individuals, the architects or ‘great men’ who designed them, made the story of ‘civilization’ about European experts and professionals rather than slave labour. But there are very few records of who the individual designers may have been. The desire for origins and authors produced much speculation and, when found, a cult of the individual. That the buildings were produced by slaves, or in a more vernacular process common to European farmers, or were modelled after pattern books in Europe, explains the lack of knowledge of architects or the originators of the designs. For our purposes it isn’t particularly important to prove or disprove the attribution of buildings to specific individuals. Rather we may notice the desire within the discourse on Cape Dutch architecture for records of architectural pedigree originating in Europe, and through that, the legitimacy and valorization of the Self in the processes of colonization and Empire. In much of the writing on Cape Dutch architecture there is a near holy trinity of characters of great importance. Lewis Mansergh, in a lecture on the history of Old Cape Town, gives us the most succinct introduction to this trio: Most of the best of the characteristic architectural work we owe to three men – Anton Anreith, a sculptor in the service of the East India Company; Thibault, first lieutenant of Engineers, later Director of Public Works of the settlement; and Schutte, an architect by profession – who worked together for a long period towards the close of the 18th and beginnings of the 19th century.25

That Thibault and his compatriots contributed little to the ‘typical’ gabled Cape Dutch homestead was of little importance to the authors happy to assign the buildings to a European professional class. Dorothea Fairbridge called Thibault

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‘the greatest Cape architect of the past.’26 Much was made of Thibault’s design of the wine cellar at Groot Constantia and Anreith’s probable working of its relief pediment, but their contribution to the architecture of the Cape was typically more urban than rural, more neoclassical than baroque and, in Thibault’s case, more civic than domestic.27 Reverence for these men, particularly for Thibault and Anreith, was actively promoted by many, and can be illustrated through a few examples. The Cape Times Christmas Number of 1906 featured a five-page article on Anreith with many line drawings of his work.28 The personality cult was so alive that Graham Botha, in an article titled ‘Thibault, An Early Cape Architect,’ lamented the lack of a portrait painting of Thibault and then suggested that it is ‘more than probable that one was made’29 and wished it could be found. A double page spread of Thibault’s original drawings for the Old Supreme Court building appeared in the same edition of the Architect, Builder & Engineer. Then two years later another article on Thibault written by Botha appeared again in the Architect, Builder & Engineer, this time with a far more extensive set of images of work attributed to him.30 It was often pointed out that Thibault had presented Louis XVI with a new architectural Order, and that he had been a pupil of A.J. Gabriel who was ‘Architect-in-Chief to the King and Director of the Academy in the Royal Academy of Architecture in Paris in 1775.’31 These references were no minor anecdotes but central to the general desire to locate Cape Dutch architecture within a larger European architectural tradition. Even when buildings and sculptured pediments could not be attributed directly to an individual, authors would go ahead and do so anyway. The editorial comment in the June 1934 edition of the Architect, Builder & Engineer clearly states that a lot of work attributed to the sculptor Anton Anreith was never worked by him yet goes on to say, ‘still it is true to say that the craftsmanship is good enough to warrant the attribution’.32 In Frank Kendall’s book documenting the restoration of Groot Constantia wherein he reveals its mistaken attribution to Simon Van der Stel, he begins his own mythologizing of Thibault: It is also recorded that, assisted by Anton Anreith, [Thibault] was responsible for the famous pediment of the fine Wine Cellar at Groot Constantia (1791), and what could be more natural than to suppose that Thibault had charge of the extensive alterations to the Manor House, which we now know to have taken place?33

These three ‘Great Men’ – Thibault, Anreith and Schutte – were shorthand, a metonymic hyperlink back to Europe and the sureties of its ‘civilization’ in the face of Empire’s tenuous hold in Africa. Even Prime Minister J.C. Smuts looked to Europe for Ruskinian ratification of South Africa’s architectural heritage in his Foreword to Dorothea Fairbridge’s Historic Houses of South Africa: Neither in Music nor in Literature nor in Painting nor in Sculpture have we anything yet to compare with the performance of older countries. The one exception is our domestic architecture, and there our production is of a unique character. I believe it was Ruskin who said that the only real contribution to Architecture for the last few centuries has been made by the Dutch in South Africa – or something to that effect.34

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and he considered the book ought to carry across the seas something of the spirit of South Africa, so that our sister nations may know the beauty that lies in her old homesteads and the charm that lingers in her vine-covered stoeps and in the villages set in orchards.35

The book would act as an emissary establishing South Africa’s credentials in the commonwealth of Empire through its architectural objects and their association with European culture. Certainly much was made of the ‘fine pedigree’ of Cape Dutch architecture and its originators. Yet the discourse valorizing the style identified by the gabled Cape Dutch homesteads also represented it as indigenous, if not thoroughly vernacular. That these buildings were literally ‘of the soil’ was an attribute not missed by the agents of Empire. Alys Trotter’s article ‘Old Cape Homesteads’ in the Cape Times Christmas Number of 1898 valorizes what she considers to be (except for the houses of New England in the United States) the only example of a distinct ‘style existing in a Colony in the New World’. She goes on to state: ‘The essence of the style, then, is indigenous. It is the outcome of local conditions, therefore to be cherished by the patriotic; it is the outcome of conditions which belong to the past, therefore to be cherished as irreplaceable.’36 Or, as Rex Martienssen somewhat obscurely and ambitiously puts it in his report on the architectural students’ ‘pilgrimage’ to the Cape: ‘Our humble farmhouse is just as much an organic part of the earth as the Chateau at Versailles, or St. Paul’s, its intrinsic beauty may be just as great.’37 One of the possible explanations given for Cape Dutch homesteads fitting into their surroundings, hinted at by Martienssen above, was their use of local materials. In fact, the use of local materials was generally seen as fundamental to the development of any architecture of note – echoing one of the key tenets of the Arts and Crafts movement. The January 1934 editorial of the Architect, Builder & Engineer puts this across very clearly: To begin with, we know from our studies in the history of design and notably so in the case of architecture, that, broadly speaking, only those creations have distinction which grow out of the use of local materials. They must be racy of the soil before they can have style and order, whatever the stylistic manner in which they are conceived. Our Cape Flemish architecture points in this direction. It became the final flowering of the continuous Renaissance tradition because the forms in which it was couched were adapted to suit our climatic conditions and the labour and materials available.38

The article regrets the importation and use of ‘foreign’ building elements such as galvanized iron and stock joinery, and suggests, like the builders of earlier times, that all the items necessary for building in South Africa are to be found within the country itself. For Gerard Moerdyk – the eventual designer of the Voortrekker Monument and quasi Afrikaner-nationalist architect – the example of Cape Dutch homesteads was fundamental to directing the development of a national art and architecture. He notes how the use of local materials makes Cape Dutch

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homesteads un-extractable from the region in which they are found. A national art ‘must grow out of the soil itself.’39 Moerdyk suggests ‘it is evident that the material with which it is built must be local in order to obtain the best representation of the geographical characteristics and the soul of the nation.’40 The promotion of local materials and their appropriateness to the locale was, however, limited in extent. Although many Cape Dutch homesteads had made use of unfired bricks and walls made of rubble and mud plaster, the promotion of local materials stopped short of promoting this particular type of construction. The editor of the Architect, Builder & Engineer, whilst writing to promote the use of local materials, noted that ‘our native heath would provide us with pise da terre and pise craye of excellent and bewildering variety,’ goes on to suggest that ‘there is no need to get down to such primitive materials and the like methods that go with their use.’41 Clearly then ‘racy of the soil’42 was a metaphorical statement rather than a literal one. In Africa, building with mud had other ramifications, other connotations; in fitting with the ambitions of the agents of Empire, Cape Dutch homesteads – like the White population – had to be portrayed as robustly local and yet grandly European. But the idea of Cape Dutch being vernacular extended itself into the valleys and landscape of the Cape. The addition of Cape Dutch homesteads to the landscape was portrayed as an improvement, aligned with Ruskin’s ideas of the picturesque. Herbert Baker commented on a painting commissioned for South Africa House not quite capturing these ideas of a cultivated picturesque: I think the effect on me of Pierneef’s pictures is best expressed by this quotation from Ruskin, which always seems to me so apt for the civilised beauty of the western province valleys in contrast to their mountain background:- ‘No scene is continually and untiringly loved, but one rich in joyful human labour; smooth in field; fair in garden; full in orchard; trim, sweet, and frequent in homestead, ringing with voices of vivid existence.’ The artist seems to have made rather too much of the mountain background and not enough of the more peaceful beauty of the valleys; in other words, the effect of his pictures may be to attract the adventurer and lover of wild scenery but not those who like the beauty of the peaceful cultivated valleys; in Kipling’s words ‘the blue goodness of the Weald.’43

The Editor of the Cape Times, in the Foreword to Alys Trotter’s essay on ‘Old Cape Homesteads,’ suggests that: ‘The Cape landscape without its white embowered farms would be like the Campagna without its temples and its aqueducts. It is one of the few regions of South Africa where man has done much to help out picturesque nature.’44 They seem to ‘belong’ as an integral part of the landscape. An article titled ‘Old Cape Craftsmanship’45 notes the ‘expansion of a truly South African national spirit’ and the need to study Cape Dutch architecture and furniture to complement it, suggesting Cape Dutch homesteads ‘seem to fit in naturally with their surroundings,’ as if they had always been there. Homesteads were naturalized in relation to the environment. Not only do they seem to fit the landscape but the picturesque and formal qualities of both are often noted, inferring, to some degree, that the beautiful landscape of the Cape is incomplete without its complementary

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homestead. This idea of picturesque homology is contained in the following quote taken from Martienssen’s article on the architectural student’s ‘pilgrimage’: The Cape is particularly rich in fine old buildings which afford a wonderful opportunity for the study of all the attributes of beautiful buildings. We cannot ignore the surroundings, the atmosphere, the very flavour which permeates every building. In successful architecture there is a distinct sympathy, almost a mutual reflection of beauty and colour between the forms of the building and the forms of enfolding nature … The old farm buildings at the Cape are steeped in atmosphere. There is a glorious unity of material, of the building and the surrounding country. There is a feeling of fitness, of rightness in the whole.46

Cape Dutch homesteads, it seemed, belonged naturally in the landscape, almost timelessly. As timeless as monuments. Trotter speaks of Cape Dutch homesteads giving the Cape Colony ‘a reliquary Past embodied in monuments’47 whilst Dorothea Fairbridge, as part of her survey of Cape Dutch homesteads in The Historic Houses of South Africa, offered another poetic description: ‘She is very old this South Africa – old and eternally young, with the light of the dawn in her eyes and in her heart the memories of the past.’ 48 And again: If it chances to be at sunset the white houses will gleam like pearls in the purple dusk which has gathered at the foot of Table Mountain while the summit is yet aflame. Seen from the height they are softened and made lovely, until it is no longer Cape Town on which you look but some magic city of mediaeval legend, and the long ripples of the bay are the waters which lap the golden walls of lost Atlantis.49

Fairbridge’s prose has many subtle shifts and associations. She erases ‘Africa’ and replaces it with a Western culture going as far back in ‘civilization’ as possible, all the way back to the legends and myths of the Ancients, establishing a subtle ideological dominion over ‘Africa.’ Cape Dutch homesteads become indigenous stand-ins for ancient monuments, not only of the soil, but of pre-settler history. That South Africa could be simultaneously ‘old and eternally young’ was precisely the kind of summation that made for good Empire building. Within the logic of this paradox is the idea that the present, and the future, extend from an undeniably ‘natural,’ unknowingly distant, and thus compellingly legitimate, past.

Great Men: Romantic Portrayals, Dubious Lineages and Manor Houses If the agents of Empire stumbled their way through the contradictions of Cape Dutch architecture that were their own making – as high art and local vernacular, as indigenous and ancient – their use of Cape Dutch architecture in establishing a lineage of ‘great men’ from the past to the present was equally convoluted. The ‘father of the nation’ oddly enough, was to be Simon van der Stel, the Cape’s first governor in power from 1679 to 1699, rather than Jan van Riebeeck who was the first Commander at the Cape in 1652. In the early 1900s Van der Stel was seen to

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epitomize a cultured gentleman revered for actively seeking to have the Cape colonized and settled by European culture. The architect A. Allen, in an address on town planning given to the Benoni Rotary Club in the Transvaal, considered the ‘beginning of civilization in South Africa’50 – of course European culture was the only valid condition of ‘civilization’ – to have started with the arrival of Van der Stel, rather than with Jan van Riebeeck. Allen, keen on promoting the town planning agenda, represented Van der Stel as the first town planner in South Africa and praised his aesthetic sensibility. What amounted to a cult of ‘great men’ was certainly focused on Governor Simon van der Stel, and his son, Willem Adriaan, who succeeded him in 1699 but was subsequently exiled in 1707. This is a dominant theme in Alys Trotter’s Old Cape Colony which, although not specifically architecturally focused, did lay great credence to the aesthetic vision of these two men, often missing their more prosaic and rapacious attitude to the Cape and its people. The tendency to aestheticize Van der Stel’s influence on the built environment is exemplified in Old Cape Colony where she writes: ‘All the poetry and interest of the Cape Peninsula, and much of the country further afield, is identified with the Van der Stels. They had a genius and passion for making beautiful places to live in – dwellings of grave and quiet beauty nestling amongst trees.’51 That Simon van der Stel had planted oak trees chiefly to provide raw materials for emerging agricultural and attendant industries was overlooked or wilfully ignored. Dorothea Fairbridge, under the impression that Simon van der Stel had constructed the grandly gabled Groot Constantia, considered it to be a material symbol of the establishment of civilization in South Africa at the time of Van der Stel’s government: Between this primitive fort [built by Van Riebeeck] and the house built by Simon van der Stel at Constantia some thirty years or so later lies a world of brave endurance and hardship overcome – Groot Constantia is a landmark, and from it we may reckon the starting-point of South African architecture.52

Here, the ‘great man’ and the ‘grand building’ are conflated, each representing the other; European ‘high’ culture, namely Groot Constantia as the ‘starting-point of South African architecture,’ appears in Africa within 30 years of the initial settlement. The understanding that the ‘great man’ was represented by the physical grandeur of his home is captured in the official Cape Town City guide. In an overreaching reference to Christopher Wren’s acclamation at St Paul’s Cathedral in London53 Finch laments ‘The Cape has no statue to Simon van der Stel (more’s the pity), but in Constantia – or in Stellenbosch – one may well say, si monumentum requiris, circumspice.’54 Unlike his father, Simon van der Stel, Willem Adriaan was not unequivocally revered thanks to his somewhat heavy-handed exploitation of the settlers during his office and his dubious accumulation of wealth represented by his large homestead of Vergelegen. His twentieth-century apologists argued that he was a highly civilized and cultured individual who should be venerated whatever his supposed ill-doing to those under his control. Alys Trotter understood the paradox that Willem Adriaan’s case presented to the twentieth-century production of discourse around Cape Dutch architecture: Vergelegen, so it seemed at the time, along with

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Groot Constantia, was the template by which all other gabled homesteads were developed. And yet, it was also the physical object that galvanized a mini-revolution at the Cape leading to the departure of the ‘great man.’ She writes the following of Vergelegen: ‘It is sad and curious to reflect that had this house never been built, the clever Van der Stel family might still be represented in South Africa.’55 Or, by extension, if the Van der Stel family was still in South Africa, the stately grandeur of Cape Dutch architecture might never have come into existence. But the agents of Empire were only too eager to connect the ‘great men’ of the past to the ‘great men’ of the present; if direct descendents could not be found then a different kind of lineage could be established, or at least be inferred. The project of civilization that had started with the original ‘great men’ was being completed by the ‘great men’ at the helm of the present project of Empire. The City of Cape Town’s official guide to the Cape from 1909 makes this lineage explicit: Van der Stel was the great pioneer of his day and an enthusiastic farmer. His first Colony was named after himself. Two hundred years later the Pioneer of the North bequeaths his name to his first settlement – Rhodesia! To-day, in a part of the former’s original colony of Stellenbosch we are to revive many memories of both, – to renew our acquaintance with the past and see the developments effected by the industry of people of English, Dutch and French descent.56

And Dorothea Fairbridge, in The Historic Houses of South Africa, points to Groote Schuur as the re-manifestation of the original Dutch barn, and Rhodes as the descendant of Van Riebeeck: But when we stand on the stoep behind Groote Schuur and look out across the blur of colour under the stone pines in the garden – cannas, bougainvillea, and plumbago – across the soft turquoise of the hydrangeas on the hillside and up the silver-clad slopes of the grey mountain, we are only conscious of the two great spirits of the past – the two pioneers – Jan van Riebeeck and Cecil Rhodes. As long as this South Africa of ours endures their names will be linked together in this lovely spot – the corn lands of the one, the home of the other. Even the house reflects the work of both, for underneath the building – the fourth erected on this site – are the foundations of the great barn in which van Riebeeck stored his grain, found by Mr. Herbert Baker in making the necessary excavations.57

We saw in Chapter 2 how Rhodes’ Groote Schuur constituted a consciously symbolic act of conciliation between English and Afrikaner but it could as easily be read as a gesture driven more by visions of Empire than nationhood. Through the possession of the past, figures such as Rhodes could lay legitimate claim to a land settled by Europeans more than two centuries before. There were also other symbolic acts, one of which was the implementation of a bronze relief sculpture above the main door of Groote Schuur showing the arrival of Van Riebeeck at the Cape receiving supplication from the indigenous population: Rhodes simply is Van Riebeeck, or else, is simply continuing the process of colonization and exploitation that Van Riebeeck helped implement (Figure 3.3). Rhodes also changed the name from The Grange to Groote Schuur, reconnecting the building to its past using the Dutch words for ‘Big Barn.’ Giving reference to its

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3.3 Groote Schuur, relief carving above the front door – the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape

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first use as a grain store is perhaps indicative of his intent to possess the present and the future development of South Africa through the past. In a more subtle way, and perhaps through the efforts of Baker and Trotter rather than Rhodes himself, Rhodes’s parity with Cape Dutch historical figures is reinforced in Old Colonial Houses of the Cape of Good Hope 58 where a photograph of Groote Schuur makes an anachronistic appearance amongst original Cape Dutch homesteads. Rhodes was still possessing South Africa from beyond the grave through representations in South Africa House in London with the alabaster carving and also through a copy of Groote Schuur’s relief sculpture of Jan van Riebeeck being made for the foyer. Baker makes the connection between Rhodes and Willem Adriaan van der Stel in a book review of Fairbridge’s Historic Farms of South Africa: Willem Adrian from the top of Table Mountain, looking over the flats to the hinterland beyond, dreamt dreams – like Cecil Rhodes two centuries later – of extending his country to the northwards. One recognises a man of the stamp of President Jefferson in Virginia.59

Apart from the more overt symbolic possessions of the past that are evident in Groote Schuur, Rhodes also started a trend whereby Cape Dutch came to signify status and gentility. In fact, discourse reflects the usefulness of Cape Dutch to the agents of Empire in legitimizing social hierarchy as clear and self-evident as that found in the ‘country seats’ of England’s landed gentry. That Rhodes’s Groote Schuur had been designed along the lines of a country house was not missed by the author of an article in the Rand Daily Mail in 1931, who, in writing on the home of the Prime Minister, reported that it ‘has been described as one of the most beautiful country seats to be found anywhere out of England.’60 There are also literal representations of Cape Dutch homesteads as ‘manor houses’ in reference to a more medieval English past. The Administrator of the Cape notes as much at the opening ceremony of the restored Groot Constantia: What is it that makes Groot Constantia a precious heritage to us to-day? It is the association of the homestead with the name of Simon van der Stel, one of the

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greatest names of all times in South African history … I have now very much pleasure in declaring the restored manor house of Groot Constantia open61

And Trotter’s Christmas article in the Cape Times suggested that ‘the populous and busy modern South Africa of the future will make pilgrimage to the Old Homesteads of the Western Province as Americans make pilgrimage to-day to the old Manor Houses of England.’62 This vision of the Cape Dutch homestead as a manor house was also in use in an editorial of the Architect, Builder & Engineer describing the adaptation of European society to local conditions by the settlers claims that ‘The free worker of the Lowlands of Europe was replaced by the coloured serf of the Cape.’63 These verbal references then, have the effect of establishing Cape Dutch homesteads within the traditions of European landed gentry. In fact, by 1935,64 Charles Walgate had taken to describing the existing Cape Dutch homesteads as ‘country houses’ which indicates the extent to which these once dilapidated working farmhouses had been reinterpreted and reinvented by the elite in the 40-odd years since Rhodes’s initial endeavours. It hardly seems surprising to read that Edwin Lutyens, long in the service of providing country houses for English clients, offered this advice to architects at the Cape on his visit in 1919: ‘Finally, look to your old homesteads; reverence [sic] them and use them as models intelligently, not copying them without the understanding that those old Dutchmen were gentlemen.’65 Cape Dutch homesteads and Cape Dutch revival country houses were becoming literal and symbolic possessions of status assuring rightful possession of the land of South Africa in the service of the project of Empire.

Literal and Invented Possessions: The Agents of Empire as Landed Gentry With thoughts of retirement Lionel Phillips, the erstwhile President of the Chamber of Mines, under pressure from his wife Florence,66 chose to purchase the Cape Dutch homestead of Vergelegen near Somerset West in 1917 (Figure 3.4). Though a place in the country certainly sweetens retirement and Vergelegen was subsequently turned into a productive and profitable farm, the Phillips had other reasons for purchasing it, linked to notions of Englishness and finding a refuge in the coherent and stable signifiers that Cape Dutch homesteads provided. A bolstering of the project of Empire against the threat that urbanity, democracy and modernism posed to the existing class- and race-based social order. Vergelegen, as mentioned above, was the original but partly modified homestead of Willem Adriaan van der Stel, son of Simon van der Stel and governor of the Cape from 1699 to 1708. That the homestead, along with Groot Constantia, was represented during the first few decades of the twentieth century as an almost mythical exemplar of a country or manor house has also been recounted. It was none other than Florence Phillips’ good friend, Dorothea Fairbridge, who was at the forefront of this adoration, defending the name of Adriaan and rewriting the history of his exile. At the time, England’s country estates were being represented,

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3.4 Vergelegen, front elevation

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through institutions such as the National Trust, as part of an idyllic and ideal rural past. In fact Lionel Phillips had purchased Tylney estate outside of Reading in 1898. That Phillips was willing to sell Arcadia, the elaborate house Herbert Baker had designed for him, and move from an increasingly urban Johannesburg to rural Vergelegen suggests that the building held great cultural capital. It also required extensive and expensive alterations and additions to make it ‘habitable’ which suggests that its purchase was motivated more by ideological reasons rather than utilitarian or economic ones. It seems very likely, then, that the Phillips’ purchased the estate for the ready-made identity that its originator, and the building itself, offered them. This identity is fairly complex. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rural past of England was beginning to be revered by proponents of the Arts and Crafts movement as an idyllic and ideal setting to return to. Not only did the unpolluted rural landscape offer the promise of relief from industrial cities such as Manchester, but the hierarchical world of the past it represented offered a sense of order to those whose class-values were affronted by the urban chaos of London.67 The revering of the ‘landed gentry,’ although not in keeping with William Morris’s egalitarian and socialist visions, emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as a particularly English undertaking, through which much emphasis was placed on the landed gentry representing the value of culture, learning, refinement and history.68 Thanks to the efforts of Florence Phillips’ friend Dorothea Fairbridge and others, Adriaan Van der Stel fitted the concept of a country gentleman and Vergelegen itself matched the representation as a country house with its fine gables, symmetry and large garden, whilst simultaneously fitting in with the less ostentatious emerging aesthetic of the Arts and Crafts movement (Figure 3.5). Possessing Vergelegen would have been an opportunity for the Phillips’ to assert their desired class-values and literally remove themselves from the democratic messiness of the city.

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Vergelegen and Van der Stel may, however, have had a stronger and more personal resonance with the Phillips’s. There are a series of parallels between the lives of the Phillips’s and Van der Stel that need to be exposed. Firstly, if Van Riebeeck was acclaimed as the orginating symbol of the permanent White settlement in South Africa, and Simon van der Stel as the bringer of colonists, then Adriaan was represented by authors such as Dorothea Fairbridge as the first entrepreneur and agriculturalist. In essence Adriaan was a developer who ‘opened up’ the country with his agricultural almanac and colonization of the interior for development.69 Lionel Phillips, a man who had been at the forefront of the development of the mining industry in South Africa, would quite possibly have seen himself as some kind of spiritual descendent of Van der Stel. Florence Phillips, as an avid farmer, modelled herself on Adriaan’s achievements in this sphere. Much was made in discourse around Adriaan and Simon van der Stel of their hospitality and the focus of the political world around both Vergelegen and Groot Constantia. The potential for the Phillips family to re-enact those early ‘grand’ days of the Van der Stel period may have suggested itself to them when considering Vergelegen as a retirement home. Florence Phillips’ biographer, Thelma Gutsche notes of the Sunday lunches held at Vergelegen: The Prime Minister, the Admiral, the Archbishop, members of Parliament, distinguished overseas visitors (it was said of the Phillips that ‘they knew everyone’ and were correspondingly influential), professors, artists, editors, scientists, writers, would find themselves at the same table and exposed to her uninhibited outbursts.70

Even the Governor-General and Princess Alice (the Athlones) were often visitors to Vergelegen.71 This is not to suggest that the Phillips’ identified with Van der Stel as a Dutchman. The possession of Vergelegen was not in any way part of the general English/ Afrikaner reconciliation others such as Rhodes and J.C. Smuts had attempted to engineer through Cape Dutch architecture. In fact, Florence Phillips had no qualms about discrediting Afrikaans and Dutch history in the development of South Africa, preferring to locate its importance with the English.72 As a true believer in bolstering the supporters of the Empire in South Africa, Florence Phillips even campaigned for new immigration from England upon the centenary celebration of the 1820 English settlers through the 1820 Association.73 Rather than simulating any reconciliation between the English and Afrikaner, the Phillips family were occupying the space of the image created of Van der Stel as a fine and civilized gentleman living in a fine manor house – a particularly Romantic and English image of the life of the landed gentry of the eighteenth century. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that Van der Stel was never particularly Dutch, and Somerset West and the Cape Peninsula was more part of the English landscape than South African – to those who purchased the homesteads at any rate. Purchasing Vergelegen and ‘restoring’ it was part of the general stewardship that the English at the Cape felt was a necessary protection of History itself – here I mean

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the concept of Western civilization, which the English understood to be the sole constituent of History. For individuals such as the Phillips family, the English were, in South Africa, the natural heirs and conclusion to a story of Western civilization begun in the time of Van der Stel and left incomplete by the ‘boorish Boers’ who had had him exiled; the Afrikaners for their part could not carry the task as the general impression at the time was that they had lost their ‘civilization’ when they went off into the wilderness that was the Great Trek in the late 1830s. This gives credence to the suggestion that the English – even one born in South Africa as Florence Phillips was – were claiming the early settler past as their own as a moral necessity. The purchase, abiding in and ‘restoration’ of Vergelegen was more than an act of possession of grandeur and status; it was a small private instance of the much larger restitution and securing of ‘Western civilization’ itself. The self-assured cultural chauvinism that saw Western civilization as essential to all humankind legitimated Empire in a period of increasing internal and external threats. Another example of Vergelegen’s symbolic power in the services of Empire is to be found in the City of Cape Town’s reaction to the arrival of the Prince of Wales on an official visit in 1925. As has been mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the Prince was taken on a motorcar tour of Cape Dutch homesteads in and around the Peninsula. One of the gifts bestowed on his departure was a photograph album of amongst other things, Cape Dutch homesteads.74 This photograph album was to bear the coat of arms of the Van der Stels, as well as a cover made from wood from the camphor trees Willem Adriaan Van der Stel had planted at Vergelegen some 225 years previously. The future king of England not only possessed images of the past of part of the Empire, but literally possessed that past as future through his proxy possession of Vergelegen symbolized through the camphor tree photograph album. But what of the restoration? This task fell to J.M. Solomon, a protégé of Baker’s, already extended beyond his capacity in the design of the new campus for the University of Cape Town. At Solomon’s request, Baker sent Charles Walgate, who he had employed in Delhi, to work on Vergelegen. When Solomon committed suicide, Walgate had full responsibility for the design and restoration even though his knowledge of Cape Dutch architecture was limited. Florence Phillips had sponsored Fairbridge’s Historic Houses and she was a source of instruction for Walgate. Despite this, the work Walgate achieved was, like so much of the ‘restoration’ of the time, a decidedly less than sensitive intervention. The back gable was torn down and replaced by one copied from the old church at Paarl.75 Contrary to Gutsche’s findings that Walgate used ‘authentic joinery’ and metalwork ‘to conform to early Dutch patterns,’76 the whole design was clearly driven by Arts and Crafts sentiments. The two courtyards and the hipped-roof side-wings with their fountains and reflecting ponds beyond, the planting of cypress trees and the inserts and detailing on the shutters, all point to the workings of an Arts and Crafts architect not thoroughly familiar with Cape Dutch nuances and operating through then current European architectural concerns (Figure 3.5). Aside from the Phillips’s and Vergelegen, there are many other instances of the possession of the settler past by the agents of Empire. Rhodes, through his purchase and rebuilding of what became Groote Schuur, lay claim to and took

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3.5  Vergelegen – Arts and Crafts side additions by C.P. Walgate

possession of a settler past. He also purchased a number of Cape Dutch homesteads including Nooitgedacht, Good Hope, Boschendal, Rhone, Lekkerwyn, Weltevreden, Vredenburg, and Bien Donne, in and around the Simonsberg and Drakenstein Mountains in order to establish his envisioned fruit farm empire.77 Apart from the few politicians who had ancestral claims to the Cape Dutch homesteads they occupied during the period of study – such as ‘Onze Jan’ Hofmeyr at Welgemeend – Rhodes seemed to have sparked a purchasing craze of Cape Dutch homesteads in and around Cape Town by the city’s elite. John X. Merriman, Prime Minister of the Cape from 1908 until Union, was the owner of the Cape Dutch homestead Schoongezicht in Stellenbosch at least during the period from 1900 to 1917.78 J.W. Sauer, who held the cabinet post of Native Affairs and introduced the Land Bill leading to the devastating Land Act of 1913,79 was the owner of Uitkyk, north of Stellenbosch. Richard Stuttaford, who, as a member of parliament in 1919, motivated for and partly financed Pinelands Garden City – ‘South Africa’s first Garden City’ as the saying goes – following a visit to Letchworth in England with Raymond Unwin in 1917, also commissioned Baker in the Cape Dutch inspired design of his house Lidcote in Kenilworth in 1904 (Figure 3.6).80 Some 20 years later Stuttaford went on to purchase the old Cape Dutch homestead of Rustenburg east of Stellenbosch whereupon James Morris was involved with some restoration work.81 The man from whom Stuttaford purchased Rustenburg, was Lord Percy De Villiers, the first president of the National Society. Whilst the same suggestions made at the beginning of the section on Vergelegen could be made about these individuals and their possession of Cape Dutch homesteads – that they were retired, wanted to farm, or perhaps were investing in economically lucrative property – it is quite clear that some of them were committed to the Cape Dutch restoration and preservation movement for ideological reasons. This can be inferred from their membership to either the Closer Union Society or the National Society, and the general ideological motivations of

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3.6  Baker and Kendall – Lidcote, proposed addition c.1912

those movements. Meiring Beck was president of the National Society and it seems likely that his purchase of the Tulbagh Drostdy was motivated by a sincere desire to preserve the settler past. That Stuttaford was a committed possessor of the Cape Dutch homestead of Rustenberg is supported by his membership to the National Society and the Closer Union Society as well as in a letter sent by Kendall to him in 1926.82 Although Sauer was more of a Republican than an Imperialist,83 his wife was a member of the National Society at least in 1923 suggesting that protecting identity and preserving Cape Dutch homesteads was an active consideration. Other minor players in the future of South Africa such as Julia Solly of Knorhoek, James Rawbone of Broadlands, were also possessors of Cape Dutch homesteads in and around Stellenbosch and were both members of the National Society.

Possessing Simulacras of Settler History: the Cape Dutch Revival Style If the Cape’s elite had managed to appropriate the settler past they were also able to invent new versions of those pasts – simulacras of Cape Dutch homesteads more akin to the country houses that were being designed and built by architects such as Luytens in England. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Herbert Baker – Luytens’ occasional colleague and rival – was able to develop a fairly distinctive Cape Dutch revival style, perhaps more simply called Baker Cape Dutch that became somewhat popular with wealthy suburban house owners at the Cape and in Johannesburg. Predominantly double-storied and characterized by twirled chimneys and Baroque gables such as those at Lidcote and Groote Schuur, Baker’s Cape Dutch spoke more about his desire for originality in design and the progressive development of style in architecture than about a literal or accurate historical replication.84 It also seems fairly plausible to discount Baker Cape Dutch as having originated from any real desire to lay claim to a settler past, and to consider it more the work of an individual opportunist intent on using generous commissions to explore building as an artistic and creative medium; Baker was more of an aesthete than an ideologue.

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When Kendall and Morris took over the reins of Baker’s firm after Masey and Baker left Cape Town, the Cape Dutch revival became distinctly more political in its proliferation. A large number of Kendall and Morris’ clients were members of the National Society and Closer Union Society and were actively involved in Union ideology. Cape Dutch elements such as gables in their houses was thus more than a contemporary stylistic trend. In fact, as Radford has noted, the Cape Dutch revival had a very limited impact on domestic architecture in Cape Town in general.85 Aside from the initial enthusiasm generated by Rhodes’ example of Groote Schuur, its occurrence seems to have been based on two ideological premises: either as symbols of Union and the possession of a settler past, or as symbols of the life of the landed gentry. The two were not exclusive and in fact complemented each other. Cape Dutch gables became totemistic additions to buildings otherwise clearly Arts and Crafts country houses in their design and detailing. In fact, what was only later classified as the Peninsula type gable86 became almost exclusively used, perhaps as a way of recapturing the ‘pure’ gable form supposedly represented by Groot Constantia. An example of this is to be found at Lourensford estate (later known as Fleur-duCap). Lourensford was purchased from Sir James Sivewright in 1916 by J.W. Jagger, the leader of the Union Party at the Cape and President of the Cape Town branch of the pro English immigration lobby, the Overseas League.87 Jagger commissioned Kendall and Morris in 1924 to design a new house on the Lourensford estate (Figure 3.7). Although the design may have been a collaboration between Kendall and Morris, the project seems to have been a point of dispute between the two, leading to Morris breaking the partnership. Kendall was later involved in some alteration work to the drawing room fireplace in 1932, but the construction administration of the house-proper was left to Morris who maintained the contract through arbitration.88 Given the extent of the project and its broken symmetry, hipped-roofs, expressed chimneys and windows set at the eaves level, the house carries all the characteristics of an Arts and Crafts house designed for a country gentleman. The maintenance of

3.7 Kendall and Morris – Lourensford, c.1925

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3.8  Kendall and Morris – plan of Lourensford

social hierarchy in the project and the house is fairly obvious to read in the plan as is similarly found in Rhodes’ Groote Schuur (Figure 2.5). At Lourensford the design provides spatial and visual separation of served and servants’ areas through the restriction of the latter to the right of the main, symmetrical, double-storied house – although three of the nine servant bedrooms did creep into the upper floor of the main house. Clearly, the service/servants’ wing easily ‘disappeared’ under the myopic classist vision of the time and offered no contradiction to the overall symmetry of the main building (Figure 3.8). It is also fairly telling to note that the servants’ rooms in the service wing all have windows that face onto internal courtyards and are located away from the extensive and elaborately designed back garden. Presumably this was to prevent any ‘intrusion’ of the servants into the backspace with its Palladian folly. These design elements were typical of an Arts and Crafts country estate in England. But a minor element on the sketch plan illustrates the general conflation of race and class that had occurred in the colonies at the time: three small rooms in the servant’s wing are tellingly labelled ‘Boy,’ indicating the status of a black, male servant, and thereby locating the project in the nexus of South Africa’s paternalistic and hierarchical race relations. The clearest indication of the pretentious political status of the house is indicated by the inclusion of the Groot Constantia gable at the front entrance. Whilst it may be argued that Jagger was simply following the stylistic trend of Cape Town’s elite, his commitment to the National Society and the Closer Union Society suggest that the Cape Dutch gable was used as a connective symbol of rootedness emphasizing continuity with and possession of a settler past. Of course, a pair of ‘slave’ bell-towers inevitably appear at the northeast corner of the house.

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Many of the observations made regarding Lourensford could be made with regard to Kendall’s design of Luncarty, a predecessor to Lourensford (Figures 3.9– 3.10). Although not on such a grand scale as Lourensford, it has similar aspirations, presenting itself as the house of a country gentleman. The separation of servant and served spaces is not carried through as definitively as in Lourensford, however, there is a room for a ‘Boy’ with its entrance off a kitchen-yard, whilst the servants’ rooms and storage rooms were the only ones located in the attic. The house, originally commissioned by Commander Sereld Hay, was in all probability designed by Kendall as Baker, who at that stage was in India, would have acted simply as a design consultant on the project. Again, what is striking about the project is the inclusion of the Groot Constantia gable at the entrance and back façade looking out over the garden. Hay was not active in either National Society or Closer Union Society circles which suggests that his motivations for including the gable may have come from Kendall. In 1927, Kendall was involved in designing an additional artist’s studio space for Edith Struben, Luncarty’s new owner, whose father had been a member of the Closer Union Society and a treasurer of the National Society, and who herself was a member of the National Society. Kendall spent considerable time and effort tracking down some 200 Delft tiles for the fireplace adding to the ‘authenticity’ of the home as a Cape Dutch homestead.89 It was, however, a specific instruction on the part of Ms Struben that confirmed her purchase of Luncarty as an instance of the deliberate possession of original settler history. At the beginning of the

3.9  Frank Kendall – Luncarty, c.1918

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3.10 Frank Kendall – plan of Luncarty

design process she wrote to Kendall that ‘if feasible and possible [I] should like to use my copy of Constantia Cellar Frieze over the fireplace and the rest to accord in treatment with it.’90 Although the overall feel of the room was not particularly Cape Dutch, the miniaturized moulding of the frieze was indeed inserted, affording Struben the possession of both the history of Groot Constantia and the settler past of its ‘great men,’ such as Simon van der Stel and Anreith, the sculptor. Examples abound of the Groot Constantia or Cape Peninsula type gable being ‘attached’ to the front façade of fairly ostentatious and not so ostentatious houses developed in the suburbs of Cape Town. A double storey house on Greenfield Road in Kenilworth, designed by Kendall for H.E. Hockly, illustrates this quite clearly as well as making use of fairly typically proportioned, paned and shuttered Cape Dutch style windows on the ground floor, and more Arts and Crafts inspired windows up against the eaves on the first floor (Figure 3.11). The Greenfield house retains the gabled ends characteristic of Cape Dutch homesteads, making a fairly convincing double-storey adaptation of a typical Cape Dutch homestead front façade. The same cannot be said of a house designed by Walgate in Somerset West. Although its plan roughly resembles the ‘H’ typical of many old Cape Dutch homesteads and its sash windows seem to have been carefully proportioned and positioned along Cape Dutch lines, its hipped roofs present the Groot Constantia or Peninsula type gable as an unconvincing and somewhat arbitrary addition to the house (Figure 3.12). Contemporary photographs and descriptions of the interior – its black-stained ceiling beams and picture rails, and its many ‘cosy’ fireplace alcoves – suggest that the hipped roofs were part of the general Arts and Crafts aesthetic. Although its large planks of yellowwood floorboards show attempts at greater

3.11  Frank Kendall – House Hockly, Greenfield Road, Kenilworth, 1930

3.12  C.P. Walgate – Stellandal, c.1926

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authenticity in the design, the pretences of slotting into a ‘great men’ tradition can be found in the name given to the house and in a detail on the front façade. Called Stellandal in honour of the Van der Stels, the front gable also bore their coat of arms.91

Conclusion During the age of Empire and in the politics of the Union of South Africa, Cape Dutch homesteads – through the floating cipher of Cape Dutch gables and the ‘great men’ who owned them – were resurrected, dusted off and readily deployed as evidentiary markers of western civilization in Southern Africa – or more precisely, of the longevity of the project of western civilization in Southern Africa, of which the agents of Empire were now the custodians. By charting out each homestead and tracing every twist and turn of each distinctive gable type, Empire was enumerating its territorial possessions and stage-managing evidence of its originary claim to the land; the re-charting of the original settlement of the Cape was in effect a re-charting of the possession of Southern Africa by Empire, starting from Cape Town like the original settlers did and spreading northwards into ‘Africa.’ Much of the discourse around Cape Dutch architecture emphasized the role the early settlers had played in bringing ‘civilization’ to the sub-continent. Cape Dutch homesteads, the ‘great men’ that owned them, and the horizon of European culture that linked them to the metropole, were thus considered both symbols and literal manifestations of civilization as such. Cape Dutch architecture retroactively showed a high pedigree of European design within a rooted vernacular, allowing the style to represent the Cape as fundamentally European in origin and literally part of Europe. Consequently, the Cape itself could be understood as an already literal part of Europe, as if it always was and always would be, and the unease and ironies of a conquering Empire could be dispelled – the land was not African but European. The production of this discourse helped consolidate a White identity that postured itself as superior and essentially European; in Africa, yes, but unlike Africans. Empire was seen to have an unassailable, almost religious, edifying necessity – the European culture that produced these great artefacts must surely continue its work in Africa! This discourse discredited and diminished the involvement of Others, of course, in the production of the buildings being revered, automatically downplaying their toil in the building of the Cape’s wealth. By focusing on the image of the gable, the discourse around Cape Dutch architecture necessarily excluded problematic aspects of the Cape’s history, such as slavery, and, through a distinctly fetishizing process, introduced suggestive Cape Dutch elements such as slave bell-towers into the 1900s Cape cultural landscape as unproblematic aesthetic objects, emptied of meaning. Spurred by the building preservation movement and nationalist sentiment, the nouveau riche at the Cape – mirroring England, as ever – set about purchasing, at the turn of the nineteenth century, existing Cape Dutch homesteads or building simulations thereof as signified through Groot Constantia’s gable. Owning Cape Dutch homesteads became a way of possessing the ‘noble’ past imputed to them.

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Furthermore, as a new ‘landed gentry’ (as signified through the Cape Dutch homesteads), the politicians and upper middle-class in the Cape and South Africa were able to literally lay claim to the history and geography of the land of South Africa, and thereby legitimize the project of Empire both in South Africa and Africa. Yet, precisely whilst pretences of high society and civilization were being made, an extensive and consuming discourse was emerging that began to represent the racially heterogeneous dwellers in the old parts of Cape Town as uncivilized and bestial, making them vulnerable to being dispossessed of the land they occupied. In a similar manner, the old parts of Cape Town were represented as squalid slums, without any aesthetic merit, making them vulnerable to eradication. These considerations form the next part of this book.

Notes 1

The State, vol. 1, no. 6, (June, 1909), p.657.

2

Victoria & Albert Museum, RIBA Archives, BaH 31/3.

3

Education Gazette, 15 May 1919: ‘Memorandum on the Teaching of History.’ Original emphasis.

4

Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 19, no. 2, (September, 1935), p.7.

5

Ibid.

6

Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 21, no. 2, (September 1937), pp.12–13.

7

Cape Argus 19 May 1928: ‘The House that Nobody Visits.’

8

Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 19, no. 2, (September, 1935), p.7.

9

See Hall, M., ‘The Secret Lives of Houses: Women and Gables in the Eighteenth-Century Cape’ in Social Dynamics, vol. 20, no. 1, (94); although James Walton did change the focus to the un-gabled vernacular, see Walton, J., Homesteads and Villages of South Africa, (Pretoria: J.L. Van Schaik Ltd., 1952).

10 Cape Times 14 August 1916: ‘The Tavern of the Sea.’ 11 Finch, J. R., The Cape of Good Hope, pp.6–7. 12 KAB CCC Mayor’s Minute, 11 September 1925, p.5. 13 Trotter, A.F. and Baker, H., Old Colonial Houses of the Cape of Good Hope, p.6. 14 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 9, no. 6, (January, 1926), p.1. 15 African Architect, vol. 3, no. 1. 16 Trotter, A.F., Old Cape Colony, p.55. 17 Cape Times 25 August 1898: A.P. Trotter, ‘Old Cape Homesteads.’ 18 Transvaal Leader 23 February 1914: ‘Architecture in South Africa.’ 19 UCT Manuscripts and Archives BC206, 145: 28 July 1924, letter from Kendall to Pearse. 20 Ibid. 21 UCT Manuscripts and Archives BC206, 145: 25 July 1934, letter from Pearse to Kendall.

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22 UCT Manuscripts and Archives BC206, 41: 3 October 1930, letter from Kendall to Wallace Mein. 23 UCT Manuscripts and Archives BC206, 41: 8 March 1930, letter from Wallace Mein to Kendall. 24 UCT Manuscripts & Archives images BC206, 429. 25 Cape Times 14 August 1916: ‘The Tavern of the Sea.’ 26 Fairbridge, D., The Historic Houses of South Africa, p.21. 27 De Puyfontaine, H. R., Louis Michel Thibault, (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1972). 28 Cape Times The Cape Times Christmas Number 1906: ‘Anthon Anreith,’ by Rip van Winkle. 29 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 6, no. 3, (October, 1922), p.3. 30 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 7, no. 11, (June, 1924), p.7. 31 Pearse, G.E., Eighteenth Century Architecture in South Africa, p.29. 32 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 17, no. 11, (June, 1934), p.3. 33 Kendall, F.K., The Restoration of Groot Constantia, p.20. 34 Fairbridge, D., The Historic Houses of South Africa, p.ix. 35 Ibid., p.xi. 36 Trotter, A.P., ‘Old Cape Homesteads,’ Cape Times, 25 December 1898. 37 South African Architectural Record, vol. 13, no. 50, p.31. 38 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 17, no. 6, (January, 1934), p.7. 39 South African Architectural Record, vol. 21, no. 6, (June, 1936), p.192. 40 Ibid. 41 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 19, no. 7, (February, 1936), p.3. 42 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 4, no. 8, (March, 1921), p.15. 43 Victoria & Albert Museum, RIBA Archives, BaH 31/5, Letter to High Commissioner Charles te Water, 15 November 1933. 44 Cape Times ‘Old Cape Homesteads,’ Cape Times – Christmas Number, December, 1898. 45 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 3, no. 12, (July, 1920), p.15. 46 South African Architectural Record, vol. 13, no. 50, p.30. 47 Cape Times 25 August 1898: A.P. Trotter, ‘Old Cape Homesteads.’ 48 Fairbridge, D., The Historic Houses of South Africa, p.9. 49 Fairbridge, D., The Historic Houses of South Africa, p.183. 50 South African Architectural Record, vol. 16, no. 62 (June, 1931), p.101. 51 Trotter, A.F., Old Cape Colony. A Chronicle of Her Men and Houses from 1652 to 1806, (Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., 1903), p.45. 52 Fairbridge, D., The Historic Houses of South Africa, p.11. 53 ‘If you seek my monument, look around you,’ is a copy of a dedication to Wren in St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

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54 Finch, J.R., The Cape of Good Hope, p.100. 55 Cape Times 25 December 1898: ‘Old Cape Homesteads.’ 56 Finch, J.R., The Cape of Good Hope, p.55. 57 Fairbridge, D., The Historic Houses of South Africa, p.66. 58 Trotter, A.F. and Baker, H., Old Colonial Houses of the Cape of Good Hope, plate xxxiv. 59 Victoria and Albert Museum, RIBA Archives, BaH/64/3. 60 Rand Daily Mail 30 May 1931: ‘Permanent Home of the Premiers.’ 61 Cape Times 22 September 1927: ‘Groot Constantia.’Emphasis added. 62 Cape Times 25 December 1898: ‘Old Cape Homesteads.’ 63 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 17, no. 6, (January, 1934), p.7. Emphasis added. 64 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 19, no. 2, (September, 1935), p.7. 65 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 2, no. 10, (May, 1919), p.15. 66 Gutsche, T., No Ordinary Woman. The Life and Times of Florence Phillips, (Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1966), p.342. 67 Hawkins, A., ‘The Discovery of Rural England,’ in Colls, R. and Dodd, P. (eds), Englishness. Politics and Culture, 1880–1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1986). 68 Meacham, S., Regaining Paradise, p.9. 69 Fairbridge, D., Historic Farms of South Africa. 70 Gutsche, T., No Ordinary Woman, p.365. 71 Ibid., p.376. 72 Ibid., p.376 and 390. 73 Ibid., p.354. 74 Cape Times 20 February 1925: ‘The Prince’s Visit.’ 75 Gutsche, T., No Ordinary Woman, p.362. 76 Ibid., p.368. 77 Baker, H., Cecil Rhodes, pp.243–4. 78 Merriman was also the first Chairman of the Van Riebeeck Society, which published out of print historical documents, see Fouche, L., The Diary of Adam Tas, 1705–1706, (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1970). 79 Davenport, T.R.H., South Africa: A Modern History, p.336. 80 UCT Manuscripts & Archives BC206, 67. 81 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 11, no. 11, (June, 1928), p.7. 82 UCT Manuscripts & Archives BC206, 155: 23 January 1926, letter from Kendall to Stuttaford. 83 The State, vol. 3, no. 4, (April, 1910), p.526. 84 Victoria and Albert Museum, RIBA Archives, BaH/64/1, Herbert Baker, ‘A Paper on South African Architecture,’ 1907. 85 Radford, D., ‘The Architecture of the Western Cape, 1838 to 1901,’ p.2.

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86 Walton, J., Homesteads and Villages of South Africa, p.14. 87 Gutsche, T., No Ordinary Woman, p.342. 88 UCT Manuscripts & Archives BC206, 172: 18 August 1925, letter from C.H. Smith to Morris. 89 UCT Manuscripts & Archives BC206, 95: 12 April 1927, letter from Kendall to Struben. 90 UCT Manuscripts & Archives BC206, 95: 14 January 1927, Letter from Struben to Kendall. 91 Daily Dispatch 19 February 1929: ‘The Home Beautiful.’

Part II Other/City

In my short visit to the United States I saw as much as I could of the old colonial buildings, being especially interested to compare them with our old houses in South Africa … I looked in vain in New York for any remnant of Dutch influence in the architecture and searched the museums without success for any of the beautiful furniture which is so familiar to us in Cape Colony. … [In New York’s high towers] the horizontal lines have been abandoned, and in effect it is all rather, if it is not irreverent to say so, higgledy piggeldy vertically. There is little attempt in the new buildings to give the steadying effect of cornices or horizontal parapets to the heads of the towers, and they look as though their heads had been torn off or ‘scalped,’ leaving the raw edges.1 Herbert Baker, ‘Notes on my American Visit,’ 1930

Standing on the shore of New Jersey or Brooklyn – as he must have been – Herbert Baker was looking back at New York City as an architect of his time: a painter of pictures in masonry and mortar. In 1930, ‘space,’ that ineffable architectural obsession of the twentieth century, had only recently been invented2 and was mainly the plaything of young avant-garde architects rather than the primary medium of an almost-septuagenarian classicist like Baker. Consequently, for Baker, New York was a cityscape, a picture to be seen from the outside, to be viewed from a distance; to be in New York – in the space of New York – was to be in the throng of people,3 the flow of energy, of information, of goods, movement, inventive interactions where architecture melts into air and is overwhelmed by something bigger than itself. Baker was searching in vain for Cape Dutch architecture – the steadying surety of singular buildings, balanced and symmetrical, and he was missing seeing what was right in front of him: a city. More acutely, New York and its buildings was evidence of a ‘barbaric’ violence done to architecture, Manhattan’s ‘higgeldy-piggeldy’ character showed an unsettling lack of a master–designer in control of the cityscape, an absence of the professionally applied coherence of an architect. Standing on the outside and looking at the city as ‘scape’ then, Baker saw it simply as an aesthetic problem. Like most architects, Baker made a category error, ignoring the city’s systems and its

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opportunities, its economies and ecologies – and how its energy and chaos might allow even the indigent the lure of a foothold in the cracks and crevices of its canyon streets. To be sure, at the beginning of the twentieth century, cities like New York were an ‘ugly’ side-effect of capitalism, or, the triumph of a free-form modernity over the totalizing singular style of tradition. Whereas pre-industrial cities were a small-scale accretion of self-similar units, modern cities were an agglomeration of ambition and individuality, each building an improvisation on the Broadway boogie-woogie grid – played in a different key. Jostling for attention, they gathered themselves up into ever taller signs of ‘progress’ harnessed to the whims and pretences of designers and clients. Cities such as New York were – and still are – records of the ebb and flow of finances across their shores, the tallest buildings a trace of the high-tide mark of the flood of money in the economy – not the ordering impulse of a master architect sculpting the skyline. The best New York could offer by way of coherence was its set-back and bulk bye-laws and zoning.4 And yet, the idea that the city could – and should – be sculpted and designed like a stage-set or a picture or a painting are there in Baker’s words and sentiments. They reveal the underlying ideology, desire and training of any architect. This is what the second part of this book is about: the aesthetics of order battling to subdue an anarchic metastasizing organism – the well-trained urge of architects to totalize and make a visually and socially chaotic city singular and coherent. To design the city. We’ll look at the beginnings of town planning, particularly from an architectural or aesthetic perspective, and through it, the overarching desire to bring order to a chaotic accident of people and things. But the aesthetic problems of the city were only ever disturbing signs of a deeper malady. Issues of health and adequate housing for the working classes – in classic Marxist terms to ‘reproduce the means of production’5 – certainly lay behind the official White impulse to order the city. In the age of Empire, the Victorian city was a sociological ‘hotbed of horrors,’6 its poorer neighbourhoods a freak show of too many bodies crammed into impossibly small rooms with all manner of social and pathogenic ills. If early Victorians once viewed their cities with civic pride, later descendants saw the city as a shocking embarrassment. Poor sanitary conditions and the breakdown of the family unit were equally threatening to social order – as far as the burgeoning tabloid-reading middle classes were concerned. Antiurban sentiments were solidified through horrific reports by ‘slummer journalists;’ a dollop of delectable disgust consumed at the breakfast table along with other by-products of Empire such as Ceylon tea and Lyle’s golden syrup. The sub-let and jerry-built ‘homes’ were described as a deformity of a once whole and familiar Self – matching the simultaneous horror and attraction of Joseph Merrick, ‘The Elephant Man,’ on show in the East End of London. Like the ‘higgeldy piggeldy’ Manhattan skyline, the inner-city slums of England were a disfiguring amalgam of expedient additions and extensions to older housing stock, backyard infill and mazes leading to hostile ‘rookeries’7 – a chaotic assault on the body of middle class respectability. In the most general terms then, it is easy to correlate the city – this late-Victorian city of dirt, noise, pollution, and chaos – with the Other.

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Cape Town at the turn of the twentieth century had neither the dramatic vertical development and density of New York nor the grim Dickensian grime of England’s cities, except perhaps in the light industrial areas of Woodstock and Salt River. It was, aside from a few key streets such as Adderley, Darling and Strand, a largely Dutch colonial town in character,8 capturing neither the Beaux Arts civic grandeur of the City Beautiful9 movement, mildly rippling through South African architectural discourse at the time, nor the picturesque quality of an English village. Yet, despite its small scale, it was still a problem for the agents of Empire. We’ve traced how Cape Dutch architecture, and Cape Dutch homesteads in particular, came discursively to represent and symbolize a useful take on history, civilization and culture through which White South Africans, and more directly, upper-middle-class English South Africans, made claims of possession of the land; the valorized Self was located in the countryside, through what was generally considered ‘high’ architectural design. It was axiomatic then – and if one excluded the rural predominance of ‘tribal’ Africa – that the Other resided in the city, literally in the slums and back alleys hidden behind the façades of polite society. As we shall see the ‘slummer journalists’ of the local version of Grub Street found them to be, like their English counterparts, a repulsive attraction. A threatening presence needing to be contained, corralled and neutered. The visibly increasing – disordering – presence of black people in the city undermined the convenient binary spatialization of Europe and Africa, or ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarity,’ that had given the agents of Empire the moral fuel they needed to exploit and conquer – ‘Africa,’ it seemed, was already here on the inside, alongside genteel society, intermingling. Otherness was present in the visual disorder of residual urban Cape Dutch elements, in the expedient use of ‘ugly’ materials, the re-used flotsam of capitalism or in the recurring material signifiers of pre-settler ‘Africa’ – the detourned off-cuts and off-casts of industrial waste, or, mud and thatch. We’ll focus on Cape Town proper, or rather, the discourse and representation of disturbing parts of the city – Old Cape Town as it was often called – parts like the socially and culturally heterogeneous District Six. Once again recent immigration to South Africa of English architects (and a host of other professionals to do with the city) frames much of the discourse and representation of Cape Town with concerns largely generated in England, but transferred and transformed to suit the particular racial politics at the Cape. The city, notwithstanding the general anti-urban sentiments in England at the time, was considered problematic on two counts, the aesthetic and the social. Chapter 5, considers how the occupation of the inner city of Cape Town by social and racial Others started to represent the possible undoing of English possession of the city and Empire’s possession of the country itself. Discourse on space and image, especially of Old Cape Town’s ‘slums,’ produced contradictory descriptions of Otherness that was part of the criss-cross bandaging over Empire’s vulnerabilities. Where Chapter 5 focuses on the social space of the city, Chapter 4 deals with the concerns voiced by architects over the physical and material qualities of the city itself. Elements simply considered ‘ugly’ motivated much of the eventual structuring of the city as a White space; this allowed Others to be removed from the space of

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the city and secured the emptied-out civic grandeur of an Edwardian city in the image of Empire. As we will see, the emerging tourist industry played a part in the desire to ‘prettify’ Cape Town, whilst the Arts and Crafts’ anti-industrial stance gave the use of corrugated iron in particular an immoral bent. Racial politics intensify around the discourse on Old Cape Town and its ‘slums.’ The importance given by English architects to visual aspects of the city conflated elements considered ‘ugly’ with the social and racial Others who occupied these ‘unsightly’ structures. Removal and exclusion from the city followed. An aesthetics of order motivates the racial-spatial policies of apartheid and this is where Part II begins.

Notes 1

South African Architectural Record, vol. 15, no. 57 (March, 1930).

2

Forty, A., Words and Buildings. A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture, (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000).

3

See De Certeau, M., ‘Walking in the City,’ in The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

4

Koolhaas, R., Delirious New York, (New York: Monacceli Press, 1997), pp.107–8.

5

Althusser, L., ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, (London: New Left Books, 1971), pp.127–8.

6

Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 1, no. 3, (October, 1917): ‘A Hotbed of Horrors.’

7 Evans, R., ‘Rookeries and Model Dwellings: English Housing Reform and the Moralities of Private Space,’ in Evans, R., Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, (London: Architectural Association Publications, 1997). 8

For a description of the urban fabric of Cape Town at the end of the nineteenth century, see Howard. A.G., ‘Progress of Architecture in Cape Town since 1876,’ SAAE&SJ, (May, 1907).

9

Wilson, W.H., ‘The Ideology, Aesthetics and Politics of the City Beautiful Movement,’ in Sutcliffe, A., (ed.), The Rise of Modern Urban Planning, 1800–1914 (London: Mansell, 1980).

4 From City to Cityscape: On Aesthetics and Order in Town Planning, Tourism, ‘Slums’ and Building Materials

The informal beauty which resulted from the natural and apparently unconscious growth of the medieval town may command our highest admiration, but we may feel that it arose from conditions of life which no longer exist, and that it is unwise to seek to reproduce it. Possibly other forms of beauty will be found more adapted to our present conditions. 1 Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in Practice The town planner is the setter of architectural gems.2 Herbert Baker, ‘Town Planning’

Judgements of an aesthetic nature – an aesthetics of order framing the apprehension of the city – were devastating for those at the periphery of Cape Town’s economy of power. The administrative archives of the city are filled with the socially disruptive operational agency of ‘beauty’ – at times veiled, at times explicit. Beauty, or the aesthetics of visual order, can radically undermine those who are officially determined not to possess, inhabit or apprehend it. Imperial beauty wanted to reorder the city from a place to inhabit, struggle and cohabit into a place to look at, from city into a cityscape. The significance of the agents of Empire’s apprehension of the city as a visual problem is paramount. An aesthetic sensibility informed and initiated town planning as a profession. Town planning had not quite articulated at this stage its technocratic and sociological ambitions – even apparently ‘practical’ town planning ideas were often formed by the need for a visual order to be made apparent in the cityscape. Empire needed to replicate itself in a recognizable form around the globe, it needed to see itself in the streets of Cape Town; unruly subjects and spaces could be brought into line through an aesthetic sensibility, an analogical order that overwrote the messy accretive disorder of the city. Official beauty lay in clarifying lines and regulations, excisions and exclusions. New developments were to be planned – without contradiction – for their orderly picturesqueness, and existing city fabric was to be reordered, its laissez faire lines straightened under the rack of rationality. There is a discernible neurotic tone, an anxiety over the unfamiliar,

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in this discourse attempting to apprehend the city as officials and architects fussed over the bulging, blemished and partly alien body that is Cape Town, a barely recognizable Self. We might consider the visual reordering of the city as part of the dream-work of Empire. The wish-fulfilment of impossible contradictions and incommensurabilities magically resolved in overwriting lines and realignments. But what vectors were these lines to take? What were their originating sources and where were they headed? Raymond Unwin feels like the locus through which these lines travelled even though he never set foot in Cape Town. Unwin was a pioneer of town planning in England and aesthetic sensibilities certainly frame his work. He was equally disgusted at disorderly laissez faire development and the aesthetic monotony of the bye-law street that was its reactionary consequence3 – the former had no apparent order and the latter too much. Unwin inherited a sense of the picturesque and a love for the medieval village through A.W.N. Pugin, John Ruskin and William Morris, and the urban theorist Camillo Sitte. Unwin’s Town Planning in Practice promoted the idea of architects designing the city into the scenographic semblance of a formalized picturesque English village, and insisted there was no difference between designing a building and designing a city.4 As architecture teetered on the cusp of industrial modernism, architects like Unwin fell back into a picturesque English village past where building materials had been hand-hewn and softened by mossy time – into the bucolic aesthetic sensibilities of the Arts and Crafts movement. But they fell back into the past clutching the tools of modernism – analysis, rationality, efficiency. The agents of Empire’s ambition for Cape Town was thus simultaneously picturesque and ordered, both Arts and Crafts driven and at times bolstered with the gridded grandeur of the City Beautiful movement and the ‘grand manner’ of Edwardian classicism which was gaining traction in civic architecture of the day.5 Indeed, Unwin’s work itself charts his transition from the medievalism of the Arts and Crafts movement into ‘other forms of beauty ... more adapted to our present conditions.’6 We’ll wade through the ‘dull details’ of civic administration – the daily mechanics and intrigues behind the apprehension of the city as a visual problem – to uncover the efforts of the agents of Empire to control and transform Cape Town from city to cityscape. These civic wrangles had real consequences for those vulnerable to this ‘vision’ of visual order. The aesthetic underpinnings of the birth of town planning in Cape Town animated an aesthetic rationale that disrupted lives and upturned whole communities.

The Aesthetic Motivations for Town Planning at the Cape The passing of the Town Planning Act in England in 1909 – with Unwin as its main motivator – drove similar ambitions in South Africa whilst the RIBA-sponsored 1910 conference in London brought town planning directly into architects’ field of concern. But early efforts to establish town planning as de rigueur practice in the Cape, and South Africa in general,7 were not very fruitful. Tracing these initial attempts helps illustrate the close relations between the architects at the Cape and official bodies interested in the appearance of Cape Town. As I will show, there were

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4.1 District Six laissez faire development, aerial photograph 1935

parts of Old Cape Town, in particular District Six, that were carbon-copies of the fractured rhizomatic disorder of laissez faire development so reviled by Unwin8 – irksome neighbourhoods riven with accreted and expedient spatial development that became the focus of initial remedial town planning work (Figure 4.1). In 1911 the president of the Cape Institute of Architects (CIoA), Arthur Reid, brought the CIoA and the Cape Peninsula Publicity Association (Publicity Association) into a loose partnership promoting the town planning agenda at a public meeting.9 The two bodies were already united in promoting Cape Dutch architecture as part of the tourist attractions of the Peninsula.10 There is certainly a continuity between promoting picturesque Cape Dutch buildings and the desire to remake and present Cape Town as an orderly and picturesque tourist town. Initially though there was little public and City Council support for their efforts and town planning did not receive enough backing from members of the City Council for it to be included in the City Engineer’s general practice. Similarly, at the national level, the town planning oriented Township Bill was debated in parliament in 1912, but was not passed.11 In 1915, the CIoA saw an opportunity to promote town planning with the impending unification and amalgamation of the southern suburbs into Cape Town. They adopted the unopposed motion to approach the Improvements and Parks Committee (hereafter Improvements Committee) so that ‘the City Council be requested to appoint a Committee of Experts with a view to drawing up a Town Planning Scheme of the whole area under their jurisdiction, particularly with regard to the undeveloped portions thereof.’12 The Publicity Association had

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earlier approached the Improvements Committee urging that the Council ‘appoint a Town Planning Commission consisting of the best available expert opinion to prepare a scheme for the development of the Cape Peninsula and [Cape] Flats, for a period of years.’13 The matter was effectively side-tracked by the Improvements Committee whose response was that the City Engineer was currently involved in the development of a town planning scheme for Kalk Bay and Muizenberg – hardly the comprehensive scheme the CIoA and the Publicity Association were hoping for. Less than a year later, the South African National Society (National Society) petitioned the Improvements Committee for the City Council to consider the ‘preparation of a scheme for the development of the Cape Peninsula and [Cape] Flats,’14 almost a verbatim copy of the petition by the Publicity Association. Clearly the CIoA, the Publicity Association and the National Society were all closely connected, with members from each body present on the committees of the others. For example, Kendall, Reid and Fallon were the CIoA’s representatives for the Publicity Association in 1922,15 and had been at various stages presidents of the CIoA, whilst Kendall had been one of the National Society’s most active council members. The CIoA, the Publicity Association and the National Society all worked in tandem to promote the town planning agenda. All were primarily concerned with the visual appearance of the city. Progressive architects no doubt saw the material benefits of a well-planned city and everyone wanted smooth flowing traffic. But the CIoA and its architects had a livelihood primarily – in this context – in making things pretty, while the Publicity Association was intent on presenting the Cape with a pretty image, and the National Society had taken the ‘beautiful’ Cape Dutch homesteads as the dominant component of its preservation portfolio – clearly their interest and collaboration in promoting town planning was chiefly aesthetic. Even the major promoter of Cape Dutch architecture, W.J. Delbridge, as City Councillor in 1919, tried to gain the support of the Council for the inclusion of a town planning clause in the Public Health Bill of 1919,16 which suggests that the appearance of Cape Town mattered even during the ruinous miasmic year of the Spanish ’flu pandemic. Slowly, the town planning promoters began to win the government bodies over. The Report of the Housing Committee, set up by the central government to investigate the housing crisis unfolding in the country, contained a section on the need for town planning in any of the future housing projects of South Africa. In this, the Housing Committee followed the lead of English motivators of town planning as an integral component of housing provision. Although their main point of reference was Henry Aldrige’s practical manual, The Case for Town Planning,17 they stressed that the ‘beautifying of towns and streets also comes within the scope of town planning,’18 as did the preservation of places of historical interest. Even though no real town planning was undertaken at the Cape until the 1930s, there were ways in which development was controlled prior to this, largely through the Improvements Committee. It oversaw land subdivisions until 1926 whereupon it handed the task over to the City’s Public Health and Building Regulations Committee (hereafter PH&BRC).19 The Slums Act of 193420 finally motivated a comprehensive town-planning scheme for South Africa’s major cities to be implemented within three years of the Act being passed.

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Laissez Faire and the Aesthetic Drive of Subdivision and Town Planning at the Cape The Cape Province’s Township Ordinance,21 promulgated in 1927 did not promote any actual town planning projects. Essentially a reactive legislation, it nevertheless required that a Township Board headed by the Surveyor-General should be the controlling authority for considering proposed sub-divisions to property. Even at the heart of this seemingly most technicist and bureaucratic of institutions – dealing as it did with title deeds and survey diagrams – was a concern over aesthetics. Parts of Cape Town had grown, and were still growing, out of a series of expedient subdivisions made from existing larger estates, a process typical of laissez faire development. There was very little legislation to control these subdivisions; most ordering of the built environment could only happen through building regulations, whereas property subdivision could be legally secured long before any plans were drawn up and submitted. The Township Ordinance22 was supposed to deal with this issue and was meant to control property subdivision in an orderly manner as the Surveyor-General, A.H. Cornish-Bowden explained in an article in the Architect, Builder & Engineer.23 Rather than simply technocratic, though, this legislation was promoted by CornishBowden as a way of ‘preventing the continuance of the haphazard methods of land subdivision in this Province, to which are due so much of the inconvenience in traffic and the unsightly in aspect from which we suffer to-day.’24 Cornish-Bowden, whilst referring to the success of the Acts of Parliament of Great Britain in the establishment of garden cities and satellite towns, lamented: ‘[i]f only such matters had been properly regulated in Cape Town, for instance, for the past 30 or 40 years, what a wonderful and far more beautiful city it would be.’25 Clearly controlled subdivision was intended to offer more than simply the alignment of roads and sewerage runs. Ironically, as early as 1890, nearly 40 years before Cornish-Bowden’s article, the Mayor of Cape Town lamented the lack of legislation whereby the Council could ‘improve irregularly built streets of houses’.26 And further: ‘There are rows and lanes of dirty, and in some instances, dilapidated houses, which might well be improved off the surface of the earth of this City. There are other places where broad healthy streets could be formed if an act existed under which the existing buildings could be cleared away’ (Figure 4.2). The general disorder in the city fabric resulting from earlier laissez faire development ruffled the aesthetic sensibilities of the architects who preferred a well-ordered environment, or alternatively, an obviously picturesque one. The piecemeal ‘chaos’ of areas such as District Six fell out of line with the image of Empire and the colonial city conceptualized by English architects. At the 1911 public meeting on Town Planning, Arthur Reid, the president of the CIoA, spoke of the ‘the deplorable results, both from the aesthetic and utilitarian point of view, of allowing towns to grow up haphazard.’27 As late as 1928 the issue was still prominent; the then president of the CIoA, Charles Percy Walgate, was still making public the case for orderly development for aesthetic reasons. The Cape Argus reported on the meeting with the following headline: ‘Cape Town’s need for Town Planning. Haphazard Buildings that are Eyesores. The cry for “Orderly Development.” Architects to help the Council.’28

4.2  Coffee Lane, an Old Cape Town ‘slum’

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Reid’s speech in 1911 vividly reveals how an architect of the time conceptualized the city. For Reid ‘the interest of a city was centred in the architecture of its buildings, the disposition and grouping of these structures, the width and arrangement of its streets, the area and proportion of its squares and open spaces, and the beauty and comfort of its parks, gardens and approaches generally’29 – a précis of Unwin’s Town Planning in Practice. The city imagined here is an aesthetic problem needing architects and town planners to order and design it into something beautiful. Nothing could be further from laissez faire development than the ‘grand manner’ of Edwardian classicism or the City Beautiful movement, with their axiality, open tree-lined boulevards, gridded grandeur and buildings at the scale of city blocks. This was the antithesis of the small fractured disordered spaces of places like District Six. Although the City Beautiful movement did not dominate the discourse at the time, the sentiments that led to its development around the world played a major part in how the agents of Empire approached the city as an aesthetic concern. Even the City Engineer was caught up in the general enthusiasm for the tree planting agenda of the City Beautiful movement. He was quoted in a newspaper article in 1916 that he understood ‘the splendid prospects the Peninsula offers for the planning of a beautiful city. Its natural beauty is unrivalled, and the present generation owes much to the splendid work of the old settlers in creating fine avenues and encouraging extensive tree planting.’30 And with that, Simon van der Stel jumps back into the picture. Van der Stel was revered as the country’s original town planner, and especially – as J.M. Solomon observed – one who planned in the now fashionable ‘grand manner.’31 Gerard Moerdyk, in a public lecture given on town planning, claimed that ‘there had been no system of layout at all in Cape Town since the days of Simon van der Stel, who had planted beautiful oaks, and there was now lacking what might have been a unique advertisement at the gateway of South Africa.’32 Whilst Van der Stel was riding the wave of retroactive popularity due to increasing nationalist sentiments, it was the broad boulevards of the Dutch colonial streets fitting the aesthetic of the City Beautiful movement and the axial civic grandeur of Empire that truly led to his popularity with those espousing the town planning agenda.

Razing Neighbourhoods: The Town Planner as Scenographic ‘Setter of Architectural Gems’ Herbert Baker succinctly captured the aesthetic underpinnings of ‘grand manner’ town planning in a 1914 conference on Imperial Health held in London by the Victoria League. The apparent mismatch between his sentiments and the conference theme should not go unnoticed. ‘In many of our cities the most beautiful buildings lose their value for want of design and orderly arrangement in their surroundings. The town planner is the setter of architectural gems.’33 The problem was architectural ‘gems’ were often located within the dense fabric of cities, limiting the distance by which these ‘gems’ could be adequately viewed or the opportunity for enlivening light to play across their surfaces. In a nod towards clearing cities of the dense spaces of old neighbourhoods Baker went on to declare that ‘the façades

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of buildings are seldom seen as the designer intended. In looking along a street the perspective is so sharp that it is only the simplest architectural features that have any value, and these only, if they are not lost as is too often the case, in a riot of wasteful ornament.’ Some ten years later, Harold Porter, a Herbert Baker protégé and advocate for town planning, voiced a similar sentiment at a paper read at the first Union Congress of Architects and Quantity Surveyors in 1928. Town planning should, he said, consider people’s ‘disgust at finding important public buildings wrongly placed on sites where they cannot be seen to the best advantage, and the enthusiasm for fine buildings nobly placed.’34 Pity then the Old Supreme Court building initially laid as the Old Slave Lodge for the Dutch East India Company in 1679. It was quite simply out of line and it proved that not all old civic buildings – even those from the Cape Dutch period – were automatically valued. Sitting beyond the general line of buildings and pavement to its north, the building presented a hindrance to the free flow of traffic up Adderley Street. Consequently, in 1924, a proposal to demolish it caused major debate in the papers. Although the National Society as a body did not act to save the building, individual members wrote to the press in an attempt to influence the public into preserving it, especially the hall designed by Thibault.35 Some members of the public such as ‘Mons’ expressed the opinion in a letter to the Cape Times that it was ‘simply an obstructing eyesore, not a thing of beauty by any means,’36 whilst another, who signed ‘For a Brighter Cape Town’ suggested that it was best to ‘Clear away the unsightly building, make an open central square, and show up our Houses of Parliament; then it would be something that our fellow-citizens would be proud of.’37 In the end, the building was set back 44 feet through the surgical excision of a part of its abdomen – a compromise that seemed to satisfy most, even if the 1934 proposal still aimed at its complete removal (Figure 4.3). The case of the Old Supreme Court/Slave Lodge suggests that it was not just any large civic building that deserved preservation. Occasionally lesser valued ones needed to be sacrificed to allow grander, more important buildings, such as the Houses of Parliament, room to be seen as objects in the round. There were other vestiges of the Cape Dutch period that came under attack in the drive towards the orderly remaking of the city, especially Old Cape Town. The stoeps, as remnants of the Cape Dutch period, were, and in some cases, still are, well used places of street-level interaction by residents of Old Cape Town. Arthur Reid was, however, happy to report in his speech of 1911 that these ‘oldfashioned pavements have almost entirely been removed’. This was largely due to Regulation No. 37 promulgated on 14 June 1899, although there had been moves to have the stoeps removed almost 50 years before then.38 Certainly the stoeps were inconvenient interruptions in the pavements of the city as the occasional remaining few still are, but really an aesthetics of order lay at the heart of moves aimed at what Reid called ‘rectifying the mistakes … of former years.’ This is not to say that Reid was anti-preserving the Cape Dutch past. In fact, at his Presidential address a few months before, he had voiced his concern that ‘Most of the old buildings had been swept away, but much remained in and

4.3  Town Planning Scheme No. 5, 1934

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4.4 Constitution Street, encroaching stoeps

around the city that the exigencies of modern requirements would threaten, unless steps be taken to check the vulgar and wanton hand of the spoiler, for he had no head, eyes, or heart.’39 But this preservation impulse, up until the 1940s,40 was directed almost entirely toward the building as an object, albeit surrounded by an urban fabric – stoeps included – that was a hindrance to the aesthetic potential of ‘beautiful’ buildings as such. It was clear that the urban fabric of the city was not considered worthy of preservation. In future contemporary urban conservation the stoeps would be revered as key components of an original urban infrastructure, fundamental to the character of Old Cape Town, and indeed, fundamental to the social life of the street. In the early 1900s they were simply out of line (Figure 4.4). But what does this have to do with ‘building apartheid’? Admittedly, concerns for the preservation or removal of historical buildings in the centre of Cape Town seem a long way from apartheid’s dehumanizing policies. The agents of Empire understood the city as an aesthetic problem, something to be adjusted in the pursuit of symmetry, or balance, or simply, in the creation of orderly boulevards and vistas. It made the urban poor vulnerable to the consequences of aesthetic and ‘practical’ decisions – as Haussmann’s devastating geometry in Paris demonstrates. In Cape Town the urban poor occupied the older parts of the town that bore the ‘higgledy piggldey’ disorder of an accreted built history. If walls were to be set back and stoeps and buildings removed in order to fall in line with the order of geometry and vistas, then the people occupying those spaces were vulnerable to the projections of a spatialized grand racial order (Figure 4.5). Even the desire to craft Cape Town into an alluring aestheticallypleasing tourist destination had direct consequences for where certain people and buildings were to be located.

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Unsightly Vistas: Tourism, Slums and the City as a Visual Product The first real attempt to market the city as a tourist destination was in 1908 when the Council’s Special Committee received £500 for the production of a guidebook advertising the city.41 The Publicity Association took over the production of the guidebook with the longstanding Town Clerk, J.R. Finch, who had written the first guidebook, continuing as author of subsequent editions.42 The Improvements Committee also adopted a proposal by African Films Trust Ltd. to produce a short film to be shown around South Africa, and a shorter coloured film to be distributed overseas ‘throughout the principle countries of the world’.43 In fact, two films of the Cape Peninsula were exhibited at the Empire Exhibition in Wembley in 1924.44 A few years after the publication of their first guidebook, the Council had teamed up with the South African Railway Publicity Department to co-sponsor a book promoting South Africa as a tourist and immigration destination.45 Efforts to co-ordinate the advertising of South Africa culminated in the Overseas Advertising Conference held in Johannesburg on 24 and 25 November 1919.46 These advertising campaigns were not only intended to attract tourists to South Africa, but immigrants too, especially de-mobbed soldiers at the end of the First World War.47 J. Brown, in an editorial of the Architect, Builder & Engineer, criticized Cape Town’s advertising campaigns as evidence of the preference of cities to ignore slums – to frame them out of the picture – rather than deal with them. In fact, he believed slum eradication and rehousing could form a stronger ad campaign than simply pretending that they did not exist: Due care is, of course, taken that slum areas are left out of the pictures, but, perhaps, an advertisement would be attended with better results if any

4.5 Realignment in District Six at Clifton and Hanover Streets

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Municipality found itself in the position to announce that it had cleared out these overcrowded hovels, lock, stock and barrel, replacing the unsightly eyesores with model dwellings, which would ensure health, comfort and cleanliness. We remember some years ago standing on the steps of the magnificent Palais de Justice in Brussels, where in the immediate neighbourhood acres of old houses were being cleared away in order to enhance the beauty of the neighbourhood and provide suitable environment for the classic structure.48

Brown effectively reduces the housing problem to aesthetics where the ‘model dwellings’ intended to replace the slums form part of the overall production of the city as an object of beauty. Indeed, the visual presence of the slums was so problematic to those with an eye on marketing the city that two years earlier the Publicity Association had made overtures to the PH&BRC asking for increased efforts to liaise with the Railways Department to reduce train fares for the working classes. Of course their intentions were far from altruistic: reduced fares would make working class satellite-suburbs more feasible and thereby rid the city of its ‘slum’ neighbourhoods.49 If ‘slums’ were to be removed the question remained: where would the new dwellings be located? Part of the efforts to promote Cape Town as a tourist destination revolved around the development of the car and the motorist.50 A number of scenic roads had been completed which made motoring around the countryside a sightseeing delight. Awareness of the importance of the visual presentation of the city and its suburbs was highlighted in 1928 by the Town Clerk at a meeting to consider the Nieuwe Molen housing scheme, which he felt ‘would not be a disfigurement in the drive from the Town to the Southern Suburbs.’51 This concern for the location of housing schemes or settlements in relation to the vistas of the city was not new. When Cape Town’s first residentially segregated Native location of Ndabeni was under consideration in 1900, William Hare, a brickfield employer, contrary to the interests of his business, considered the establishment of a location behind his brickfield at the foot of Devil’s Peak a bad idea because: ‘we have the back of the mountain to look nice, and putting such accommodation there would make it unsightly.’52 Similarly, in a lecture given to the Pretoria Rotary Club on town planning, Gerard Moerdyk lamented the fact that ‘The most beautiful sites in Cape Town were disfigured by shanties inhabited by coloured people.’53 At the heart of the literature promoting Cape Town as a tourist destination was the idea of Cape Town as a gateway, not only to the country but the rest of Africa. In 1925, the architect A. Allen published an article titled ‘How I Would Rebuild Cape Town’ opening emphatically with ‘Cape Town is and always will be the entrance gate to South Africa’54 – an easy claim to make before mass aviation. Allen was concerned that money spent on overseas advertising was money not spent on the ‘entrance gate’ itself: ‘And so the entrance gate to South Africa remains a discredit to the country’. Whilst the connection of the city to the foreshore and the harbour were seen as important components in correcting this condition, especially due to the arrival of visitors from the sea, Allen noted that the overall presentation of the city – and especially District Six – was cause for concern.

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At the other end of the railway line – at the other end of the entrance gate to South Africa – the agents of Empire in Johannesburg noted similar concerns, and were intent on situating where and how people lived according to the vision and vistas of tourism and visual aesthetics. The South African Architectural Record published a summary of the lecture given on 23 October 1930 under the auspices of the Transvaal Town Planning Association at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, in which Harold Porter had this to say of tourists arriving in Johannesburg from Cape Town: And then they got in a train to come to Johannesburg, and their first impression of our City was from the railway embankments at Doornfontein, a repellent vista of washing, garages, tin hovels and thousands of braziers befouling the atmosphere. ‘It is a festering sore in Johannesburg, and we keep it,’ exclaimed the lecturer. ‘This slum should be tackled in earnest.’55

Some 20 years earlier, E.H. Waugh, the future City Engineer of Johannesburg, and the then President of the South African Branch of the Society of Architects in London, lamented that ‘There is not a single street in Johannesburg which affords an artistic, or even satisfactory vista; in fact, practically all of them end in what is nothing more or less than slumdom.’56 Even a city born in 1892 – based entirely on the pragmatics of digging its ground out from under its own poorly formed foundations – was evaluated on the basis of tourism and picturesque vistas, a European gaze, which urged the relocation of poorer people and their unsightly things.

‘Unsightliness’ as a Category for the Removal of Otherness Words and phrases like ‘disfigured’ and ‘festering sore’ occur often in reports and newspaper articles and were used to martial support to rid cities of slum areas.57 In a 1934 article titled ‘World’s War on Slums,’ the Architect, Builder & Engineer noted that in ‘Wales, Scotland, Ireland, in Germany, France, Austria, in Chile and Bombay – even in Turkey where Mustafa Kemal Pasha is rebuilding the nation from cellar to roof, slum areas form an unsightly blot on the face of civilisation.’58 Metaphors of the city as a body or a face blemished by ‘unsightly’ slums abound. They suggest the need for a surgical excision to remove the disease and restore the body to its whole Self. If cities were the ‘face of civilization’ then vigilant efforts were required to remove the incessant grime and blots building up beneath its painted surface. Certainly the metaphors were correct – slums were the necessary consequence of capitalism and colonialism; a symptom of the British Empire itself, a by-product of exchanges and processes taking place within the body and bubbling up to the surface – not a ‘blot’ affixed from the outside. Words like ‘unsightly’ and ‘eyesore’ appear regularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a wide range of archival sources and refer to a wide range of materials and visual conditions. Most often the words ‘unsightly’ and ‘eyesore’ appear in letters of complaint from home-owners and rate-payers

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regarding the presence of dwellings deemed undesirable and out of keeping with the neighbourhood. Complaints were about protecting one’s house as a financial investment whose value could be depleted through the presence of an ‘unsightly’ structure or the proximity of racial or social Others. Whether or not middle class municipal ratepayers were happy to have neighbours of another skin colour living next door to them – as long as their houses were of a similar standard – is doubtful. Both the racist attitudes endemic to the period and the dominance of an aesthetics of the visual relied on essentially visual markers for exclusion; skin colour was as much a sign of difference as ‘unsightly’ structures were. The conflation of these two visual aspects helped produce the identity of Cape Town’s urban poor as Other and effectively urged their removal from the city. Racial segregation of the city was a function of beauty. The minutes of the City of Cape Town’s PH&BRC show considerable evidence of ‘unsightliness’ as a legitimate cause for exclusion or removal of both people and edifice from the cityscape. Although not specifically written into the building regulations, the word is often used as a catchall when a building or dwelling was deemed inappropriate. A report from the City Engineer concerning a wood and iron structure measuring 10’ × 5’ × 7’ ‘constructed as a sleeping apartment by a Chinaman at Westoe Farm, Strubens Field, Mowbray’59 contravened building regulations without submitted drawings for approval and in a structural condition prejudicial to neighbourhood standards. Given that the dwelling was on a farm it seems unlikely that it would have caused anyone or any adjacent buildings damage but ‘the structure [was] very unsightly and prejudicial to property in the neighbourhood.’60 It was removed and the fate of the ‘Chinaman’ unknown. A few years before the consolidated building regulations of 1920 were enacted, the PH&BRC had visited the seaside suburb of Bakoven as the dwellings of a Mr C. Goslett and his employees were deemed to be in a ‘very untidy and unsightly condition,’61 and this was enough to have them removed. Many homes in informal settlements were put together out of foraged hybrid materials condemned by the municipality which mapped and recorded their dispersal across the Peninsula. Such hybridity was a feature of Native locations across the country and officially understood as a condition of ‘semi-civilization’ brought about with the change from ‘barbarity.’62 In contrast to the idealized life of rural Natives the Tuberculosis Report of 1914 found that in locations ‘generally the dwellings are mere shanties, often nothing more than hovels, constructed out of bits of old packing case lining, flattened kerosene tins, sacking and other scraps and odds and ends. They are put on bare ground, higgledy-piggledy, without any sort of order, often propped up one against another’63 (Figure 4.6). They were quickly condemned on a number of fronts: the hybridity of materials used, the poor associational status of those materials, and chiefly the lack of visible order in their assemblage.

4.6  Kimberley Location, Report of the Tuberculosis Commission, 1914

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Municipal Structuring of the Appearance of Old Cape Town The dominance of the visual in the assessment of a dwelling also made its impact on parts of Old Cape Town. In 1917, the Medical Office of Health (MOH) for Cape Town recommended that the premises of 181 Hanover Street and 38 Aspeling Street be purchased as part of the funds provided for the prevention and relief of overcrowding. ‘The buildings were in a most dilapidated condition, and had been an eyesore for years.’ And further: ‘The purchase and demolition of the properties would not only remove insanitary premises, but would be a decided street improvement.’64 Of course the idea of ‘street improvements’ had long impacted Britain’s cities, and in many ways what was happening in Cape Town was a reflection of ‘civic pride.’65 In 1915, around the time of the amalgamation of the southern suburbs into the municipality of Cape Town proper, William Black, as President of the CIoA, suggested that ‘we should strongly advocate compulsory repair, renovation, systematic and regular painting and a general clean up’ as part of revised building regulations.66 And further that, ‘In Paris and many other beautiful cities the authorities compel all owners to paint and clean their buildings periodically.’ Whilst lime washing would have helped prevent the ingress of insects into the plaster cracks of the older buildings, it is clear that Black envisaged a prettified Cape Town. This idea of maintenance and cosmetic touch-up over structural intervention was echoed at a Council meeting discussing the overcrowding issue in 1918. Councillor Mr Buchanan said ‘there was something even more important than the building of houses, and that was educating people to look after the houses.’67 Perhaps he did consider it important to maintain the structure and fabric of the building as an investment in the city’s infrastructure however disgust at visual dilapidation was the subtext. In a letter to the editor of the Cape Argus, W.M.B. Taylor, Secretary of the Ratepayer’s Association for Wards 6 and 7, demanded that ‘our City Fathers get a move on and bring a regulation into force to compel landlords to keep the inside and outside of their properties in a proper condition … If there was a regulation brought into force it would stop the breeding of germs and add to the beauty of the slums.’68 No doubt this was an unintentionally ironic statement. These examples help illustrate that the issue was not necessarily how slum dwellers lived, but how their homes looked that was part of the rationale for exclusion and removal of Others and their dwellings from the city. It was with the Slums Act of 193469 that concerted efforts were made to clear parts of Old Cape Town. Leading up to the implementation of the Act was the question of what exactly constituted a slum – precisely the kind of wrangle the Act was meant to resolve. As we will see in the following chapter, the agents of Empire were confused over whether the buildings or the inhabitants gave the definition of a slum, so more often than not the two were conflated. At the heart of the Act lay a set of conditions considered to be scientifically quantifiable, resolving this confusion. If these conditions were not met then the premises could be declared a slum and demolished.

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Two of these conditions were the volume of air space per person and the segregation of sexes for anyone over the age of 12. Dr Abdurahman, the only Coloured member of the Council and elected through the District Six ward, found the proposed Act highly problematic, and, in a debate on the matter pointed to a contradiction. He asked: ‘Is overcrowding a reason for demolishing a house?’70 to which his fellow Councillor M.J. Adams replied: ‘All we require is power – which I say we already have – to compel people to keep their houses clean.’ Clearly, Adams had missed the point that Abdurahman was making, namely, that the Slums Act located the defining characteristic of a slum in its use and not the building itself – an issue of policing and management rather than infrastructure. Adams’ comment illustrates the common understanding that the slums were simply an ugly presence in the city, and like a blemish on a face, needed some cosmetic colouring and cleansing to eliminate the condition. A year later, Abdurahman asked another cutting question stemming from the proposed Act and his understanding of the problems facing his poor constituency: ‘How, asked Dr Abdurahman, can a man with nine children, and earning £1 7s. 6d. a week, segregate the sexes?’71 For Abdurahman, the slum problem was not to be located with either the buildings or the people living there but with the exploitative employers of unskilled and semi-skilled labourers. The Slums Act was passed in 1934 with powers to demolish afforded municipalities. The MOH and City Engineer set about investigating dwellings and other building types to be declared slums based largely on the scientific aspects of the Act. But the idea of visual presentation was so dominant that it lingered into the first few years of its implementation – as evidenced in the minutes of the Slum Clearance Special Committee which contain the assessment reports of both the MOH and the City Engineer as well as the interviews of owners as required under the Slums Act of 1934. At least in the first few years of the implementation of the Act, the MOH and the City Engineer considered buildings that looked like slums to be slums, or at least desired to have them removed from the city. Aside from the more scientifically rigorous definitions noted above, their reports often referred to the general ‘dilapidated appearance’ as one of the reasons to declare a slum.72 Sometimes reports simply state: ‘the building presents a neglected and unsightly appearance.’73 The evidence dealing with the properties of Max Gurland located in Wynberg are particularly illuminating. The owner’s legal representative, perhaps aware of the occasional subjective and aesthetic motivations of the MOH, City Engineer and other city representatives through having defended other owners’ buildings, confronted the Town Planning Assistant: ‘Mr Collings is not going into any specific details, is that because you have come to the conclusion that from the general appearance of the houses they constitute slums?’74 Notwithstanding a set of less than convincing rejoinders by the Town Planning Assistant, the dwellings were eventually declared slums.75 Similarly, when defending himself against an attack by the owner’s legal representative over his motivation for declaring a building a slum because of a balcony being ‘dilapidated, dirty and unsightly,’ the MOH stated: ‘I have examined it and it is ugly,’76 as if that would suffice.

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4.7 Vestiges of District Six at Walmer Estate, Cape Town

In order for a dwelling or building to escape being declared a slum, the owner was given three months to complete an itemized schedule prepared by the City Engineer in conjunction with the MOH, a typical element of which was that external plaster walls were to be ‘steel trowelled true and smooth.’77 The external appearance of buildings, remodelled for aesthetic reasons, was an important part of the slum clearance program. That many of the buildings were perhaps from the mid-nineteenth century is suggested by the fact that many were constructed of sun-dried bricks and clay mortar. An example is 110 Church Street, where the schedule notes that ‘The plaster to the front elevation is rough and must have a skimming coat.’78 In contrast to the reverence by which the rough plaster of Cape Dutch homesteads was held, this is a clear example of the anti-urban sentiments of the agents of Empire, keen on bringing order and regularity to ‘unsightly’ neighbourhoods and missing their similarity to cherished Cape Dutch homesteads due to their urban locale (Figure 4.7). Concern for the visual presentation of the city was not limited to consideration of dwellings but anything seen from streets or trains. Council members and members of the Publicity Association often expressed concern over the existence of advertising hoardings in the city. These were almost without fail considered ‘unsightly.’79 This was not limited to suburban developments. The city itself was nominally reordered through an added regulation that illustrates the extent to

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which the agents of Empire wanted to control the city’s appearance. The regulation was an attempt to control balconies and stoeps and what was stored on them, although this was legally limited to those balconies and stoeps projecting beyond the property line into the street as proscribed by the Council.80 As the minutes of the Housing Committee record, balconies were ‘used for storage purposes [and] are detrimental to the public interest tending to obstruct the clear view down streets and will give the thoroughfares of the City a most untidy appearance.’81 The regulation included a fine of five pounds for the hanging of laundry on a balcony or stoep without a permit. Although most of the licences issued dealt with the storage of boxes on balconies, at least up to 1931,82 there are a few examples of applications for hanging laundry. Consider, for example, the application of G. Denton regarding the balcony at 56 Hanover Street where the case was made that there was nowhere else to hang the laundry, as the dwelling was a tenement. Although permission was granted, it is important to note that the Acting MOH, A.W. Reid, at first refused to recommend approval. Exactly what objections the MOH could have had, aside from a concern for structuring the appearance of the city, are a mystery. Another minor example can be given of the MOH going beyond his calling as a medical doctor through his concern for the appearance of the city. The MOH saw fit to report that during an inspection of Rondebosch Common as used by the military ‘a large number of slop and refuse buckets and wood and iron structures still existent at the common.’83 That these were unsanitary was not the issue but rather that they were ‘very unsightly, and steps should be taken to have them cleared away.’

‘Inefficient Metallic Monstrosity’: Corrugated Iron and ‘Other’ Materials No material was considered as ugly a by-product of industrial capitalism as corrugated iron. It was loathed in the era of Arts and Crafts sentimentality; its sharp edges and folded homogenous surface was evidence not of the greatness of Empire but of an aesthetic danger threatening it from outside its medievally constituted body. Yet its efficiency as a building material ensured wide use in settler intrusions into native territories, in Australia and South Africa, and beyond, and helped build the British Empire. It was – and still is – an easily transported building material, able to cover large surfaces and assembled in a short time – a perfect building material for the poor. But it is no exaggeration to say that corrugated iron was generally considered by the main architects of the time to be the most abhorrent material ever fashioned. Frank Kendall, President of the CIoA in 1914, during an address on farm architecture, stated that corrugated iron was ‘on a par with a plague of locusts – one of the worst things in the country.’84 Kendall went on to establish its negative association with transience and its illegitimacy for use in what he notably calls a home: ‘For pioneers and the like it has its legitimate use, but for serious minded people making a permanent home, it should not be considered when anything better is at all possible.’85 The former president of the CIoA and editor of the Architect,

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Builder & Engineer, W.J. Delbridge, penned an article called ‘The Corrugated Curse,’ having this to say: ‘Cursed be the makers and users of galvanized corrugated iron. Ugly, temperature conducting, temper provoking, inefficient metallic monstrosity – avaunt.’86 Delbridge was possibly the author of an article a year before in which corrugated iron was lamented as the ‘shiny manifestation of a commercialism that outrages both Art and Nature.’87 The article goes on to echo Kendall’s earlier sentiment about the material’s association with unsettling transience, but adds a dash of nationalism to the mix: ‘We are growing old enough, as a people, and settled enough, as communities, to make endeavours towards forgetting the era of the iron roof and the concomitant cast-iron pillars and balustrading which were the signs of a community that was neither settled nor proud. Let us celebrate our growing-up by deleting the mean roofs that menace our civic and individual pride.’ As the corrugated iron roof of Rhodes’ cottage had been ‘corrected’ with thatch after his death. In the logic of architects associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, ridding the landscape of corrugated iron and other industrial castings was a moral and patriotic effort symbolizing the maturing of a nation – never mind that as a building material it gave the transient poor a rudimentary claim to the city. Or, precisely because it did. Disdain for the material was not limited to architects. Corrugated iron was considered so offensive that it usually had to be either removed, or covered up. When asked to respond to the City Engineer’s concern over the erection of an 18’ × 12’ × 8’ summer house in the yard of her property, Mrs Wyndham Clampett resolved to ‘avoid the unsightly appearance of the corrugated iron roof [by covering] the same with spars so as to give the structure a rustic appearance.’88 Yet if a wood and iron shed was out of sight it was also likely to be ignored. In the City Engineer’s report on an application to insert double doors into a boundary wall in Observatory – to allow the owner to gain access to a wood-and-iron motorcycle shed – the City Engineer had no objections on account of the shed being ‘hidden from public view’89 confirming that it was not the physicality of the material itself that was the problem but rather its ‘unsightly’ nature. A few years later, and probably in response to the shortage of houses in the Peninsula, the MOH was willing to ignore a complaint from the owners and occupiers of property in Landsowne district as sent from the Provincial Secretary, concerning the erection of a ‘two roomed iron house under flat roof, the sheets of iron being placed horizontally instead of vertically.’90 The MOH responded with the following: If kept in repair and occasionally painted there is no reason why they should become an eyesore or prejudicial to better class houses. Also that to preserve their agreeable appearance, no unsightly wind screens are erected around them to protect vegetables etc. grown on the plots.91

It seemed that in the time of a housing crisis, corrugated iron was tolerated when carefully managed – a consideration examined more closely below. Nevertheless, the idea of the public view was not a minor element in the evaluation of what could remain in the cityscape, especially when considering corrugated iron.

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In defence of the sheds owned by a Mr Wintle in Woodstock, Annie Bull wrote to the City Engineer stating that ‘anyone travelling from Newlands to Capetown, as I do, would see that there are many greatly more disreputable looking sheds especially in the Woodstock area in full view of the train.’92 And then in his own defence Wintle wrote that he could not .

carry on my business without them. And why is it that I am picked upon is more than I can fathom for there are many other people within a stone’s throw from my office whom have got wood and iron sheds and in several cases much more an eyesore than mine and in sight of the main streets, which mine are not.93

The production of the city as a visual object to be seen from the transport of a train or a motorcar was seemingly more important in this case than the processes of industrial production.

‘Temporary’ Buildings, Corrugated Iron Areas and Rural Ideals As early as 1906, the City Engineer had prepared a list of ‘temporary sheds’ within the city.94 This list reflected the class interests of the committee members. For example, the PH&BRC resolved in October 1907 that ‘the application of Mr. Mitchell to retain the galvanized iron shed at the foot of Adderley Street be not acceded to having regard to the desirability of improving the general appearance of the foreshore in view of the approaching gala season.’95 Furthermore, building regulations pertaining specifically to the use of wood-and-iron dwellings emerged out of a concern to regulate the appearance of seaside resorts such as Camps Bay and Sea Point. These had developed as places of ‘temporary’ dwellings and campsites during the summer months. The PH&BRC had, as early as 1907, made attempts to introduce regulations for the ‘control of camping sites and to regulate the class of structure to be permitted.’ By 1913 the PH&BRC had resolved to withhold building permission for wood-and-iron bungalows until regulations could be introduced to set aside areas for them in seaside environs, which were becoming permanently inhabited. Removing existing wood-and-iron structures was left largely in the hands of the MOH96 who tended to focus mostly on these types of structures even though the Cape Municipal Ordinance of 1912 disallowed municipalities from arbitrarily prohibiting the erection of wood-and-iron structures. The PH&BRC acted somewhat beyond its jurisdiction in 1916 when it resolved to allow the erection of only brick or stone dwellings on First to Fourth Street north of the Main Road in the Kensington Estate area.97 This was ostensibly to prevent wood-and-iron dwellings from being seen from this street and was a general form of prohibition that the Ordinance disallowed. With the increasing discourse around the need for a housing policy, the question of wood-and-iron dwellings came into focus in 1916. At the instruction of a Sub-Committee formed to investigate the housing problem, the City Engineer investigated a series of sites in the areas of Mowbray, Maitland, West London, Claremont and Retreat, with the aim of defining areas in which wood-and-iron

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dwellings and ‘dwellings of a cheaper class’ could be located.98 Less than a month later it was resolved to define the following areas as zones where wood-and-iron dwellings could be erected: 1. Area at Maitland bounded by the Koeberg Road from Church Street, Brooklyn, to the boundary of the City in the Milnerton direction, and all land on the west side of such portion of the Koeberg Road to the Salt River. 2. The area bounded on the north by the Klipfontein Road where it crosses the Krombooms River to the City boundary in Claremont, on the East by the City boundary at Claremont between the Klipfontein and Lansdowne Roads, on the South by the Landsdowne Road between the City boundary at Philippi and the Krombooms River between the Landsdowne and Klipfontein Roads.99

Along with the Retreat District which was also included in the zoning, these areas were peripheral, undeveloped spaces where poorer people had been erecting their own dwellings – well beyond the focal length of middle class interests. The admission of wood-and-iron dwelling zones into the city boundaries was seen as a temporary measure aimed at dealing with the emerging housing shortage. Thus the 1920 building regulations not only allowed the PH&BRC to restrict wood-and-iron dwellings to specific spaces or zones in the city but also, through regulation 967, to a specific time period determined by the PH&BRC. Most licences for wood-and-iron dwellings were subject to a six-month order to demolish. Occasionally, licences had one month’s notice to demolish normally only given for dwellings that had been erected without a licence and had been examined by the PH&BRC, the MOH or a sanitary inspector, and for which retroactive plans had been submitted. Without prejudicing their ability to order demolition on a case-bycase basis, the PH&BRC eventually resolved that all wood-and-iron dwellings were liable to be demolished by the year 1931 at six months notice100 although some remain to this day in Athlone.101 With regards to ‘temporary’ structures therefore, the domestic space of the city was structured with the dual dimensions of time and space, while the aesthetic monstrosity of corrugated iron was restricted to the periphery of the city, beyond the limits of Empire’s cityscape. ‘Temporary’ dwellings were not limited to wood-and-iron only. A hierarchy of materials also played a part in what defined a building as ‘temporary.’ In 1921, sundried bricks were to be allowed in the areas set aside for wood-and-iron dwellings ‘upon the distinct understanding that such erections are regarded as temporary buildings and will be subject to the terms and conditions governing temporary structures.’102 In the debate leading to that resolution, Councillor A.B. Reid objected to their inclusion and eventually agreed to the resolution only if the structures of sun-dried brick were used to ‘substitute those constructed of wattle, reeds and daub.’103 Prejudices were not limited to ‘temporary’ dwellings and materials: although the PH&BRC committee resolved to allow the building of a reinforced concrete dwelling at Lakeside in 1914, it is significant that this non-brick building was flagged by the City Engineer as a potential problem requiring the attention of the PH&BRC.104 Part of the resolution of the PH&BRC was to leave the granting of permits for reinforced

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concrete dwellings at the discretion of the City Engineer and the approval of the Council until new regulations could bring this building material under its control. In fact, there is much evidence that the PH&BRC was very selective in its implementation of the regulations, choosing to be stringent in poor areas and very lax in more wealthy ones. For example, plans for a pise-de-terre hut – completely contrary to building regulations – at the seaside area of Camps Bay was approved as submitted,105 although the request for the building to be thatched was denied on account of its close proximity to the property boundary and the limitations of regulation 825 restricting the use of thatch at least 50’ from boundaries or other buildings.106 Selective implementation of the building regulations is explored in the following section.

Compromises to the Building Regulations: Rural Ideals and Aesthetic Concerns Before the implementation of the 1920 regulations, Kalk Bay’s regulation 81, requiring non-combustible roofing material, was ignored in the case of the thatch roofing of an extension to Cecil Rhodes’ cottage on the Main Road, Muizenberg.107 Whilst it was noted that it was important for the addition to ‘fit-in’ with the existing dwelling, it seems very likely that the house of this ‘great man’ was not to be made ugly on account of the building regulations. The PH&BRC seemed easily swayed in compromising the building regulations to bring a ‘correct’ order to the built environment. Many of the old Cape Dutch homesteads had also been constructed of sun-dried bricks some of which were located in areas of Cape Town in which they were technically disallowed. These buildings, prone as they were to dampness in the walls and harbouring bugs in the mud-plastered walls, escaped the attention of the MOH and the City Engineer. This was not the case with the old thatched cottage of Krohne and Benning on Coronation Road, in the poorer area of Maitland, which was issued with closing orders for precisely these reasons.108 Certainly as the housing problem became more acute in the early 1920s, the PH&BRC was more prone to allow wattle and daub structures erected in the ‘temporary’ dwelling areas to remain subject to one month’s notice to demolish, as the example of the unauthorized structures in the Retreat109 and Crawford110 areas suggest. The question needs to be asked why – given the propensity of the era to hold the rural cottage as an ideal – the PH&BRC, the MOH and the City Engineer did not consider self-built cottages such as these, practical and aesthetic answers to the developing housing problem? The fact that regulation 964111 required that all dwellings have a double-pitched roof may have excluded some mono-pitched structures with corrugated iron roofs as less than ideal. In fact residents occasionally had to adjust existing monopitch roofs, as in the example of Abraham October and his wood-and-iron dwelling on 18th Street in the Kensington Estate.112 But many of the self-built dwellings at the margins of the city had thatched roofs and were set in forested areas. The answer perhaps lies in the desire for the sanitized simulacra of an age gone before rather than the messy truth of the past or the poverty

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associated with its present manifestation. In fact, the attitude of the PH&BRC, the City Engineer and the MOH to the housing problem perfectly sums-up the general contradictions of an age caught between the Romantic imaginings of a rural and socially conservative past of the Arts and Crafts and Garden City Movement, and the modernist visions of a scientific and progressive future. Whatever Romantic image was to be presented was to be highly controlled in its social space – especially with regard to racial Others – and scientifically produced with the correct air volumes, ventilation and weapons against damp, dirt and disease. In short, it was the image of the bucolic ideal that was desired, not the lived reality of a medieval cottage. An example of this ‘resolved’ contradiction was manifested in the 1920 building regulation 886 which effectively included the possibility of erecting a Tudor-style house using timber framing, as long as the infill was of brick and not the wattle and daub of the English past. Although there is no direct evidence to confirm it, it seems quite plausible that the CIoA’s consultation on the building regulations would have made sure that this Garden City and Arts and Crafts standard was specifically allowed in its ‘hygienic’ form. In fact the PH&BRC was quite taken by the ideas of the picturesque and used the notion to guide their somewhat uneven implementation of the building regulations. The PH&BRC also chose to ignore the fact that the Rev. G.E. Mason had built a summerhouse made of Jarrah poles lined with sailcloth on the inside and with a thatch roof within a few feet of his property boundary on Eureka Road in Rondebosch.113 Less than a month after the new MOH, Tom Shadick Higgins, arrived from London, he visited the informal settlement of Kensington Estate and went on record as stating that ‘it was more a question of civilization than sanitation.’114 He went on to state that ‘A terrible state of affairs is caused by people being allowed to erect an indescribable type of hovel, (some are made of sacking and are not 6 feet high)’ and suggested that ‘if it were at all possible steps should be taken in the future to prevent the erection of these unauthorized structures.’ Both the summerhouse of the Reverend and at least some of the ‘hovels’ of the Kensington residents were constructed of materials similar to dwellings pictured in the Tuberculosis Report. Yet the one was occupied by a respectable individual with a life made complete through the ‘aesthetic’ conception of the summerhouse, whilst the other unnamed residents were to become the objects of a civilizing mission that gave them ‘proper’ dwellings. Exactly what that civilizing mission entailed is the subject of later chapters dealing with the various housing programmes instituted by the City through the Housing and Estates Committee. The crux of the matter was perhaps best summed up by Councillors Henshilwood and Somerville in 1922, who reported to the PH&BRC their findings on the extensive informal settlement occurring in Meadows Estate, Claremont. With regard to forcing the Coloured occupants to build ‘proper’ houses or to ‘clear out’ the Councillors reported: It is by no means certain that they can, or will, do either. They are their own architects and their own builders, and their ideas of house planning and house construction are not such as are likely to receive approval of our officials.115

Only an intentionally aesthetic life was a legitimate life, it seemed, within the imperatives of Empire.

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Conclusion So the city of Cape Town was to be made as a cityscape – freed from all the contradictions that the cauldron of industrial capitalism and colonialism excreted to the surface of its otherwise beautiful body. The city was apprehended largely as a visual problem lacking the aesthetics of order – part Arts and Crafts village and part City Beautiful – that characterized the image of Empire. Consequently, the main motivators for town planning to be instituted at the Cape were not simply focused on the technocratic benefits that this emerging field could bring the city; a concern for the appearance of the city of Cape Town drove much of their representations to the authorities to have town planning implemented. The City Engineer, the Medical Officer of Health, and the Surveyor-General, all usually considered to be dispassionate men of science and disparaging of frivolous things such as beauty, approached the built environment with much the same considerations as architects, who were keen to make the city ‘beautiful’ and have it structured as scenography to show off its architectural ‘gems.’ This concern for the appearance of the city also dominated the discourse around the emerging tourist industry, in which the visual presence of slums and the location of social and racial Others played a major role. Materials such as corrugated iron were considered egregiously ugly enough to force those who lived in corrugated iron structures and other hybrid dwellings to be removed from the city and corralled to the periphery along with the ‘ugly’ structures they lived in. This conflation of the visual appearance and material physicality of dwellings with social and racial Otherness – notwithstanding the uneven application of such judgements when it came to the city’s middle class residents – continued into parts of Old Cape Town such as District Six. Here the visual category of ‘unsightliness’ was reason enough and cause for the exclusion of social and racial Others from the space of the city, even requiring intervention in the appearance of these places, and thereby re-ordering the city as a White space. The category of the visual, however, was not the only means through which the exclusion of social and racial Others from the city was legitimized. How people lived in Old Cape Town, and especially when they lived in a manner contrary to English middle-class values, was as much of a reason for their exclusion from the space of the city and provoked intervention into these parts of Old Cape Town. We explore the discourse and representations of the problematic social space of Others in the following chapter.

Notes 1 Unwin, R., Town Planning in Practice. An Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs, (London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1919), pp.13–14. 2

Cape Times 18 June 1914: ‘Town Planning.’

3 Unwin, R., Town Planning in Practice, p.4. 4 Unwin, R., Town Planning in Practice, p.xiv.

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5

Swenarton, M., Building the New Jerusalem: Architecture, Housing and Politics 1900–1930, (Watford: IHS-BRE, 2008) ‘Neo-Georgian Maison-Type,’ p.38.

6 Unwin, R., Town Planning in Practice, pp.13–14. 7

Parnell, S., ‘Creating Racial Privilege: the Origins of South African Public Health and Town Planning Legislation,’ Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, (September, 1993).

8 Unwin, R., Town Planning in Practice, p.2. 9

Cape Times 22 May 1911: ‘Town Planning.’

10 KAB CCC A1659 vol. 1/1: CIoA, 13 July 1911. 11 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 13, no. 5, (December, 1929), p.15. 12 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/5/4/1/3: Improvements Committee, 1 June 1915. 13 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/5/4/1/2: Improvements Committee, 12 April 1915. 14 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/5/4/1/4: Improvements Committee, 3 April 1916. 15 KAB CCC A.1659 vol. 1/3: CIoA, 15 June 1922. 16 KAB CCC 3/CT 1/4/7/1/1/10: PH&BRC, 31 January 1919. 17 Aldridge, H.R., The Case for Town Planning. 18 Union Government UG4-1920: Report of the Housing Committee, p.60. 19 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/5/4/1/15: Improvements Committee 13 December 1926. 20 Union Government Act No. 53 of 1934 (Slums Act). 21 Cape Provincial Government Ordinance 13 of 1927 (Township Ordinance of the Cape Province). 22 Ordinance No.13 of 1927 (Townships Ordinance). 23 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 13, no. 5, (December, 1929), p.19. 24 Ibid., p.13. Emphasis added. 25 Ibid., p.19. 26 KAB CCC Mayoral Minute, 11 August 1890, p.11. 27 Cape Argus 20 May 1911: Editorial. Emphasis added. 28 Cape Argus 22 February 1928. 29 Cape Times 22 May 1911: ‘Town Planning.’ 30 Cape Times 15 June 1916: ‘Town Planning for the City.’ 31 Transvaal Leader 23 February 1914: ‘Architecture in South Africa.’ 32 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 12, no. 8, (March 1929), p.3. 33 Cape Times 18 June 1914: ‘Town Planning.’ 34 South African Architectural Record, vol. 13, no. 52 (December, 1928), p.187. 35 Cape Times 1 October 1924: ‘The Old Supreme Court.’ 36 Cape Times 6 October 1924: letter to Editor, Signed ‘Mons.’ 37 Cape Times 1 October 1924: ‘The Old Supreme Court.

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38 Radford, D., ‘The Architecture of the Western Cape, 1838 to 1901’, p.17. 39 KAB CCC A1659 vol. 1/1: CIoA, 23 March 1911. 40 Du Plessis, I.D., The Cape Malays, (Cape Town: [unknown], 1944); Truluck, T.F. and Cook, G., ‘Preservation of the Bokaap, Cape Town: Changes in Attitudes and Actions’ in Contree vol. 29, no. 91, p.21. 41 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/5/1/1/6: Special Committee, 3 November 1908; Finch, J. R., The Cape of Good Hope. 42 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/5/4/1/6: Improvements Committee, 10 June 1918. 43 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/5/4/1/1: Improvements Committee, 31 July 1914. 44 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/5/4/1/13: Improvements Committee, 8 December 1924. 45 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/5/4/1/1: Improvements Committee, 29 September 1913; Cape Times 21 November 1919: Editorial. 46 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/5/4/1/8: Improvements Committee, 8 December 1919. 47 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/5/4/1/8: Improvements Committee, 8 December 1919; KAB CCC Mayoral Minutes, 9 September, 1920, p.50. 48 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 1, no. 2, (September, 1917), p.28. 49 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/7: PH&BRC, 1 November 1915. 50 Cape Peninsula Publicity Association, The Motorists’ Paradise. 51 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/13: Housing Committee, 10 May 1928. 52 KAB NA457: CNL: William Hare. 53 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 12, no. 8, (March, 1929), p.3. 54 Cape Argus 21 March 1925: magazine section, ‘How I Would Rebuild Cape Town.’ 55 South African Architectural Record, vol. 15, no. 60, (December, 1930), p.125. 56 African Architect, vol. 1, no. 6, (November, 1912), p.123. 57 Cape Times 1 November 1918: ‘The City’s Housing Problem;’ Cape Times 3 November 1934: ‘Slum Owners Alarmed;’ South African Architectural Record, vol. 19, no. 10, (October, 1934) p.254. 58 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 18, no. 5, (December, 1934), p.6. 59 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/13: PH&BRC, 10 June 1921. 60 Ibid. 61 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/8: PH&BRC, 27 September 1916. 62 Union Government 34-1914, Report of the Tuberculosis Commission, p.107. 63 Ibid., p.126. 64 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/9: PH&BRC, 8 November 1917. 65 Smith, P.J., ‘Planning as Environmental Improvement: Slum Clearance in Victorian Edinburgh,’ in Sutcliffe, A. (ed.), The Rise of Modern Urban Planning, 1800–1914 (London: Mansell, 1980). 66 Cape Times 24 June 1915: ‘Cape Town and its Building Regulations.’ 67 Cape Times 1 November 1918: ‘The City’s Housing Problem.’

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68 Cape Argus 30 October 1918: letter to the Editor, ‘Well’s Square.’ 69 Union Government Act 53, 1934, (Slums Act). 70 Cape Times 5 April 1932: ‘Cape Town’s Slum Evils.’ 71 Cape Times 4 September 1933: ‘De-Slumming.’ 72 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/5/13/1/1, SCSC: 22 October 1934, evidence concerning No. 115 Castle Street. 73 Ibid. 74 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/5/13/1/1, SCSC: 23 September 1935. 75 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/5/13/1/3, SCSC: 2 December 1935, Appeal submitted by Barnett Gurland. 76 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/5/13/1/1, SCSC: 25 February 1935, Evidence concerning No. 36a/38 Constitution Street. 77 Ibid: 11 February 1935, Work schedule for 23 & 25 Wells Square. 78 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/5/13/1/3, SCSC: 8 February1936. 79 See for example KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/5/4/1/1: Improvements Committee, 30 March 1914 and KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/5/4/1/6: 12 August 1918. 80 Cape Provincial Government Notice No.192 of 1921, on 13 May 1921. 81 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/2: Housing Committee, 22 February 1921. 82 See KAB CCC 3/CT-4/1/4/260: Building and Other Regulations, File: E552/4. 83 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/6: PH&BRC, 21 October 1915. 84 The Journal, Grahamstown: ‘Farm Architecture,’ 15 May 1913. 85 The Journal, Grahamstown: 15 May 1913. 86 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 13, no. 10, (May, 1930), p.3. 87 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 12, no. 12, (July, 1929), p.5. 88 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/14: PH&BRC, 25 October 1921. 89 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/13: PH&BRC, 15 June 1921. 90 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/22: PH&BRC, 18 February 1925. 91 Ibid. 92 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/27: PH&BRC, 13 December 1926. 93 Ibid. 94 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/2B: PH&BRC, 4 October 1906. 95 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/3: PH&BRC, 17 October 1907. 96 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/6: PH&BRC, 4 June 1914. 97 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/7: PH&BRC, 22 February 1916. 98 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/8: PH&BRC, 25 October 1916. 99 Ibid., 13 November 1916. 100 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/12: PH&BRC, 10 December 1920.

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101 Dumbrell, K., ‘Athlone in the Early Twentieth-Century – a Precursor to Working Class Housing on the Cape Flats,’ (University of Cape Town: Unpublished B.A. (Hons) Thesis, 1998). 102 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/12: PH&BRC, 1 March 1921. 103 Ibid. 104 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/6: PH&BRC, 3 July 1914. 105 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/12: PH&BRC, 16 February 1921. 106 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/13: PH&BRC, 4 May 1921. 107 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/10: PH&BRC, 14 November 1918. 108 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/8: PH&BRC, 26 July 1916. 109 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/12: PH&BRC, 13 May 1920. 110 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/13: PH&BRC, 15 June 1921. 111 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/17: PH&BRC, 20 June 1923. 112 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/20: PH&BRC, 1 April 1924. 113 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/14: PH&BRC, 25 October 1921. 114 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/18: PH&BRC, 18 July 1923. 115 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/15: PH&BRC, 10 May 1922.

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5 Ascribing Otherness and the Threat to the Self: Representations of Slums and the Social Space of Others

In Buitengracht-street, the Princess was attracted by a beautifully designed but dilapidated old Dutch house. Most of its windows were shattered and its oak panelled hall was serving as a communal kitchen. Past this house, but a few generations ago, the British Governors of the Cape and the flower of Cape Town’s society used to parade in the evening. Lady Anne Barnard, it is said, knew it well. Yesterday Princess Alice found it harbouring incredible squalor.1 The Cape Times, ‘Princess Alice in Slumland’

In 1929, Princess Alice went down the rabbit hole and landed up in ‘Slumland’. And like Wonderland it was busy with disturbing characters. For ‘the slum’ loomed large in the popular imagination as a weird liminal space at the edge of middleclass respectability. Slumland threatened the loss of the Self and, without much exaggeration, the whole of Western Civilization – as so clearly symbolized by the fate suffered by the old Dutch house and its associated ghosts of Empire described above. Off with her head indeed. But it was surprisingly only one of many rabbit holes that the Princess managed to fall into in the course of her duties as the Vicereine of South Africa; Old Cape Town was riddled with them – or so it seemed. As we shall see below, newspaper articles and official reports often described places like District Six as rabbit warrens filled with animal-like humans. In the broad brushstrokes of sensationalist journalism and the finer details of official reports, District Six and Old Cape Town was depicted – ascribed – as the location of Otherness. But ascribing Otherness worked in dual ways, locking the inhabitants inside the tainting walls of derelict buildings, or alternatively, the ‘animalistic’ inhabitants tainting the walls of the housing stock by miasmic association. This slippage is rife in discourse on ‘slums’ and is tellingly present when the Garden Cities and Town Planning journal tried to define ‘what is a slum?’2 Verbatim extracts of George Duckworth’s paper read at the RIBA give the answer: A slum, then, is a street, court or alley which reflects the social condition of a poor, thriftless, irregularly employed and rough class of inhabitant. The outward signs are bread and litter in the streets; windows dirty, broken and patched with

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brown or white paper; curtains dirty and frayed and blinds half drawn and often hanging at an angle. The street doors are usually open, showing bare passages and stairways lacking balustrades, while the door jambs are generally brown with dirt and rubbed shiny by the coats of the leisured class, whose habits are to lean up against them.

The transference and slippage between building and person is beautifully and literally articulated in the last sentence – the dirt of the building rubbed off onto the skin of the loitering unemployed, and the dirty practice of loitering ironically becoming a cleansing, rather than the tainting, of dirty buildings. In Cape Town, the ‘slums’ of District Six and parts of Old Cape Town were stigmatized and devalued, opening both the inhabitants, and the buildings, eventually to forced removal and relocation. And solidifying the nascent race politics of a divided South Africa to boot. For the act of ascribing Otherness was also the consolidating of the Self; every hyperbole employed to shock the reader was a strengthening of the veracity of the project of Empire, of the ‘obvious hierarchy’ of races and cultures. Imperial discourse on the architecture and inhabitants of the slums became a key founding layer in the construction of apartheid. And it is to this discourse that we now turn.

Ascribing Otherness: ‘Kennels’, ‘Hovels’, and Other Animalistic Associations From newspapers3 and magazines,4 to petitions,5 conferences,6 and official documents7 the word ‘hovel’ is ubiquitous in the 40-odd years this book covers. Although words like ‘pondokkie’8 and ‘shanty’ were occasionally used, especially towards the end of the period of study and mostly to describe peri-urban dwellings, ‘hovel’ associated the ‘slum’ dweller with an animal status.9 It should be noted, however, that many of the descriptions of dwelling spaces using this emotionally charged word, especially those after the ’flu epidemic of 1918, were intended to shock the general public and officials into providing some form of social housing or better health conditions in certain areas. Nevertheless, the use of this word in identifying and describing Other-spaces reinforced the identity of those inhabitants as Other. It was used as early as 1888 to undermine the voting rights of recently urbanized Natives living in the city: As J. Easton, ruminating on Four Questions of the Day admonished the reader: ‘Think for a moment of that ignorant and disgustingly dirty fellow, the occupier of one of these wretched hovels, having a voice in the government of this town equal to that of the mayor himself.’10 Clearly, a ‘hovel’ did not constitute the legitimizing capacity that property-based voting rights were intended to bestow. The link between slum-dwellers and the animal world was often made through words other than ‘hovel.’ In an article titled ‘A Hotbed of Horrors,’ the Architect, Builder & Engineer ran an exposé on slum conditions, choosing Wells Square – a place of much notoriety to be explored in the following chapter – as their focus.11 In this example, the association of the urban poor with the animal world is made

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very clear: ‘It may have been a square once; it’s a sink now. What once was open space is covered by hovels, kennels, rabbit warrens, call them what you will, but for Heaven’s sake don’t call them human habitations.’ For their part the Cape Times ran a series of reports on the ‘Underworld of Cape Town’ where the association of human ‘type’ with dwelling ‘type’ is defined: Within a stone’s throw of the University [in the city] exist squalid hutches and warrens occupied by people of colour who could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as the better class. These premises are being whitewashed now. The landlords have had a shaking up [from the series]. Perhaps they fear demolition.12

And in 1918 the City Council, after the tour they took of the city’s poorer neighbourhoods, reported seeing ‘the dens and kennels in which people lived worse than rats.’13 At a much later date the Cape Times was still calling poor people ‘sub-human’14 through their association with their dwellings. The simple act of naming and associating people with animal-like dwellings ascribed a sense of Otherness that would ultimately bolster and naturalize segregationist ambitions. The primary concern that drove most of the writing on slums was the condition alternatively called ‘overcrowding’ and ‘congestion.’ As was noted in the previous chapter, the latter term was also used to describe the aesthetic problems with the density of buildings in the city, but it was the density and number of bodies in dwellings that was typically meant by the word. Congestion, in these terms, was one of the major causes for concern for the agents of Empire. In the shadow of Victorian morality and the required separation of sexes, it was generally understood that ‘living under such conditions [of congestion and overcrowding] is not only bad physically, but also bad morally.’15 Although there were sentiments to the contrary, the overwhelming consideration was that this condition of dense living was endemic – essential – to the Native and Others in general. Again, animal-like adjectives reinforced this perceived condition as problematic and threatening. We find this in the records of the Commission for a Native Location for Cape Town in 1901 (hereafter CNL) concerning District Six: We have a considerable amount of overcrowding among the low-class Jews. The Kafirs seem to like to herd together; they would prefer to have a room filled. The Europeans prefer the reverse, and it is the result of circumstances that they herd together.16

Again, the animal qualities associated with the word ‘herd’ are fairly obvious. These generalizations were echoed by Robert Wynne-Roberts, the City Engineer of Cape Town, who was of the opinion that a satellite Native ‘location’ was not desirable and preferred the supervisory possibilities that lodging-houses could apply in ‘civilizing’ Natives: You would be able to have supervision over them. They want to live under conditions they are used to live. They like to huddle up together. If they are under the lodging-house principle you can get them to live in a more civilized way by force.

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You will in this way do the native more good than anything you can think of. Once you begin to improve his morals in that respect you raise him to a higher level. If the natives are in a location they would be huddled together as they please, and you cannot expect to improve them in this way.17

Whatever the City Engineer’s paternalist intentions, Natives, it seemed, ‘naturally’ preferred to live ‘huddled together.’ This essentialist attitude also carried through to the view that it was ‘their nature’ to spoil: ‘If some people were put in the Governor’s house they would soon turn it into a condition worse than a Kafir kraal.’18 Others lamented the ‘noteworthy ease with which natives usually adapt themselves to slum conditions.’19 Whilst a report by the Department of Native Affairs in 1919 suggested: ‘So long as the native is content to live in squalor so long will the native population of the towns be an offence and menace to the European section of the community.’20 It followed then, that Natives were somehow naturally unable to keep ‘their’ living quarters in any kind of decent order, whilst the sentence itself hints that this should be enough to legitimize the possible dispossession of natives from their dwellings in the city. The idea that Others had a natural tendency of living in dense areas cut across the then hardening racial lines: Coloureds were considered as prone to dense living as Natives. On a ‘Visit of Inspection’ to Wells Square, the Municipal Reform Association stated matter-of-factly that they found ‘as many as 17 [coloureds] living in one house.’21 For the English middle class the tendency was for four or five people to occupy a house; this statistic would have been beyond the need for hyperbole and would have been enough in itself to induce shudders. A few years later, at a conference between the government’s Central Housing Board and the city’s Housing and Estates Committee (hereafter Housing Committee) to consider a housing scheme for Coloureds, it was reported that ‘Councillor Zoutendyk stated that the object of the Scheme was to get rid of the congested areas. He pointed out that it was very difficult to get the people in District Six out of their “hovels,” even if they were offered nice houses. They would rather live in congested areas.’22 For that matter consider the following quote which links the increase in density of bodies in space to an increase in social degenerates. The particular locality under consideration is the area of District Six that was known as the ‘Dry Docks’ which, contrary to expectations of its name was at the foot of Devil’s Peak mountain, just below the recently developed De Waal Drive: Seventeen years ago, when we first started mission work there, the cottages were inhabited by very decent coloured folk, each family occupying a room and occasionally two rooms. But now things have altered and the overcrowding is deplorable, two and in some cases three families living and sleeping in one room, 12 × 12 feet. And even then only one family rents a room. They sometimes take in a lodger or two. Many of the respectable people are still there and trying to live good, quiet lives, but there are dilapidated rooms abutting on filthy backyards which are not fit for human habitation, which shelter numbers of girls and men of the lowest type.23

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District Six and its ‘hovels’ were being conflated with a particular kind of unfathomable person happy to live in dense, sub-human conditions. But it was not just particular areas of Old Cape Town that were problematic. The whole idea of urban living in general was considered degenerate, and could literally lead to a genetic degeneracy.24 Just in case they forgot themselves, the Central Housing Board’s report of 1935 quotes Raymond Unwin on just how different the English are in terms of domestic space. Unwin, who, as we shall see in the third part of this book, had a definitive influence on domestic space had this to say: ‘The English people retain their love of individuality for themselves and their family life which springs largely from their cottage homes … They dislike the “herd” life and the “herd” mind which tenement existence is liable to foster.’25 That a family would choose to live in a tenement or a flat was largely incomprehensible. Consider the cultural self-assuredness in the following quote from the 1935 report of the Central Housing Board, which was the main organ of central government financing municipal housing: ‘On the continent of Europe, flats are provided for many classes of workers, most of whom are owing to the nature of government control inarticulate as to their desires or wishes for home life.’26 In other words, were they able to protest, then their choice would naturally go against the flat and be in favour of the single-family detached unit. Yet the sentence carries with it the innuendo that continental Europeans – those other than English – could be and were marked as Other by their choice of dwelling type. ‘Neighbours have nothing in common, not even a cabbage patch, and the tenant of a flat cannot forget that neither he, nor his neighbour, is “king of the castle.”’27 It would seem that those who lived in flats then were all ‘dirty rascals.’ This Othering also played its part with regards the idea of degeneracy, the logic being that given a choice nobody would consider flats as a desirable dwelling type, therefore, its inhabitants must either be indigent, or more simply, prone to degeneracy. There were, however, some voices that suggested that people who lived in overcrowded dwellings in Old Cape Town did so not because they chose to or were innately programmed to, but because they could afford nothing else. The sentiment of helping the ‘worthy poor’ was summed up by Princess Alice at her opening speech for Cape Town’s Housing Week in 1929: You cannot expect decency, morality, or health under such conditions. And yet, if you or I were forced to pay a rent we could not afford, and were faced with hungry children, why, I am certain we should do exactly the same! There are lots of decent, respectable people struggling along in those frightful conditions, whose marvellous patience and resignation are beyond praise. But that is no reason why their poverty should be exploited as it so obviously is in many cases.28

Nevertheless, the majority of reports and representations depicted high density living as confirmation of the difference of those people already marked as such due to other indicators such as skin colour, language and dress. Caught up within this confirmation was the further Othering that suggested that this propensity to dense living was a ‘natural’ phenomenon for a variety of groups of people who, due to their racial inferiority, were also close to animals in their dwelling habits and

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character. The fact that many families were of an extended or, non-nuclear, type is another point that may have created the sense that they were Other. Whatever its cause, the ‘herding,’ perhaps hinting at the dangerous animal world of ‘Africa,’ struck the agents of Empire as a condition needing to be controlled and eradicated.

Contamination and the Threat to Civilization and the Self Slums and Other-spaces of Cape Town were viewed by most of the middle-class and those in power as a threat ‘to civilisation, to humanity, and to Christianity.’29 Throughout the period of study, and ranging from magazines30 to civic meetings,31 slums were represented as a direct threat to Western civilization, which needed protection from this cancerous attack. What exactly constituted this threat, what allowed Dr Jane Waterston to state ‘Nothing sickens me more than the manner in which these people live in this town,’32 and what potential effects this had on the reordering of Cape Town is the subject of the following section. It explores, in particular, the problem that the bodies of servants and Others coming into White homes presented to the agents of Empire. Within many and various verbal representations, Other-spaces were often made threateningly present in the spaces of the Self. Unlike overcrowding, where the threat to Western civilization was to come indirectly through the ‘natural’ degeneracy of particular groups, here the threat was to come directly through the ‘contaminated’ body of servants or through the inanimate objects touched or serviced by Others in spaces represented as Other, and thereby into the home of the Self or directly onto the body of the Self through ‘contaminated’ clothing. Typically it was servants themselves, or rather, their bodies entering the home who were the main focus of this perceived threat. The following quotes can be taken as exemplary of the kind of sentiment often expressed: In Cape Town, the people of the slums come into the houses of Sea Point, Rondebosch and Wynberg as servants, housemaids, and ‘boys:’ they become cooks and washerwomen. They handle the food Europeans eat, make and wash the clothes Europeans wear, tend and even nurse European babies. I wonder how many infectious and contagious diseases have been introduced into European homes by servants? 33

It was not only newspapers that carried such sentiments. In an editorial in the Architect, Builder & Engineer on the need for housing and written after a visit to Parkwood on the Cape Flats, the author ominously noted that it was ‘out of these squalid kennels that we saw servants go forth to work in such homes as yours and ours.’34 Yet it was not only the movement of servants into the Home that was deemed a threat. As the Cape Times rightly recognized, the urban poor were the backbone of the colonizer’s economy and wealth and were always, therefore, connecting the Self to their ‘hovels’ through inanimate objects, especially clothing and food: Somewhere or other in Cape Town – either in insect-infested huts in Ndabeni or in dirty pens in city hovels – are living men and women, black and coloured, who

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handle daily most of the things we eat and wear. The pollution which surrounds them at night touches us all somewhere by day. Here are the real foundations of our civilisation – embedded in the filthy ooze of a human cesspool. We spend many thousands a year on maintaining a costly public health service, and at any moment a dirty, plague-stricken native from one of the underground haunts of Cape Town – where infection, once lodged, is bound to spread like a consuming fire – can blow the whole edifice of our security to pieces with one hot breath.35

In many of the articles on ‘slums,’ the use of space, and how this related directly to the Self through the handling of things ‘we eat and wear,’ was identified as a major cause for concern. Not only was the holdall phrase ‘hovel’ used to summarize the Otherness of the space, but care was taken to describe in detail the surroundings in which these Others worked and lived as this quote on Wells Square (Figure 5.1) illustrates: In one case we saw a coloured cobbler working at an open window of the smallest size, through which appeared a room of not more than one hundred square feet. In this were several beds. The flooring was decayed, the worker and his surroundings indescribably filthy. Whose boots was he mending? 36

A similar concern was voiced over washerwomen who provided a service to the English middle class residents of Cape Town. Again, what is of interest is the way in which the activities of the washerwomen and their use of space are carefully noted: We found that many of the tenants of these dwellings carry on the occupation of washerwomen, and during our visit these people were openly carrying on their vocation, the clothes being washed, in many instances, outside the front doors, adjacent to the lavatories, the ironing being performed indoors. From the nature of the garments hanging on the lines, it was at once apparent that they came from good families, and it is unnecessary for us to point out the serious consequences which must necessarily result from such practices if they are allowed to continue.37

The middle-class were urged to literally enter the space of the Other for their own good: ‘If Europeans would only go, and see for themselves the filthy conditions under which natives live, they would think twice before admitting them to their houses while living under such insanitary conditions.’38 This urging to visit the interior of Other-spaces became increasingly poignant later when the Slums Act was declared in 1934. Even though it looked – the Cape Times noted – ‘solid and respectable from the street,’39 a building in District Six was one of the first to be declared a slum. Any building, thus, could harbour out of sight a condition that was abhorrent and dangerous. Deception potentially lay in every respectable façade. Yet these instructions to enter Other-spaces also carried with it the urging to reform. No less than for the good of the nation were women urged to ‘concern herself with the what concerns her most – look after, say, the homes of those who are working for her – her servant and her washer-woman, and her errand-boy, if she has one, or any of her husband’s employees.’40

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5.1 Wells Square, ‘A Hotbed of Horrors’

It is easy to dismiss the newspaper articles and the sensationalism associated with tabloid journalism. Yet these reports affected the ordering of the city as a White space. As we saw in the previous section they helped ascribe and confirm the difference of Others through the use of animal adjectives in their description of Other-spaces and through the idea that those inhabiting them had a natural tendency to live like animals in overcrowded conditions or slums – the presence of the Other in the city was shown to be an indirect threat to civilization. It was also made to seem a direct threat to health and the biological wellbeing of the Self and ‘good families’ as these reports laboured to illustrate a series of connections across space that linked Other-spaces with spaces of the Self. Through a set of rhetorical devices these Other-spaces are always potentially present in the Home, either through the body of the Other or through their contact with the things used and belonging to the Self. One’s own domestic space was suddenly perilous. These articles confirmed racial hierarchy and reinforced a sense that the presence of Others in the city needed to be controlled and eradicated. On entering these places and reporting their findings in painstaking detail, journalists became part of the mapping out of the interior space of Otherness. This mapping out of ‘strange’ interiors helped order the city as a White space. The use of the interior space of the slums and how that space was structured, or rather, unstructured, was necessarily part of the business of the middle class and it is to this that we now turn.

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Loose Boundaries: Miscegenation, and the Threat of ‘Contact’ A major threat the slums held for the White middle class was the interracial mixing that its social spaces encouraged. Yet they were not alone in their concerns; almost all those who cared to contemplate this aspect of slum-life, whether Black intellectual or White architect, considered the mixing and potential miscegenation it presented as a problem. The initial concern for racial intermixture in Other-spaces was the relationship between Natives and Coloureds, often signified through the word ‘contact’. Dr Abdurahman, the only Coloured member of the Cape Town City Council for many years, as part of the Overcrowding Sub-Committee, was concerned that ‘natives should not be allowed to come into contact with the coloured people of the City.’ Although it is not stated exactly why, it is quite possible that Abdurahman, along with many others, would have explained this as being crucial for the good of both ‘races,’ or for that matter, could have been intending to protect either one of them. In fact the idea of needing to ‘protect’ the Native who was considered ‘an unlettered child of the rural area … brought into contact with the degrading concomitants of civilized conditions,’41 had defined ‘the Native problem.’ As we shall see in Chapter 7, this idea of shielding from contact with the temptations – in a word, alcohol – of the city for their own good was one of the strong moral arguments used in favour of the production of the city as a White space. But Dr Abdurahman’s concern for the threat could have easily been read the other way. The editorial of the Cape Times had early on stated that ‘The aboriginal populations of the East are altogether alien to the manners and methods of the West, and their sense of decency and public decorum is different from those of the respectable coloured classes of the city into whose localities they are at present forced.’42 Some 20 years later in reference to the increased residence of Natives in the city, or more correctly ‘influx‘ into ‘coloured quarters,’ the Cape Times called it a ‘crime,’43 meaning that the phenomenon was a threat to Coloureds and that this ‘crime’ was caused by Natives. The dominant concern was for the poor White residents of the city, particularly those living in the slums. In fact, the Housing Survey of the MOH had specifically included the extent of the mixing of races as one of its statistical findings.44 The Architect, Builder & Engineer saw fit to urge the state to deal with the dangers of having those of European descent having to live ‘in close proximity to those of other races.’ In their view, ‘the peril is by no means confined to the spread of disease and crime; it may threaten white civilization in the continent of Africa.’45 The potential for miscegenation, the entering of ‘the continent of Africa’ into the body of ‘white civilization’ through the loose boundaries of the slum, is a good example of how the slum was seen as a place of danger to the identity of the Self indexed through ‘white civilization.’ Slums potentially threatened the ever-anxious boundaries of White identity. The following excerpt comes from a report in the Cape Times regarding the tour of Cape Town’s slums during Housing Week in which parliamentarians took part: Europeans lived often in the same houses with coloured people. The children played together, and in the evening shared the same slice of bread. Indeed, on the

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levels on which those Europeans exist the party discovered that the taboos and inhibitions of their race were tending to lose much of their power. On that level, one of them remarked, would not intermixture be easy for them, and perhaps even desirable? 46

And further: Dr. Van Broekhuizen, M.L.A. for Wonderboom, Transvaal, was especially distressed over the casual way in which white, coloured and black people are intermixed in the slums, often inhabiting the same house, and on occasions even sharing the same room. He was firmly convinced that the first step towards solving the housing problem in Cape Town ought to be rigid segregation of the white, coloured and black classes.47

It was not only politicians who considered the segregation of races through slum clearances and re-housing as an integral part of the housing ‘problem.’ The Chairman of the South African District of the Institute of Municipal and County Engineers, R.W. Watson, in an official address, felt that the municipalities did not have the legal power to solve ‘the problems arising out of the clashing of East and West in South Africa’48 by enforcing racial segregation, but considered this a major failing: The removal of that considerable proportion of the native population, especially married natives, whose present conditions of living are at once unhealthy and a menace to the health of others, to suitably laid out villages or locations is a duty of prime importance.49

Statements such as those made by the parliamentarians and Watson, whether motivated by theories of racial supremacy and degeneracy or not, pointed to the potential loss of identity through miscegenation or ‘blood contamination’50 brought on by the intermingling proximity of living that Old Cape Town offered. This potential loss of clear racial and ethnic identities through miscegenation was also linked to the potential loss of the armature of supercilious confidence towards Natives through which White people were able to emotionally continue the colonial project. Concern was also voiced that White people living in the slums would become ‘demoralized,’ by having no choice but to live with Others.51 Once there, they would remain moribund and then degenerate further, losing their Whiteness. This problem of degeneracy was based on the idea that the respect of Natives and Others for Europeans needed to be maintained at all times to avoid a loss of face, and a potential loss of power.52 Whiteness needed to be seen as wholly unassailable. In fact, the report of the government’s 1920 housing commission states unequivocally that: The poor whites, as we have seen are living in the most degrading and undesirable conditions in many of the towns, and having regard to the preponderance of the black population and the importance, as all believe, of maintaining the prestige of the white race, this class of people not only cannot be

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permitted to remain as they are, but should be compelled to re-instate themselves in what must be their proper standing in the social scale.53

This ‘standing on the social scale,’ no doubt included those necessary accoutrements of the Self: a happy Home and an edifying History that the Cape Dutch preservation movement was intended to secure. Not all European residents of slum areas would have been ‘poor whites.’ It should be noted that District Six, for example, had many residents with European and Jewish surnames, many of whom were owners of property there.54 Or, one may consider an article in the Cape Times in 1911 relaying the ‘remarkable contrasts’ of the area where one found the ‘unconcern of the Malays, the ox-eyed calm of the Indians, and the alert, intelligent look of the Jews are all displayed in even a section of a street.’55 District Six, as a heterogeneous place, complicated the agents of Empire’s wish for a segregated social-spatial order. Whether due to the threat of ‘noble natives’ learning immoral behaviour, or the potential loss of racial identity and thereby the clarity of ‘correctness’ in the colonial project, it was very plainly thought – even for those campaigning for the right to vote for women – that ‘the unregulated mixture of colour in congested areas was a cause of social degradation for all.’56 Apart from miscegenation fears, reports on the slums also suggest fears over the erosion of Self. Contained within the battlefield-inspired spatial metaphors of newspaper reports is a sense that Others were dominating or gaining increasing control over areas that were formerly places of the White Self. The lack of borders, or the permeability of borders around slum areas, was profoundly disturbing. Consider the similar sense of loss and danger in the following two separate newspaper reports: Here are whole streets of once good-class residential property entirely given up to coloured house-holders and shop-keepers. The decline is startling enough by day. But by night it becomes even more marked. For then, as the native workers of the city troop home to their dismal lodgings, a further stage in the degeneration of the city becomes apparent.57

And Decent streets, one by one, have fallen, by force of circumstances over which the most energetic and cleanly housewives exercised no sort of control, into the most deadly slums. Cellars and back rooms (meant for wood or coal) became by degrees, the homes of whole families, which includes, almost always some relations in addition to the parents and children.58

This second quote leads us into two key aspects of the following sections. First the idea of specific rooms being named and related to specific functions as hinted by the phrase ‘meant for wood or coal,’ and secondly, the idea of the non-nuclear family as suggested by the phrase ‘some relations in addition.’ It is to this latter condition that we turn to first.

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The Misuse of Space: Congestion and Function The density of bodies present in a room – a condition referred to as ‘congestion’ – was one of the dominant concerns brought into focus by the slums. The urban poor were said to live ‘huddled’ together confirming their animalized status as Other. This section gets at how the actual condition of ‘congestion’ was considered problematic. Whilst fears of the spread of disease in these conditions was genuine – albeit a somewhat facile concern for the impact on labour and how that carrier labour force may transmit disease to the privileged – it was the strongly held opinion that an excess of people in one room would also constitute a collapse of moral health. In a society where non-nuclear families were quite customary, due to a culture where extended families were the norm or the poverty-based necessities of sharing, this condemnation was onerous. Besides, this concern for non-nuclear family spaces was not simply over the moral health of those occupying the spaces, but reflected how tenuous the values and conditions of Whiteness were and how the Self could be lost unless continually re-made. This dual consideration can be traced in the tone of many of the sensationalist articles that conducted exposés on the congested areas of Old Cape Town. Even in conditions of lower densities or less overcrowding, the possibility of a non-nuclear family escaping moral judgement was slim. A little more than a third of the 15,750 people living in one-room lettings in Districts Two to Six in 1932 were part of a rental pattern that involved more adults than two parents in the same room.59 An uncle or an aunt, or two sets of parents sharing a single dwelling with their children, was not a possibility those in power were often willing to accept. The MOH stated his view of this phenomenon in the Housing Survey Interim Report: All the activities of home life are concentrated in the one room. It is the bedroom and dressing room for everyone in the household, no matter what the age or sex, the living room, the room for meals, and the only place where food, clothing and household requisites can be stowed away. Except when there is a common kitchen also available, it is the room where the food must be cooked, and the ‘washing up’ done after cooking and eating (nearly always with no sink in the room), and where the members of the household must wash and take their baths. In time of illness the same room is the sick chamber, and it is the scene of childbirth and of death … The only acceptable standard is that every household should have separate bedroom accommodation for (1) the parents, (2) the other adult males and (3) the other adult females; and, in addition, one room for use as living room and kitchen and for other daytime purposes. Nothing less will allow of the necessary standards of health, decency and culture.60

And the report of the Union Government’s Housing Committee There can be no privacy or decency in life when a whole family occupies one room, and practically all the poorer coloured people and many of the poorer white people in Cape Town to-day are living a family to a room.61

These quotes hint at a strong underlying belief of the time, namely the clear separation of functions into distinct spaces, represented in the case above by

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the need for bedrooms separate from kitchens.62 Unclear spatial differentiation of functions was taken as a sign of primitivism or a lack of humanity. The MOH was careful to point out that his list of minimum accommodation was not only necessary for standards of health and moral decency but also for ‘culture.’ For the MOH of Cape Town, the slums and their density of people were not adding up to the vision of what a home, with all its satisfying Englishness, necessarily was. It is crucial to understand that the MOH’s minimum spatial requirements for a dwelling were also necessarily part of the vision of what it meant to live a proper life. Furthermore, every activity needed to be given a name, and every named activity needed to be given a space, and every activity-named space needed to be separate from the next. Of course certain activities were expected to take place within the same space – the inclusion of these largely determined by English values of the home. Clearly in Other-spaces such as the slums, just the opposite occurred. For example, in Old Cape Town, the lack of properly defined open space or gardens for children to play in was a concern (Figure 5.2). Streets, and other open spaces in the ‘slums’ were seen as inadequate and dangerous: In Wells Square we saw a row of single-storeyed dwellings crowded with children of all shades of colours. Within eight feet of the nearest dwelling citywards ordure and bedding from an adjoining stable lay drying in the sun, and round and in this the poor little outcasts played.63

It is quite clear that the author considered this area as wholly inadequate a place in which to raise children. Children often occur in photographs of slum areas and were effective, albeit unknowing, puppets of the propaganda efforts. Whether this was from a natural curiosity on their part or whether these were perhaps staged is somewhat irrelevant. Their frequency of use in images was undoubtedly part of an editorial understanding of the potency they held. The power of the image in general was well understood and used regularly in articles on the slums. Negative judgements were cast by the use of these photographs and associated captions which expressed the inadequacy of what the object was being likened to – usually a sarcastic accompaniment to a clear intrusion into the lives of the less fortunate. Nearly always the caption reflects the viewer back to themselves through reference to middle-class values. The reader simultaneously sees themselves and the objectified subject and is appalled and repulsed (Figures 5.2–5.3). Whether through poverty, convenience or cultural tradition, Old Cape Town was a space of much fluidity in use. In particular, one of the problems associated with its development and densification was the creation, or rather finding, of dwelling space previously used for other functions or the problem of former houses being taken over and used in a way offensive to the ‘ghosts’ of the nuclear family members who had lived there. The ‘Princess Alice in Slumland’ quote at the beginning of this chapter is an obvious example. It points to the sense of a loss of Self, where history is being erased under the ‘barbarism’ of Africa. Awareness of this fluidity in the use and misuse of space was noted in a Cape Times tour of a shebeen:

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5.2  ‘The Hungry Children of District Six’

Our objective was a three-roomed house which has been purchased by natives. We found it full of natives and coloured folk, several of them in advanced states of intoxication. In the front room I counted nine native ‘bloods’ and two coloured women, one of them a bawdy creature openly practising her filthy avocations. The place stank of sour liquor. There was scarcely an unoccupied inch of space in all the rest of the house. The passage was thronged with other natives. In the kitchen a semi-nude black man, probably doped, lay propped against the wall, his wide-open eyes full of a merciful oblivion.64

This idea of the misuse of space also included those buildings that had never been intended to be used as dwellings but were being lived in. A lot of the sensationalism in the press was based on searching for, and discovering, these buildings: It has been common knowledge, or should have been, that for a long while past a stable loft, a converted stable, an underground cellar, a passage in a crowded house, and a backyard building have sheltered the very poor. This describes what a lady worker said two years ago: Off ----- Street is a kraal, in which there are several houses and a stable (not too large), but containing about 8 or 10 horses, etc. On the stable ground is a rickety ladder, the top end resting against a very shallow loft, very much neglected and dirty. The air is impure and made worse from stable refuse, etc. In this loft, which has no door, live several girls and men of a questionable type (all coloured). One table, and some smaller boxes which serve as tables and chairs, are spread about the loft. Three of four mattresses are on the floor with bedclothes of all descriptions. A fire is burning over which two little saucepans are cooking. On this particular morning, two girls were seen sitting on the floor smoking cigarettes. They were half dressed. One’s face and head was bandaged, the result of a fight. In the farther end lies the object of the nurse’s visit – a female (young, unmarried, but living with a man), in the last stages of consumption.65

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Sensationalist writing such as this was not uncommon in the newspapers reporting on the otherworldliness of Cape Town’s slums. The headings of the many series construct a sense of entering another world, vividly mapping for middle-class readers the sordid world of the Other and menacing them with the dangers of its teeming impropriety. Many alluded to the sense of voyeurism suggested in the articles, for example ‘The Opium Dens of District Six.’66 As we’ve noted, a dwelling was likely to be considered a slum simply on account of it looking like one. But what if a stable had hidden away within it a group of ‘questionable’ types? What if a reasonable façade hid beyond its decorous walls a ‘hotbed of horrors’?

Mapping the Interior and the Periphery Along with the realization that the home, or the house, was no longer a representation of what functions or activities were contained therein, came the call – exemplified by newspapers such as the Cape Argus after the ’flu epidemic of 1918 – to map out the internal territories of slum dwellings: There is only one way to prevent such things and that is constant vigilance. The city should continue to be mapped out, into the districts as they are now being worked. Serious workers should be permanently allotted to each district. Their visitations should be searching and severe. They should be acquainted with the insides of all houses, not merely the back yards. They should bring to light all cases of overcrowding, dirtiness, and disease, and they should make such an outcry about it that the authorities would be compelled to take steps to provide accommodation for the overcrowded, and to remove them; to insist on certain standards of cleanliness.67

The Housing Act of 1920 required that municipalities begin a major survey of the housing stock, which also involved mapping out the interior space of homes. The housing shortage was only part of the impetus. Obviously the state was interested in the way people were living their lives beyond the façades of their dwellings – it was by these means that it could control and manage the lives of those who were not White and middle-class, a topic taken up in more detail in the following chapter. The condition of sight and seeing was one of the fundamental problems that was noted in the space of Old Cape Town. Aside from the problems of back yards being hidden from view, and thus potentially beyond control, there were a number of areas in Old Cape Town that were made of dense, fractured and irregular spaces, which were difficult to map out and control, and which were largely the result of laissez faire development during the British occupation of the Cape. Wells Square was the epitome of this kind of space, with its hidden interior and a permeability fundamentally threatening to not only the police, but the general public.68 Most of the illicit activities associated with Wells Square were attributed directly to the characteristics of its spatial structure which enabled activities such as gambling, prostitution, and illegal drinking.

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The following stands as an example of the anxiety that the dense and hidden spaces of Old Cape Town generated: Around the corner of a street, in a narrow passage, anywhere out of sight, we find large numbers of men, youngsters and even children divided into groups of circles, frantically busy gambling.69

It was not only Old Cape Town that began to be mapped. The increasing presence of Natives at the periphery was also noted, though it did not lead directly to the kind of extensive mapping of that had been undertaken in Old Cape Town. The Lansdowne and District Civic Association complained to the Town Clerk that ‘many natives of a very undesirable Class are squatting, on Outlands, Balmoral Estate and other parts of Lansdowne.’70 The Medical Officer of Health reported in 1923 that there were some three hundred unauthorized huts and dwellings between Muizenberg and the boundary with Wynberg which were mixed in racial occupation between Coloured, Natives and Whites.71 The awareness of these ‘problems’ at the periphery of the city was not new: similar concerns were voiced in 1900 during the Commission on a Native Location for Cape Town. The evidence at the commission also illustrates that the problems of sight/seeing were at the heart of a spatial paradox that was to haunt those in charge of the planned and future administration of the racial segregation of the city. The City Engineer admitted that Natives were living on the slopes of Table Mountain above the city: ‘I do not know whether it is a fact – that natives are allowed up in the bush to put up wattle and daub places and live there without any control whatsoever. I have seen two of these places where they live … I believe it is there men who are out of sight, and who have nobody to look after them, get drunk.’72 If the visible presence of Natives in the city was threatening (as we shall see in Chapter 7), then their non-visible presence was equally so. In the paranoid structuring of the city as a White space, Natives and Others needed always to be seen but never in sight.

Conclusion The relationship between naming and dwelling was part of the process whereby the agents of Empire were able to ascribe and lock in the Otherness of the general non-white population. It meant the urban poor were simultaneously seen as subhuman and threatening. On finding the dense living conditions of Old Cape Town the agents of Empire and jobbing journalists considered this a natural characteristic of the people living there. So the forces and interests reordering Cape Town’s domestic space with the implementation of housing schemes and Native locations, could marshal these sentiments in the rationale for the removal of Others from the city, while defining the needs of those subjects of removal as less-than that of their White counterparts. Assigning Otherness to those at the Cape who were not White and middle class bolstered a boundary-setting White identity able to take much self-assurance in its role as protector and guardian of the not quite human.

5.3  ‘Miserable Pondokkies of Cape Flats’ – informal housing at the periphery of the city

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Investigations into the slums uncovered conditions thought to be a direct threat to Western civilization. The proximity of the middle-class home to the slums, although geographically very distant, was intimate thanks to the passage of servants circulating in the domestic economy of the home. Another concern was the fact that the dense, heterogeneous character of the slums permitted miscegenation and the breaking down of both literal and figurative barriers between the Self and the Other. Another major threat was the potential break down in social order as suggested through the ‘immoral’ conditions of spatial overcrowding. Furthermore, the ‘incorrect’ use of space according to its intended function not only defined those dwelling in it as bereft of rationality but led to the call for the mapping out of the interior of these spaces so that the lives of those Others could be better managed and controlled. Finally, those problematic dwellings at the periphery were pleasantly ‘out-of-sight’ but not quite ‘out-of-mind,’ as there was a disturbing sense of the need to bring these spaces under the control of the city. Whilst this chapter dealt with the really existing domestic space of Cape Town as represented through the imaginings of the agents of Empire, the following chapter considers what they thought ought to ideally (and not so ideally) take its place. Reordering the Other as the Same was beginning to be defined.

Notes 1

Cape Times 31 July1929: ‘Princess Alice in Slumland.’

2

Duckworth, G., ‘The Making of a Slum,’ in Garden Cities and Town Planning, vol. xviii, no. 4, (April–May, 1927).

3

Cape Times 13 February 1922: ‘A Terrible Indictment;’ Cape Times 15 February 1922: Letter titled ‘The Dry Docks;’ Cape Times 22 June 1936, ‘Squalor of Peninsula Slum Quarters.’

4

African Architect, vol. 1, no. 6, (November, 1912), ‘Johannesburg’s Magnificent Contrasts;’ Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 1, no. 3 (October, 1917).

5 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/9: Housing Committee, 19 February 1925, petition from residents of the Lansdowne District. 6 KAB CCC 3/CT-4/1/4/469: Housing Committee Conferences & Letters, 24 April 1925, comment by the Mayor. 7 Union Government 34-14: Report of the Tuberculosis Commission, p.126. 8

An Indonesian word originally used to describe the reed huts of slaves at the Cape, see Silva, P. (ed.), A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

9

The modern reader may be surprised by this direct association, but it is one that is verified in the primary sources I have looked at and also in the 1933 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which gives the first definition of ‘hovel’ as: ‘An open shed; an outhouse used as a shelter for cattle.’

10 Easton, J., Four Questions of the Day. 11 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 1, no. 3, (October, 1917), pp.59–61. 12 Cape Times 15 February 1922: ‘The Underworld of Cape Town.’

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13 Cape Times 1 November 1918: ‘The City’s Housing Problem.’ 14 Cape Times 7 August 1939: ‘Pondokkie Dwellers – City’s “Sub-human” Race – Squalor and Death on Cape Flats.’ 15 KAB NA457: CNL, interlocutors to Rev. Elijah Mdolomba (Weslayan Missionary). 16 KAB NA457: CNL, Joseph Corben, (Sanitary Superintendent). 17 KAB NA457: CNL, Robert Wynne-Roberts, (City Engineer). 18 Cape Times 8 December 1917: ‘Future of Wells Square.’ Quoting Rev. A. Hodges. 19 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 19, no. 5, (December, 1935): ‘The Slum Problem.’ 20 As cited in Union Government 4-1920, Report of the Housing Committee. 21 KAB CCC 3/CT-4/1/3/97(31/3): Improvements to Wells Square 1915–1918, letter dated 18 May 1917. 22 KAB CCC 3/CT-4/1/4/469: Conference between the Central Housing Board and the Housing & Estates Committee, 23 April 1925 and 24 April 1925, p.9. 23 Cape Times, 14 February 1922: ‘Underworld of Cape Town.’ Letter to the Editor from ‘One Who Knows.’ 24 Hawkins, A., ‘The Discovery of Rural England.’ 25 Union Government Central Housing Board Report: 31 December, 1935, p.10. 26 Ibid., p.6. 27 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 10, no. 8, (March, 1927), p.22. 28 Cape Times 13 August 1929: ‘Princess Alice on the Slums.’ 29 Dr Malan (Minister of the Interior and Education) at the opening of ‘Housing Week’ as reported in Cape Times 13 August 1929: ‘Menace of the City’s Slums.’ 30 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 18, no. 5, (December, 1934): ‘World’s War on Slums.’ 31 Cape Times 13 October 1919: ‘Site Values Rating Question.’ Paraphrasing Mr C.H. Lamb speaking at a meeting at the Red Triangle Club chaired by the Mayor: ‘The birth-rate was falling and they found that Cape Town, which had so many open spaces in its immediate vicinity, was surrounded by a belt of slums which were a disgrace to our civilisation.’ 32 KAB NA457: CNL, Dr Jane Waterston. 33 Cape Times 22 June 1936: ‘Squalor of Peninsula Slum Quarters.’ 34 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 22, no. 1, (September, 1938). 35 Cape Times 7 February 1922: ‘A Tour of the Shebeens.’ 36 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 1, no. 3, (October, 1917): ‘A Hotbed of Horrors.’ 37 KAB CCC 3/CT-4/1/3/97 (31/3): Improvements to Wells Square 1915–1918, reference dated 18 May 1917 to the Municipal Reform Association’s visit to Wells Square. 38 F.A. Saunders, ‘Municipal Control of Locations,’ paper read at the Thirteenth Session of the Association of Municipal Corporations of the Cape Province, held at Grahamstown, 10, 11 and 12 May 1920, p.2. 39 Cape Times 1 November 1934: ‘Building Over 120 Years Old.’ 40 Cape Argus 26 October 1918: ‘The Home.’

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41 Cape Times 7 May 1923: editorial. Typically this would have been a reference to strong alcohol. 42 Cape Times 27 December 1899: editorial, ‘The Kafir Problem.’ 43 Cape Times 13 February 1922: ‘A Terrible Indictment.’ 44 KAB CCC Mayors Minute, 8 September 1932, Appendix 6: Housing Survey, Interim Report, p.4. 45 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 19, no. 5, (December, 1935): ‘The Slum Problem.’ 46 Cape Times 3 August 1929: ‘Degrading Effects of the Slum.’ 47 Cape Times 1 August 1929: ‘Nationalist M.L.A.’s Indictment.’ 48 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 13, no. 12, (July, 1930), pp.25–6. 49 Ibid. 50 Rheinallt-Jones, J.D. and Saffrey, A.L., Social and Economic Conditions of Native Life in the Union of South Africa. Findings of the Native Economic Commission, 1930–1932. Collated and Summarized, (Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press, 1933); Marais, J.S., The Cape Coloured People, 1652-1937, (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1939), p.282. 51 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 19, no. 5, (December, 1935): ‘The Slum Problem.’ 52 Rheinallt-Jones, J.D. and Saffrey, A L., Social and Economic Conditions of Native Life in the Union of South Africa, p.75. 53 Union Government 4-1920: Report of the Housing Committee. 54 Although many ‘coloureds’ as former slaves had inherited the names of their masters, the names considered here are particularly not Afrikaans nor Dutch in origin which suggests they were perhaps recent European immigrants. Consider, for example, the names listed on the valuation report for Wells Square prepared in 1918 as found in KAB CCC 3/CT-4/1/3/97 and those contained in a petition in 1915 to the Town Clerk as found in KAB CCC 3/CT-4/1/3/97 (31/3): Improvements to Wells Square 1915–1918. 55 Cape Times 20 May 1911: ‘Counting Heads.’ 56 Cape Argus 17 January 1923: ‘Suicide of the White Race.’ Quote from a speech by Mrs Dawes, town councillor for Aliwal North, given at the Women’s Enfranchisement League Conference. 57 Cape Times 7 February 1922: ‘A Tour of the Shebeens.’ 58 Cape Argus 19 October 1918: ‘The Home.’ 59 KAB CCC Mayors Minute, 8 September 1932, Appendix 6: Housing Survey, Interim Report, p.4 footnote. 60 Ibid., p.4. 61 Union Government4-1920: Report of the Housing Committee, p.12. 62 Daunton makes the point that it was the highly differentiated internal space of English dwellings that was unusual at the time, see Daunton, M.J., House and Home in the Victorian City. Working-Class Housing 1850–1914, (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), p.57. 63 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 1, no. 3, (October, 1917): ‘A Hotbed of Horrors.’ 64 Cape Times 7 February 1922: ‘A Tour of the Shebeens.’ 65 Cape Times 13 February 1922: ‘A Terrible Indictment.’

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66 Cape Times 8 February 1922: ‘The Opium Dens of District Six.’ 67 Cape Argus 19 October 1918: ‘The Home.’ 68 For a similar reading of London’s slums see Evans, R., ‘Rookeries and Model Dwellings: English Housing Reform and the Moralities of Private Space.’ 69 Loubser, A.G.H., De Achterbuurten van Kaapstad, (Stellenbosch: Pro Ecclesia-Drukkerij, 1921), p.31. Author’s translation. 70 KAB CCC 3/CT-4/2/1/3/103 (5465): Unauthorized Structures. 71 KAB CCC 3/CT-4/1/5/1248 (N75/5): Natives, Alleged Squatting of: Kensington Estate, Maitland, Retreat, Muizenberg, Kalk Bay, 1922-1923, letter from Shadick Higgins to Town Clerk dated 31 October 1923. 72

KAB NA457: CNL, Robert Wynne-Roberts (City Engineer).

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Part III Same/Suburb

It was Cecil Rhodes who recorded his ambition to see ‘More homes, more homes’ spring up as the white man conquered the desert. It is the province of us architects to give real effect to this ideal, and if we make the homes we build really beautiful English homes, becomingly furnished within and set outside in fair and orderly gardens, we shall be lending our small aid to further the work of our politicians. Herbert Baker, ‘South African Architecture.’ 1 Orderly housing is a prerequisite of proper control, whereby vagrants and parasites who always flourish in slum conditions can be cut out. This scheme to house all workers under control, co-ordinated with the control of influx, which must be made effective by means of the labour bureaux ... will radically improve the conditions of the Native populations of the towns. Hendrik Verwoerd, ‘Speech to Senate,’ 30 May 1952.2

Apartheid was always more than the sum total of its brutality and injustice. It was an absurd fantasy. Proliferating flurries of Kafkaesque legislation3 were evidence of the impossibility of its dream: to have a country belonging solely to white people served by black people. The metastasizing policies of segregation and control spun endlessly around the hopelessness of overcoming that contradiction. The failed ‘homeland’ system, or ethnic states within the state, evidences this absurdity at the macro scale; to be a servant requires some cohabitation in space, it requires physical presence rather than the complete absence the ‘homeland’ promised. Where and how people live in and around cities was the battleground on which the contradictions of the apartheid fantasy raged. Consequently housing projects, apart from reproducing the means of production, acted as proxies for the fantasies of the state, testing the viability of the apartheid project itself and its claim to normality and rationality.4 Housing was the ambition through which all the tensions and contradictions of apartheid could be ‘resolved.’ Housing projects were totems enacting the impossible dream of apartheid while disorder within South Africa’s cities severely challenged it. Urban disorder

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kept on undermining the totemic potential of housing projects. Disorder interrupts the safe one-to-one mapping of word to thing, of concept to material reality. It introduces eddies and vortices in the easy flow of meaning. This is the power that material objects have beyond designation, the words that pin them down; moments of disorder – the unnameable Other – within the space of the city speak louder than words, although what they say is unclear. If the ordering impulse of ideology cannot be met in reality – within the limited utopian space of housing projects – discourse works hard to represent multivalent physical realities as singularities, as ‘slums’ or ‘Garden Cities.’ Discourse becomes the grid through which reality is filtered, assigning maladjusted subjects and spaces a taxonomic fixity, as the boundaries of the grid limit the latent energies threatening to disturb the fantasies of the state. The shaky foundations of shacks and ‘slums’ counter the heady fantasies of ideology forced into addressing, or disavowing, the unstable condition of its own body. Corralling people and things into bounded physical and/or epistemological territories allows the state to section off and ignore its own bodily ailments. To restate: where and how people lived was the fundamental problem vexing the fantasy of apartheid – and discourse was a necessary part of this, helping overcome the contradictions that housing projects could not. This problem preceded apartheid. Apartheid legislation was simply the conclusion of a process begun 50 years prior, in fact, with the first colonizing settlers. South African cities, such as Cape Town and Johannesburg, were founded on supposedly uninhabited5 land. Indigenous inhabitants were brought from rural areas to these cities without the means – in the settlers’ eyes – to live ‘properly’ in urban conditions, to live within the limits of the White city. The absence of an urban tradition of indigenous inhabitants,6 or rather, the absence of colonizing settlements at the point of indigenous towns or villages was, I would like to suggest, part of the reason for the eventual development of apartheid itself. It presented the acutest form of the question of where and how people were to live; the disordering presence of Natives within the space of the city led to extreme strategies of control and ultimately segregation to protect the project of Empire.7 It lead to the production of the city as a White space – a city that sections off unhealthy territories, identifies unknown conditions, excises foreign growths, locates people and things in reality in ways analogous to the hard profile of zoning maps. It is a precursor to the modernist or apartheid city; a city where people have their clearly defined places, where things are mapped singularly and unambiguously, one-to-one, from concept to thing. This closing part of this book sorts through the problem of where and how people were to live during the pre-apartheid era and how this produced the city as a White space. How the city of Cape Town was re-ordered and remade continually as the agents of Empire attempted to deal with the contradictions of colonialism. It also explores how discourse operated to overcome the gap between fantasy and reality, ideology and materiality. During the pre-apartheid era, the Garden City Movement was the rationalizing discourse through which the question of where and how people were to live was to be resolved – if not in deed, then at least in word. The housing question occupied the era, with the state in the UK becoming increasingly aware of its role in resolving the contradictions that the market had

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made manifest.8 As we shall see, many of the policies, motives and machinations of the Garden City Movement are, in essence, the same policies eventually deployed by the apartheid state. This is not surprising. The Garden City Movement emerged in England out of the same problem the apartheid fantasy manifested: where and how should people live? The urbanizing workforce of rural England in the early 1900s was an ‘alien’ presence to middle class suburbanites, as was the urbanizing black workforce in pre-apartheid Cape Town to the predominantly English administrators and politicos. The situation in Cape Town was different only by extremes brought about by the coincidence of class and race at the Cape. As we shall see in Chapter 7, the truth about the Garden City Movement – its panoptic logic and totalitarian potential normally veiled behind Arts and Crafts Romanticism – finds its full expression in the development of the segregated township of Langa alongside its Whites-only counterpart, Pinelands. Langa can arguably be considered an example of Homi Bhabha’s ‘mimic men’9 – close enough to the colonial model, but too Native to be ‘correct’ – even if it was constructed by the agents of Empire rather than Natives themselves. For Bhabha, the mimic man is the mirror in which Whiteness recognizes its own tenuous construction and potential unravelling. In that sense, this chapter traces the anxious moves of Empire as it tries to wrestle Garden City ideals and English values into the mirror of how its Other subjects should live in pre-apartheid Cape Town. Each twist of the frame produced distortions in the mirror, at times disturbing and, at other times, flattering and convincing – and often even twisting areas out of the frame of reference altogether. Garden City ideals cannot be dissociated from the general anti-urban sentiments and the sense of urban disorder that galvanized them. In that sense, the story of the Garden City Movement in Cape Town is not only that of Arts and Crafts Englishness and cottages but also the story of the initial slum clearances of District Six. Consequently, the first chapter of this final part of the book will examine a small area of District Six knows as Wells Square which came under attack from 1915 onwards until it was completely erased some 20 years later. This led to small housing projects developed along the way to Pinelands and Langa such as the Maitland Garden Suburb and a housing scheme in Roeland Street. These instances are part of the same overall story that Part III seeks to tell: that the question of where and how people should live in pre-apartheid Cape Town was where the contradictions of the colonialism of Empire – its ambitions to have its exploited subjects simultaneously present and absent – were attempted to be resolved. Apartheid was simply the next step in this process.

Notes 1

Cape Times 15 May 1905: ‘South African Architecture.’

2

Pelzer, A. (Ed.), Verwoerd Speaks: Speeches 1948–1966, (Johannesburg: APB Publishers, 1966), p.45, cited in Japha, D., ‘The Social Programme of the South African Modern Movement,’ in Judin, H. and Vladislavic, I., Blank – Architecture, Apartheid and After (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1998), p.432.

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3

Prohibition of Mixed Marriages (1949), Immorality Act (1950), Population Registration Act (1950), Group Areas Act (1950), Suppression of Communism (1950), Bantu Building Workers (1951), Separate Representation of Voters (1951), Prevention of Illegal Squatting (1951), Bantu Authorities (1951), Natives Laws (1952), Pass Laws (1952), Native Labour (Settlement of Disputes) (1953), Bantu Education (1953), Reservation of Separate Amenities (1953), Natives Resettlement (1954), Group Areas Development (1955), Natives (Prohibition of Interdicts) (1956), Bantu Investment Corporation (1959), Extension of University Education (1959), Promotion of Bantu Self-Government (1959), Coloured Persons Communal Reserves (1961), Preservation of Coloured Areas (1961), Urban Bantu Councils (1961), Terrorism Act (1966), Coloured Persons Representative Council (1968).

4

See Derek Japha’s study of the apartheid/modernist success of the 51/9 housing model, Japha, D.,‘The Social Programme of the South African Modern Movement,’ in Judin, H. and Vladislavic, I., Blank – Architecture, Apartheid and After (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1998).

5

The migratory patterns of ownership of the Cape by the Khoi were lost on the original settlers as noted by Worden, N., ‘Space & Identity in VOC Cape Town,’ in Kronos, no. 25, (1998/1999), pp.72–87 and Guelke, L., and Shell, R., ‘Landscape of Conquest: Frontier Water Alienation and Khoikhoi Strategies of Survival, 1652–1780, Journal of Southern Africa Studies, vol. 18, no. 4, (December 1992), pp.803–24.

6

The existence of a pre-colonial urban tradition in Southern Africa is well documented although colonial settlement never coincided geographically with them. For an understanding of Tshwana settlements see Maggs, T.M.O.C., ‘Bilobial Dwellings: A Persistent Feature of Southern Tswana Settlements Source,’ Goodwin Series, no. 1, (June, 1972), pp.54–64.

7

See Minkley, G., ‘“Corpses behind screens:” Native Space in the City,’ in Judin, H. and Vladislavic, I., Blank – Architecture, Apartheid and After (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1998) for the way these problems played out in East London.

8

See Swenarton, M., Building the New Jerusalem: Architecture, Housing and Politics 1900–1930, (Watford: IHS-BRE, 2008) for a recent review of this.

9

Bhabha, H., ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,’ October, 28 (1984), pp.125–33.

6 Models of the Self: ‘Model’ Cottages, Slum Clearance and the Garden City Movement

As part of The Argus newspaper’s Modern Homes Exhibition in 1933, a ‘model’ house was constructed on the stage of the Cape Town City Hall at full scale.1 Occupying centre stage of Cape Town as it did, the house gained an exhilarating ideological charge. More significantly, the exhibition was opened by the flick of a switch in London which lit this particular house up, throwing its light around the City Hall. Apart from the symbolism involved in this particularly English en-lightening of the Cape, it is easy to acknowledge the currents of power running from the metropole to the outposts of the Empire being directly activated by this event. But these were ideological currents too, connecting this house on centre stage with a long line of ‘model cottages’ running all the way back to another exhibition, the Great Exhibition2 of 1851 where Prince Albert placed his own ‘model cottage’ on display near the Crystal Palace. The English had a penchant for cottages, but more importantly, for cottages as models for living – especially for the working class. With the flick of a switch then, we find the agents of Empire in South Africa charged with the task of fulfilling this lineage. Tellingly, Prince Albert’s model cottage was a fine specimen on public display only a few years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Both offered strong positions on the impact that the physical environment has on ‘species,’ whether working horse or working class. Certainly, the notion that the environment had a fundamental effect, good or bad, on an individual was present throughout the age of Empire and its endless production line of ‘model’ cottages. Environmental determinism flipped between the negative influence of the slums and the wholesome world of imagined ‘model’ dwellings and villages where buildings were considered instruments in the process of proper socialization. From the factoryvillage housing of Bournville and Port Sunlight to the Garden City Movement, the weight of expectation of building a better society began to be increasingly loaded onto the framework of buildings themselves, testing the very foundations of architecture. The strength and development of ‘the Nation,’ the eradication of crime, instructions in ‘civilization,’ as well as civic duty and moral character, were thought to be formed through the dwelling and environment. Even innocuous

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‘beauty’ – perhaps the originating disinterested sponsor of architecture – was co-opted into the service of the common good with the belief that it could transform and ‘uplift’ the sensibility of the poorer classes and bring them in line with ‘normal’ bourgeois values. The intentional effort to socialize people through specific building arrangements and environments is best summarized by the word ‘instrumentality’ which had, in this case of Imperial Cape Town, the desire to universalize and normalize the values of the English middle class. Exactly how this was to be achieved, as we shall see in the examples below, ranged from the notional to the specific; from written representations and graphic visualizations to imagining Otherness away and literal plans structuring the erasure of Otherness. Replaced, of course, by the values of Englishness. Standish Meacham, in Regaining Paradise,3 investigates the way a vision of Englishness informed the products of the Garden City Movement – its Arts and Crafts cottages and medieval villages – and the way those products themselves were intended to strengthen a sense of Englishness. One of the key points he makes is that the Garden City Movement proponents, through their social reform program, were instrumental in the establishment and reinforcement of an English identity that was particularly anti-urban.4 Not only did the Garden City Movement valorize the English rural landscape, but it tended to valorize a pre-industrial landscape in the vein of the historicist visions of Pugin. Again, in Regaining Paradise, Meacham argues that precursor Garden City Movement projects, such as Port Sunlight and Bournville, presented a ‘sanitized and Romanticized version of life as it had been. In their governance and, probably more important, in the way daily life was dominated by the presence of their beneficent founders, they longed for paternalistic hierarchical relationships from the past.’5 With the advent of the Garden City Movement the working classes of England had begun to find themselves the ‘victims’ of a strange vision of modernity that looked to the English medieval past for models and methods – a ready-made social-spatial order – aimed at curtailing their libidinal energy and co-opting them as role-playing extras in the anachronistic scenographic pageantry of Englishness. So it is not surprising to read in the administrative archives of the City of Cape Town strongly anti-urban, paternalist and hierarchical attitudes in the instrumentalist housing projects orchestrated by the agents of Empire aimed – particularly, but not solely – at the city’s Coloured population. Certainly the desire to produce, through the instrument of housing, a class of people approaching some of the values of the English middle class was a matter of self interest; the notion of ‘class raising’ could help secure a stable labour force and also increase the level of commodity consumption in the population. As the then Archdeacon of Cape Town, Sidney Lavis, noted ‘… a decently housed, physically fit, morally developed coloured community cannot be otherwise than an economic and social gain to the state.’6 Similarly, the Union Government’s Secretary for Labour noted his desire in a letter to the Town Clerk to have the Coloured population of the Peninsula properly housed

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with a view to promoting conditions which will tend to raise it in the scale of civilisation. It is the belief of the Council that the coloured population, if not throughout all sections, at least in a good many sections, has in it the makings of a good class of citizen, and that all sections can be definitely raised under more favourable conditions of housing and other social and educational considerations.7

‘More favourable conditions of housing’ indeed. In 1925 the Woodstock magistrate declared: ‘Crime in the Peninsula was largely due to bad housing,’8 and went on to state that: ‘I am certain that healthy housing has saved many a youth from being inoculated with a virus which has led to his becoming a charge upon the criminal administration of the State. By permitting the contrary, we are sterilising better stocks, increasing low types, and impoverishing national fitness.’ Notwithstanding the imperatives of ‘enlightened self-interest’ the tinges of eugenic ‘sterilizing’ in the magistrate’s tirade brings the ‘housing question’ out of simple instrumentalist ambitions and back into the realm of Englishness and the play of identity politics. As I have shown in the previous chapter, parts of Old Cape Town were considered places of disorder and a threat to the emerging racial order of South Africa. As the ‘mother city’ Cape Town had long had a reputation as a cosmopolitan town with supposedly9 liberal attitudes to race, largely, due to the close relationship between Coloureds or its creole population and the original colonizers. But the territorially-embedded history of these people within the space of the city undermined the agents of Empire’s hardening taxonomies of race and order. The literal and figurative proximity of places such as District Six, and its racially mixed inhabitants, to the centre of Cape Town threatened the tenuous dominance of the colonizers and the hierarchically-ordered project of Empire. The city’s Others needed to be reorderd into a state of being more in alignment with the coordinates of Englishness, into a state less threatening to the values of Englishness. And the city itself needed to be dismantled and reconstructed into a set of suburbs in alignment with the taxonomies of race and order. What follows is an exploration of how the anti-urban values of Englishness were inscribed into the surface of the city in projects both real and imagined. Our closing engagement with these values of Englishness is an investigation into what constituted – and what did not constitute – the models of the Self and, most importantly, their impact on the remaking of the domestic space of Cape Town into suburbia and thence the remaking of the city’s Others into a more neutered Same.

Historical Background to the Housing Problem Of course I am not underplaying how issues of health were used to legitimize the early racial segregation of cities in South Africa10 initially with the plague in 1901 and the Spanish ’flu pandemic in 1918. These events punctuated a growing sense of unease for the agents of Empire that there was a threatening Otherness, as signified through the ‘slums,’ festering from within.

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Prior to the early 1920s, the domestic space of Others had indeed entered into public debate and concern,11 but it was only in the 1920s that it became a major, if not the, social issue of the time. Aside from Ndabeni – Cape Town’s first spatially segregated housing ‘location’ for Natives – the early years of Imperial Cape Town show a somewhat limited interest in housing and slum conditions, even though cities in England had begun to focus on these problems through the implementation of the Housing and Working Class Act in 1890. Not forgetting the Dutch East India Company’s slave lodge of the 1600s, the Workmen’s Metropole on Prestwich Street, built in 1896 for 200 (Coloured) labourers was the first City Council housing project in Cape Town.12 Apart from this, and a rejected proposal in 1904 for two tenement schemes in Lion and Roeland Streets,13 there is little evidence of public funded housing projects during the Imperial era until the end of the First World War. The projects of the 1920s are generally thought to have their impetus in the country- and world-wide influenza epidemic of 1918 following which a combination of self-interest and philanthropy are thought to have led to public support for slum removals, better housing and the Housing Act of 1920. This support was due to a combination of first-hand experience by middle-class relief workers and journalists visiting the slums in an attempt to investigate and understand the causes of the outbreak.14 Even though the influenza epidemic had the effect of bringing housing and slum questions to a head, prior to this epidemic there had been an increasing official interest, concern and investigation of the living conditions of various communities and places within South Africa and the Cape Peninsula. This mapping of conditions began in earnest with the Tuberculosis Commission of 1914, which considered the effects and conditions of dwelling space on the spread of the disease. The impetus for, and debates around, the Public Health Act of 1919 and the abandoned Unhealthy Areas Bill c.1920, also illustrate the importance that the Union Government attached to housing conditions prior to the influenza epidemic. In Cape Town itself, in May 1917, an Overcrowding Sub-Committee had been formed out of the standing Special Committee, a year before the influenza epidemic hit the city. As we shall see, this Sub-Committee had been formed almost exclusively to deal with the fairly dense area in Old Cape Town that was known as Wells Square. This Sub-Committee went on to become the Housing and Estates Committee in 1919 and was the main Council organ responsible for the housing programmes of the city. Apart from the influenza epidemic of 1918, there are other reasons as to why issues of identity concerning housing and slum conditions may have come to a head in the early 1920s. The growing interest in living conditions prior to the influenza epidemic indicates an awareness of the pressure on the existing housing stock due to the increase in population living in Cape Town. This population increase was thought to come from two sources, namely the immigration of Natives to the city following the limiting of tribal land by the Natives Land Act of 1913, as well as an increase in the number of ‘poor whites’ from rural areas due to the effects of drought. By 1922 the increased visible presence of Natives in the space of the city was such a pressing issue the Cape Times stated that ‘there are streets in Cape Town which already resemble Kafir locations of the very worst type.’15 This increase was due to

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the Ndabeni location – explored in greater detail in the next chapter – reaching its saturation and magistrates refusing to turn Natives out of overcrowded lodgings on account of there being no alternative accommodation for them.16 This period also coincided with the end of the First World War during which little construction had occurred and during which many former dwellings had been converted into stores and offices or demolished for development.17 What houses had been built were largely for the middle class leaving little new infrastructure for immigrants.18 The possible co-habitation of members of different races and the threat to the unity of an emerging White national identity added further complications and impetus to the slum and housing ‘questions.’ The provision of housing – once the dalliance of religious men and philanthropists in England and Scotland – became a state obligation in the UK thanks in part to the Tudor Walters Report of 1917; the First World War had directed the supply of building materials and activities away from speculative housing developments and the lack of housing for demobbed soldiers raised the spectre of Bolshevism as a threat to established social order. In the early part of the twentieth century, the Union Government and the municipality of Cape Town followed the lead of English housing legislation and housing programmes – for example, in the establishment of the Central Housing Board – aimed at dealing with similar housing concerns in the city. And the Spanish ’flu epidemic of 1918, which correlated contagion with spatial density, had the effect of bringing the housing problem to the public at large. It all meant the question of where and how people were to live became a major part of popular and architectural discourse in South Africa at the time.

The ‘Home’ and the Illegitimacy of ‘Other’ Dwelling Types and Building Materials During the 1920s, the increasing development of blocks of flats in cities around the country was a noteworthy phenomenon. But more so, it was a cause for alarm, especially evident in the reports prepared by the Architect, Builder & Engineer which were largely generated around social rather than aesthetic concerns. Quite simply, blocks of flats were considered unable to support and cultivate ‘a family life.’19 Exactly why that should be was never explicitly stated and was perhaps thought to be too obvious to need any further explanation or analysis. The lack of a private garden no doubt played a major part in this perception. Perhaps the spatiallycompressed transition from public to private realms was recognized in the patterns that flat-dwelling produced and was seen as problematic. Or perhaps flats lacked the litany of rooms fundamental to the activities of homemaking, as we have noted in the previous chapter. Much more telling was the way in which flat-dwelling was recognized as a direct threat to Englishness itself. The journal noted: ‘In the first place, one of the most disturbing results of the flat-dwelling habit has been to discourage home building, while it also tends to destroy much of that atmosphere of family life which one has been taught to regard as so essentially British.’20 Exactly what phrases such as ‘home building’ and ‘atmosphere of family life’ meant is up for interpretation.

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They may point to an idea of the quintessential English cottage – a space occupied by individuals involved in quiet activities such as needlework and reading, with the tick-tock of the grandfather clock, and wistful wisps of smoke out of the chimney. Whatever the mental image conjured, what was being implied was that to live in a flat was to assist in the destruction of values that can be considered essentially English21 whereas to live in a single-family detached unit was to continue the essence of being English. To construct the Self as the identity of Englishness, to construct a home required the correct physical backdrop, the correct building type. And the flat was not it. Another explanation explored in the article was that flats were attractive to members of the middle class who had no family or children and were consequently to be viewed with much suspicion. The Architect, Builder & Engineer saw fit to comment on the increasing claim of flat-seekers that they had ‘no children’ (so as to more easily secure leases) with the following judgement: ‘It does seem extraordinary that in South Africa, a country crying out for settlers of the right type, there should be any tendency or encouragement to check the natural growth of its own middle-class population.’22 The ‘logic’ operating here was that if there were no flats to encourage solo living or couples without children, there would be more English middle-class, child-rich families living in Cape Town. Or the corollary of the statement would be that, were potential flat dwelling and childless members of the middle class to live in single-family detached dwellings, the dwelling type would, perhaps by some necessity of its ‘family-ness’ and garden, give rise to a house brimming with offspring. The article goes on to demand that architects and town planners use all their influence in the development of the city ‘on the right lines for the moral and physical comfort of future generations of citizens.’ Being professionally involved in the development of flats was cast as being involved in something potentially immoral and threatening to the very safety and security of the middle class (read, White and English) in South Africa. And, again, the corollary sentiment would be that to develop and produce freestanding cottages would be to strengthen morality and bolster the dominance of the middle class. Flats were also, quite simply, considered the very basis for the development of the world’s slums. The Cape Times reported on the 1910 International Town Planning Conference in London that ‘American experts [had] attributed the growth of slums and unhealthiness of many of their cities to the baneful system of flats.’23 As a possible ‘solution’ to the emerging housing problem then, the flat as a typology was unacceptable. As the Durban correspondent of the Architect, Builder & Engineer put it, ‘one of the first principles of a healthy municipality is to house its population well and a community of flat dwellers cannot by any means be considered well housed.’24 Whilst considering flats to have been born out of necessity during a time of limited housing stock, the author went on to predict, somewhat wishfully, that they ‘would die a natural death as time goes on.’ The biggest and possibly most significant condemnation of the development of flats came from the Union Government’s Central Housing Board. As we shall see, it assisted the Municipality of Cape Town in providing funds for the development of a block of flats in District Six in the early 1930s, but considered that to be a special circumstance whilst confirming that ‘generally the Board does not favour flats.’25

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To support their position on the matter, the Central Housing Board, which originated out of the 1919 Housing Commission, made the point that ‘The trend in Great Britain is entirely against flats and in favour of separate dwellings and garden plots.’ This deference to the norms and trends of ‘home’ not only illustrates the reality of England as the reference point and source of ideas but that connections were continually being made actively re-inscribing an English identity in South Africa. As a final deference to the authority of the metropole of Empire, the report quotes extensively from Raymond Unwin: Sir Raymond Unwin, Past President of the Royal Institute of British Architects and an outstanding authority in the world on town planning, states inter alia:‘The steady trend of housing progress in this country for forty or fifty years has been towards more open development and less crowding of dwellings. Starting with the pioneer work at Bournville, Port Sunlight, Earswick, Letchworth, and other places, the conviction rapidly spread to all interested in housing that the cottage home with its garden is not only the best form of dwelling for the people generally, but that it is the most economical, and that its general provision is practicable.’ ‘Visitors from other countries where the tenement or skyscraper types of housing prevail envy England her cottage habit.’ ‘The English people retain their love of individuality for themselves and their family life which springs largely from their cottage homes.’ ‘They dislike the “herd” life and the “herd” mind which tenement existence is liable to foster.’ ‘No one who has compared life in a tenement block with that in a cottage, with its little garden, in which the children play and where the elders find pleasant occupation and escape from the many occasions for embarrassment and irritation which must arise in cramped domestic life, can for one moment rank life in a flat – however modern in construction and up-to-date in equipment – as comparable to that in the cottage for its value as a dwelling place.’ ‘Much may be done undoubtedly to improve the conditions in flats and tenements. The securing of a small open-air balcony as a necessary attachment for every flat would of itself be an enormous boon as would the arrangement of the blocks so that there is, in addition to a place for children to play, some little patch of common garden where people can sit and enjoy a little natural beauty and variety.’ 26

The report ended with the bald statement that ‘the South African race will not be built up in flats’27 – not forgetting that ‘the South African race’ was the newly represented White race group. This was not to suggest that the single-family detached dwelling was considered to be the sole province of the White ‘nation’ as a way of wresting the recently urbanized poor Whites from the dangerous heterogeneity of the slums; flats, quite simply, were considered abhorrent to any ‘normal’ or ‘decent’ way of living, and this sentiment cut across the emerging racial lines at the time, albeit with differing outcomes. A report on Herbert Baker’s paper on ‘Town Planning,’ at the Conference on Imperial Health held in London by the Victoria League in 1914, sums up the particularly English sentiment against tenements:

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The British people have one fortunate tradition in their favour. This is the principle of the ‘one house one family’ – the cottage instead of the tenement unit – enshrined in their boast that ‘Every Englishman’s house is his castle.’ Fortunately a sound British prejudice has prevented its introduction to any serious extent into the colonies.28

A middle-class prejudice, that is to say. Some 15 years later Cape Town City Councillor, Mrs Horwood, in considering a fledgling scheme for subsidized housing for the poorer classes, requested that the type of dwelling needed to be stipulated in the application as ‘it was not desirable that subsidies should be granted for the erection of tenement buildings.’29 However, two years later, and despite general opposition from other members of the Housing & Estates Committee, she came out in support of a tenement scheme for the city centre30 – albeit on the condition that municipal housing schemes in general needed to be managed and controlled on site by a council employee. This emerging ambivalence over the need to accommodate flats as a typology can also be noted in the communications of the Citizens’ Housing League (hereafter CHL). Perhaps realizing the real insistence of the inner-city poor for dwellings near their place of employment, the Housing Committee received a letter in July 1927 from Bishop Lavis requesting the chance to secure a site from the municipality on which to conduct an experiment involving a two or a three storey tenement containing ten flats or houses. A little more than two months later the CHL reported to the Housing Committee that they were ‘strongly opposed to any form of tenement building.’31 The reasons given were that there was an ‘instinctive dislike … universal among the poor’ as well as the notion that ‘privacy, individuality and home feeling cannot be obtained except in a separate house.’ The intention to impart values of Englishness through housing cannot be more clearly spelt out. The spatiality involved here needs to be made explicit. With the physically separate house comes the mediation of a separating space that produces in its isolation the possibilities of privacy and individuality. The gate and the garden fence are the real threshold of the house. The tenement, on the other hand, with its stairwells and its spatial proximity of units, was more likely to produce an immediacy of contact, working class solidarity, and communal interaction. As a White national identity was being wrested from the bulk of local history, the possibility of tenements to increase miscegenation and interracial interaction would potentially undermine a unified White ‘nation.’ Even as sentiment began to change regarding the need for tenements, the single-family detached dwelling still won out on account of its segregationist possibility. At a meeting to consider the Central Housing Board’s proposal for subsidized housing, the Mayor was minuted as being not in favour of the erection of tenement buildings as conditions in Capetown could not be compared with those overseas where there was not a mixed population to contend with. He suggested that for the present no proposals in this direction should be considered at all.32

In this sentiment he was not alone. At the conclusion of Housing Week in 1929, the Cape Times asked the question: ‘Are the slums going to be replaced by model dwellings?’33 Notwithstanding the fact that it reported the successes of

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higher density housing developments in Europe it suggested that the Garden City approach was ‘more suitable for our population of mixed races and colours.’ Although no explanation was given, it can be assumed that the possibilities of ‘contact’ would be greatly reduced in the isolationist space of the Garden City. The tenement, on the other hand, presented, through its compression of space and closer adjacencies of neighbours, the potential for chance interaction across colour lines and the possible forging of a non-racial working class. The density and communality that tenements or flats were thought to foster was particularly worrying for the agents of Empire and generally thought to foster slums. Even single storey row-houses or terraces were considered problematic. Although there had been an unbuilt proposal for terraces for the working classes by the Council in 1905, this kind of accommodation had long been considered problematic as a housing type for the working classes by a variety of people. This is borne out in the Presidential address of the CIoA in 1907, wherein Parker urged architects to get more involved with the design of working class houses. If one were asked what is the worst kind of building we have in the city to-day? I think the answer would be ‘The dwellings of the labouring and working classes.’ This class of building has never received proper attention in this town, and the demand for houses of this kind, during the recent time of prosperity, created whole rows and streets of them, very little better than the old style of houses.34

Before leaving this section on the flat, the tenement, and the terrace as the ‘wrong’ model for the Self, note that the antipathy toward any dwelling that was not in some general sense a replica of the English cottage and its low density extended to the use of building materials and construction techniques in general. Again, that Cape journal of architectural Englishness, the Architect, Builder & Engineer, flew the flag of Empire in an article on Chinese houses. Here George Cecil found it curious that the Chinese had not ‘been taught a lesson’35 and taken up European designs and methods given the immediate availability of the European examples in Hong Kong and elsewhere: ‘The houses in the treaty settlements show the latest in Western architecture; those which form the adjoining native quarter might have been built six hundred years ago.’36 This antipathy to strange building types and construction techniques was especially true of those materials considered to be ‘temporary’ – notwithstanding the aesthetic crime perpetrated by corrugated iron users. Another excerpt from an article in the Architect, Builder & Engineer – un-ambivalently titled ‘Freak Houses’ – is a good illustration of this: Recently there has been some discussion in the Press, both overseas and here, of cheaper methods in building houses, and someone has put forward the suggestion of adopting a Japanese idea of erecting paper houses; to make them more or less weather-proof they would have to be oiled. This scheme seems to have a certain amount of popular fancy, and the result is there are all sorts of amateurs bringing forward suggestions for cheap houses, varying from brick to pise and in the intermediate stages are glass, wood, iron, tin, asbestos, oiled silk, etc., almost varying from the present state to the snow hut of the Eskimos.

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There is no getting away from the fact that wherever one may go there are oddly built houses, but they do not conform to any idea of stability. Whilst they may meet a present need or a hollow pocket they are not buildings in the true sense of the word, even though they may conform to an architectural setting as far as the surrounding background is concerned. To any one who has visited Bakoven, Clifton, and Melkbosch Strand and one or two other seaside resorts, it is really appalling to see the weird erections and they are likely to last for some time before they are pulled down. All credit may be given to the owner for doing the best he can on a limited purse, purely from an artistic and serviceable view-point, but the fact remains that many of these buildings are solely temporary, and may therefore be classed as freak houses.37

The quote illuminates some of the values associated with Englishness and architecture. For example, the title ‘Freak Houses’ and the notion that they were held in ‘popular fancy’ echoes the suggestion that there was a certain fascination with these Other building materials. Yet it also hints at a kind of repulsion at their deformities, the reflection of the Home disfigured – in line with the fascination Englishness held for the deformities of London’s ‘Elephant Man’ and other East End horrors. The hierarchical arrangement of building materials, from the most ‘stable’ brick to the most ‘unstable’ mud, is particularly interesting given the general association of mud with Native dwellings – indigenous building techniques were obviously not valid answers to the housing question. The phrase ‘buildings in the true sense of the word’ is perhaps key in the above quote because it captures the polarity of legitimacy and illegitimacy that operated within the value judgements made of all dwellings. This was not to say that the idea of experimenting with new or old technologies was not actively considered, as it was in the housing programmes underway in England.38 Indeed, the Central Housing Board occasionally made overtures to that effect, yet always condemned materials other than ‘solid’ brick, and occasionally, allowing concrete into the mix.

Competitions, Exhibitions, Models and Public Events On Saturday 12 August 1929, a lorry and a motorcar were driven through the streets of Cape Town (Figure 6.1). The lorry, carrying a ‘dilapidated tin hut’39 culled from the wilds of the Cape flats, was a point of ridicule and shame. The motorcar, on the other hand, was re-crafted into a kind of twee cottage-on-wheels with the Afrikaans phrase ‘Wat Die Volk Nodig Het’ (what the people need) painted on the side. Despite the choice of language, the spectacle was all about staging Englishness. The Cape Times ran a caption interpreting the Afrikaans phrase as ‘What Many Need – A Model Cottage’ – a conviction much stronger than the flimsy board the model of the ‘model’ was made of; the ‘flimsy’ corrugated iron shack was ironically more solid and real than the ‘brick’ cottage draped over the sides of the car. Both were part of a parade, part of the ‘Housing Week’, organized by the City Council who had turned the interior of the City Hall into a spectacle of horror and hope. Charities and other interested organizations decked the interior of the City Hall with depictions of slum dwellings painted on canvasses. Films of slums and

6.1  Cape Town Housing Week parade – from shacks to model cottages

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6.2 Central Housing Board, Report dated 31 December 1920, plan Type 1, threeroomed semi

slum life ran constantly. Although the City’s Public Health and Building Regulations Committee (PH&BRC) had been promoting Health Weeks during the 1920s (keeping in line with themes generated in London),40 this was the first event focused specifically on slums and housing. The Housing Week, given much credence at the official opening ceremony by the attendance of Princess Alice and Dr Malan – the Minister of the Interior and Education and apartheid South Africa’s first Prime Minister in 1948 – pointed to the perceived seriousness of the housing problem in ruling circles. Yet again, the cottage as ‘model’ was the star of the show. In as much as the ‘model cottage’ floated around the streets of Cape Town in parades, it also haunted other representations and contexts such as the Central Housing Boards’ first annual report of 1920. Here, as Annexure C of the report, was a set of model plans for adequate house types prioritized for funding (Figure 6.2). They were not exactly blueprints for municipalities as much as models against which municipal engineers and architects might evaluate their own designs before applying to the Central Housing Board for financial assistance. These were sent to all municipalities in South Africa in a memorandum.41 The plans were all semidetached dwellings – a minor compromise by the Board over the cottage as the ‘correct’ way of living – specifically restricted to single-family units with a minimum of three rooms. The labelling of the plans scrupulously prescribes activities and functions as an antidote to the motley undifferentiated character the official gaze ascribed to the domestic space of Others. But it was in competitions for ‘ideal’ or ‘model’ homes, often sponsored by newspapers and journals, that the ‘model cottage’ was established as the ‘correct’ manner in which to live. Newspapers even sponsored garden competitions.42 The winning entries are all single-family detached units and the designs tend to be focused on achieving this ideal without undue financial and cultural compromise. One of the earliest was the Cape Argus ‘Model House’ design competition of late 1922 and published in early 1923. The cost of each house was roughly £1,100 and way beyond the means of most of the urban poor. The ‘model house’ had three rooms, excluding the kitchen and a servant’s room, located on a standard suburban 50’ × 100’ plot. The results were typical of a ‘cottage’ in Arts and Crafts

6.3 The Cape Argus Model House competition, second place winner, J. Lockwood Hall.

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parlance. What is apparent from the designs, especially the second place winner, J. Lockwood Hall, was that the need for a hall was unquestionable no matter the ‘class’ of dweller or cost of the dwelling, given the presence of a live-in servant or maid (Figure 6.3).43 In South Africa’s White suburbia, this spatial segregation increased as the living quarters for the maid or servant moved over the years from inside the house to the back yard, typically as part of the garage. The unplaced but published entry of Martin Adams, a student at the recently established school of architecture at the University of Cape Town, was a design with a ‘cosy fireplace’ (as labelled on his plan) – a clear reference to one of the essentials of the Arts and Crafts movement. Promotion of ‘ideal’ or ‘model’ homes by newspapers and magazines was not limited to competitions. The Cape Argus newspaper ran an article titled ‘A £1,250 House: What Can be Done,’ signed ‘By a S. African Architect’. The article urged ‘small houses’ – ‘cottages’ and ‘bungalows’ – to be provided at a low cost, and, in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts, demanded that these eliminate the ‘superfluous and fanciful and to make use and clear expression of local materials and conditions.’ As a showcase of what was possible, given a limited budget and the minimum accommodation required, the article presented Walgate and Ellsworth’s design for G.A. van Oordt’s ‘cottage’ for Pinelands Garden City. The author commended the architects on their sympathetic use of ‘traditional local materials – thatch and plaster.’ Central to Arts and Crafts sentiment was that houses be simple, largely undecorated and, as they said, ‘not contorted to satisfy any false idea of the beautiful.’ In 1927, the Master Builders’ Association, seeking to promote their view of what low-cost housing should be, suggested a design that was simple in the extreme, lacking any Arts and Crafts sentiment and was reputed to cost £150. This ‘cottage’ was eventually built on the Parade, Cape Town’s largest public square, and consequently became known as the Parade Cottage or Parade House (Figure 6.4).44 Such a prestigious location highlights a deepening awareness of the housing question. It captured the public imagination and the Council, which had originally authorized the Cape Peninsula Building and Allied Trades Association to build the Parade Cottage on 28 July 1927 for a three-month period, happily extended this.45 When the Citizens’ Housing League proposed to take over the running and maintenance of the exhibition cottage in order to keep the model present in the public eye, the Housing Committee was granted permission46 by the City Council to provide them with a £6 monthly maintenance. The Parade Cottage became such a reference point that the Housing Committee, considering the Oude Molen and Devil’s Peak housing schemes, referred to the proposed houses as ‘Parade Cottages.’47 Not everyone supported the design of the cottage. The editor of the Architect, Builder & Engineer, whilst considering it better than the ‘wretched tenements in which our poorer citizens, both white and coloured, at present have their being,’ felt that it would be a ‘tragedy from the public expenditure and from the public interest point of view’ if hundreds were to be built.48 Though their objections related to poor planning in the use of space and concerns over the privacy of the inhabitants, and that the dwelling did not conform to building regulations, there is a sense that the complete lack of Arts and Crafts motifs was what Delbridge found

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6.4  ‘The Parade House’ on display on Cape Town’s Grand Parade

most problematic. The publication consequently promoted a counter-competition for low-cost houses (as will be discussed below), in which Arts and Crafts detailing was made more manifest. The ability of ‘art’ to ‘uplift’ the poorer sectors of the community,49 a link that the Arts and Crafts movement manifested in building design, was being promoted. At a meeting of the South African Guild of Arts and Crafts, at which W.J. Delbridge, handed over presidency to the architect Frank Kendall, the Secretary Arthur Cook championed the edifying benefits of art and urged all present to ‘hold themselves responsible for seeing that the children who were being born into such conditions [of the world today] were supplied with the right surroundings and influence, for these would materially alter their characters and their whole lives.’50 The Architect, Builder & Engineer’s ethical scorn for the Parade Cottage was most likely based on the loss of that ‘uplifting’ effect a more picturesque cottage would apparently have had on its occupants. Later that year, the Architect, Builder & Engineer ran a competition for housing for the ‘poorer classes,’ which, if 100 were constructed, the cost of each needed to be below £200, excluding the stove and drainage.51 The editor was aware of the need for three bedrooms in order to ‘house in decency and comfort the parents and the children of both sexes,’ but felt that the house was initially to have only two bedrooms and then be added to later. As part of the publication of the winning designs, Delbridge included the Architect, Builder & Engineer’s ‘entry’ (Figure 6.5). With a strong sense of functional detailing, he noted that ‘the narrow sides of the building do not contain any openings that could be overlooked and the privacy of the interior of the building thus destroyed,’ and further, that the ‘bedrooms are sufficiently far apart to ensure privacy.’ The most striking aspect of this ‘entry’ is its Arts and Crafts character, though this is manifested through the external appearance of the cottage alone – the lack of telltale ‘nooks’ or a ‘cosy’ on the plan suggests that expense-related Arts and Crafts concerns were jettisoned in favour of superficial image effects.

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6.5  The ‘entry’ of the AB&E to its own housing competition

The urban design aspects of the imagined housing scheme and ways of introducing variety in the appearance of the designs, such as the cul-de-sac of the Architect, Builder & Engineer house, remain telling. The ability for the first prize entry, designed by the architectural lecturer at the University of Cape Town, J.H. Brownlee, to produce variety in the landscape thanks to its ‘L’ plan form, was also noted as was the negative aspect being the use of corrugated iron for the roof so as to reduce the overall cost of the project (Figure 6.6). Although the plan could easily accommodate a semi-detached layout, this possibility was not commented on by Delbridge, nor was it considered in the overall project design; clearly the single-family detached unit was the only legitimate dwelling under consideration and aside from the Arts and Crafts detailing – the acme of Englishness – what the Architect, Builder & Engineer essentially presented as the housing model for the ‘poorer classes’ was a de facto suburb.

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6.6  Winner of the AB&E housing competition, J.H. Brownlee

Density: Municipal Structuring of Class and the Villa and Cottage as Ideal Aside from these limited ideological forays, the battle to remake Cape Town into a suburb of cottages and villas and the instrumental effect this would have on the structure of society as a whole was more fully dramatized in the administrative and legislative acts of the municipality. More to the point, the hierarchy of class evident in English society at the time was directly correlated with a hierarchy of building density – the more free-standing a dwelling the more it tended towards the ‘better class.’ In other words, zoning housing density was a useful official tool in the de facto protection of class interests while the zoning of class districts structured Cape Town itself. The relationship between class and building density was explicit in the building regulations of 1920. The CIoA, and in particular Frank Kendall, had given

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extensive input into their drafting, with 25 of their 28 suggested amendments included.52 Regulation 807 restricted the subdivision of estates to 4 to the gross acre for ‘important residential districts,’ 6 for ‘ordinary residential districts,’ 8 to 12 for ‘mixed districts’ and 12 for ‘shopping and industrial districts.’ Regulation 808 restricted the coverage of the site by built footprint: no more than one-quarter of the site was to be built upon in ‘important residential districts,’ one-third for ‘ordinary residential districts,’ and the rest were restricted to no more than one half. Exactly what determined the class of a residential district as ‘ordinary’ or ‘important’ was not laid out in the regulations and the City Engineer was most likely to take cues from already subdivided adjacent estates. Dismissing any doubt as to the underlying intentions of these density regulations to structure the class of a neighbourhood through restricting the type of building and the density of the neighbourhood, regulation 809 gave the Council the power to prohibit new buildings of a ‘character detrimental to the rest of the buildings on a subdivided estate’ while prohibiting ‘any building intended for use as shops, cottage property in terraces, licensed premises, places of amusement or buildings of the factory class in such districts as may be deemed expedient.’ Not only was class being structured through density regulations, it was inferred through building typologies and the nebulously defined ‘character’ of a building. Terrace houses associated with the poor and working classes were unceremoniously lumped together with other potential ‘nuisances’ of the city such as pubs and factories. As exemplified in the application for plans for terrace housing submitted by Mr A.J.F.B. Erustzen in Worcester Road, Walmer Estate, prior to the revised building regulations of 1920, the municipality could not control the extent of property subdivision and development or the ‘degeneration’ of a neighbourhood through densification. The PH&BRC regretted approving the application given that there were ‘some detached villas of a higher value’ in the vicinity and the project would prove ‘prejudicial to the property in the immediate neighbourhood.’53 They resolved to coax the applicant into substituting a ‘better class’ of dwellings than those proposed. With regulation 809 they now had the power to categorically refuse such developments and bring a class-based structure to the city. Plans submitted by J.E.C. Killey and Co. for six dwellings at a property off Avenue de Longueville, Sea Point, illustrates the values and machinations involved in the de-densifying of Cape Town. Although the application was initially refused due to the density set at six dwellings to a third of an acre, permission was granted when it was pointed out that there was nothing in the regulations preventing the owner from developing a block of flats on the site because ‘the Sub-Committee were of opinion it was preferable to have six small detached houses instead of a block of flats.’54 Approval was eventually rescinded following a site visit where it was agreed that the area should be classified as an ‘important residential district,’ which would put the maximum density at four to the acre.55 Low-density restrictions were also intended to have an impact on the city centre itself. When Mr C. Paitaki submitted plans for a development of about 20 properties to the acre near Milner Road and Buitengracht Street, the City Engineer pointed out that as an ‘ordinary’ residential district the maximum allowed would be 6 to the acre,

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whereupon the PH&BRC did not approve the plans.56 The problem facing the City Engineer was areas of the city that had been subdivided to a density greater than 12 to the acre before the 1920 regulations.57 In a meeting set up to deal with this, the Townships Board was resolute that ‘a density exceeding 12 houses to the acre will only create slums,’ and insisted that the regulations be revised to prohibit this occurring.58 When it was pointed out by J.Z. Drake of the PH&BRC that the lower densities disallowed the poorer classes affordable rents A.H. Cornish-Bowden, Surveyor General and Chairman of the Townships Board, retorted that with frontages as low as 16 feet ‘there was the aesthetical point of view to be considered, there was no provision in these small houses for a garden in front.’59 The issue was partially resolved by the Township Board requiring the approval of a subdivided estate before any plans could be submitted ensuring thereby that ‘correct’ densities were determined by minimum plot size rather than building plan approval.60 Restrictions on density were not only intended to structure class through the environment – whilst securing public health – but also to socialize families into middle-class values. The maximum density of 12 plots to the acre came close to, but did not necessarily add up to, a street of terrace houses and was generally the maximum density expounded by Garden City promoters such as Raymond Unwin. Furthermore, ample space was allowed for front and rear gardens – a key technology of Englishness. This was an ordering principle well-known to the Surveyor-General and Chairman of the Townships Board. In an article in the Architect, Builder & Engineer, he warned that developers wanted building regulations to allow 17 to the acre disallowing the ‘humanising influence which a small garden provides’ and forcing children to ‘adopt the streets as their playground.’61 He balked at the suggestion that housing schemes within the City proper should be permitted densities of 17 dwellings to the acre as they would ‘inevitably become slum properties in a few years.’62 The building regulations of 1920 were explicitly aimed at preventing the kind of dense social environment that characterized neighbourhoods such as District Six from developing. Technical specifications like street widths and the location of building lines were driven by concerns for maximizing light and air for dwelling spaces. In contrast to parts of District Six where buildings were often built at the property line, regulation 811 required a set-back of ‘not less than fifteen feet or not more than twenty-five feet in the case of main streets; and not less than ten feet or not more than twenty feet in the case of secondary streets,’ effectively instituting a front garden space. Regulation 814 defined a minimum street width by setting the distance between opposite property lines beyond 24 feet. Perhaps as an acknowledgement of the slum clearances that were to follow, regulation 816 even required new buildings to ignore existing building lines set down in the physical form of the street and set buildings back a minimum of 12 feet from the centre of the street for those streets less than 24 feet in width. Any existing alley was to be reorderd into the width of a minimum street as each new building project was developed with an eye to possible future slum clearances. Acknowledging the work undertaken to reorder Old Cape Town, regulation 818 explicitly allowed the Council to instruct owners to remove existing stoeps or other projections beyond the property line.

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With the building regulations of 1920 the City managed to develop a generalized system of structuring class while inculcating English suburban values across the entire corpus of the city. It was with their ad hoc Assisted Housing Schemes that they started to sketch in the details of this class-based structure of the city.

Housing legislation and the Assisted Housing Schemes After the First World War, the Cape Town municipality was involved in the administration and provision of individual houses through state- and provincialfunded schemes. These are the focus of this section. Thus two legislative events helped structure the domestic space and thence the identity of the Cape Peninsula, both of which were ostensibly crystallized as a result of the influenza epidemic of 1918. The Municipal Provision of Homes Ordinance of 191963 allowed municipalities to forward money to the working poor to purchase and build approved dwellings within the municipality. The loans were payable at 5 per cent interest per month provided the applicant could make an initial cash payment of 20 per cent of the projected land and building costs. The loans were restricted to families represented by ‘deserving’ male applicants who earned less than £360 per annum and who gained no less than four fifths of their income through ‘actual personal exertion.’ That the single-family detached unit was the imagined and only legitimate form of dwelling eligible for funding of this type is suggested in the definition given to ‘dwelling house:’ ‘Dwelling House’ includes the house and its appurtenances, necessary outbuildings, fences, and permanent provision for lighting, water-supply, drainage and sewerage, but does not include the land. ‘Family’ includes the parents or other relatives dependent on the applicant or borrower.

The ambition of the Ordinance was to help worthy working men ‘erect a dwellinghouse as a home for himself and his family, or, after erection or partial erection of a dwelling-house, to enlarge or complete the same’ [emphasis added]. Although the possibility existed for non-nuclear or extended-families to be included in the scheme, these had to be headed by a gainfully employed male. Inherent in the structure of the scheme – it being practically impossible to join-up with a neighbour and build a semi-detached dwelling – was the detached dwelling on its own separate plot. The Housing Act of 192064 was very similar to the Ordinance, but with countrywide reach. In this case the State would provide funds to local authorities for housing schemes that had been approved by the provincial administrator at the recommendation of the Central Housing Board. Although the Central Housing Board did not plan the housing schemes, it was specifically established by the Act to provide assistance and guidance to local authorities on the appropriateness of the schemes, even providing model plan types as we have seen earlier. It was only in 1933 that the interest rate on the Central Housing Board recommended loans

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was dropped to below prime – ‘sub-economic’ as it was called – effectively allowing subsidized housing for the poorer classes, especially for Natives. Until that point, the Provision of Homes Ordinance and the Housing Act were essentially only effective in providing houses – at the poorest end of the scale – for artisans who could keep up payments on the loan. Indeed, a certain amount of screening was implemented so as to prevent the municipality from losing money on the loans it made to those applying for assistance under the Act and Ordinance. These two policies were effective in, and possibly intended to, secure the position of the poor urban White population and achieve racial residential segregation.65 It is worth taking a closer look to see how the implementation of these individual house schemes (as opposed to housing projects) may have had a basis in the desire to structure the domestic space and identity of different class and racial groups in Cape Town. It is important to clarify the various mechanisms through which the City Council, through the Housing Committee, built these individual houses. Both the Ordinance and the Act allowed individuals to apply for loans made available through the Council, although the Act required funds to be provided through central government. In both cases the Housing Committee was burdened with the task of approving each individual design as it was submitted to them. The schemes were marked in their initial stages by a slow take-up; only two applications totalling £1,800 were submitted and approved by the Central Housing Board in 1923 out of an available amount for that year of £18,500.66 By May 1927 the two schemes were fairly effective in helping increase the working class or artisan’s housing stock: 321 homes were built through the Ordinance system and 163 through the Housing Act, dotted around the suburbs of Cape Town.67 The three-bedroom dwelling with its wooden floors and tiled roof at Belvedere Road in Claremont is a typical ‘cottage’ funded under the Provision of Homes Ordinance (Figure 6.7). There is no reason to believe that funds were denied on account of the race of the applicant and the intended neighbourhood for the development of the dwelling. As we have seen this was a class issue, structured by building regulations related to density and ‘class’ of dwelling and the appropriateness of the cottage to the existing neighbourhood. The schemes were clearly efforts aimed at ‘saving’ worthy families from degeneration, the latter happening due to their close association with degenerate types in the denser parts of Old Cape Town. Different conclusions can be made of the Municipality’s Assisted Housing Scheme in wood-and-iron that developed a few years after the Ordinance and the Act but which then ran concurrently with them. This scheme aimed to re-house those in the suburbs who were living in self-built and unlicensed dwellings. As we will see, the Assisted Housing Scheme was race and area specific in its allocation of funds. The scheme was first mooted in 1922 when two members of the PH&BRC reported on the increase in informal settlements in the Cape Flats areas and in particular Meadows Estate in Claremont. The report suggested that the mostly Coloured occupants had been turned out of the more populous areas of the city and had bought plots on the Estate in the belief that they could erect whatever dwelling they saw fit on the land. The following is an extract from Henshilwood and Somerville’s report:

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6.7 Cottage for Mr R. Delvin, 1922 under the Municipal Provision of Homes Ordinance

C. is a Municipal employee – Sanitary Cart. Has three plots purchased at same rates. Has a small hut of tin and wattle on each plot. Himself and two brothers and their families live in these huts. The huts are tumble down, dirty, and quite unfit for decent dwelling … It is easy to serve notices upon these people and to tell them they must either build proper houses – as approved by the Council or clear out. It is by no means certain that they can, or will, do either. They are their own architects and their own builders, and their ideas of house planning and house construction are not such as are likely to receive approval of our officials.68

For these City Councillors turning these occupants out of their dwellings ‘would be the essence of Municipal inhumanity,’ and suggested a scheme that eventually solidified as the Assisted Housing Scheme. Although they initially considered pisede-terre, the scheme was limited to wood-and-iron, and then later, brick. Applicants could choose from three standard designs ranging from one living and one bedroom to one living and three bedrooms depending on their income. The Council would erect the ‘cottages,’ as they were called, on land owned by the applicant or selected by the Council so as to replace the ‘hovels’ that were being lived in. In 1922, £10,000

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was voted to clear the Meadows Estate of the unauthorised dwellings.69 Applicants had to pay an initial £10 down-payment and then pay the Council a monthly rent on a hire purchase scheme. This gave the Council the opportunity to police and control the social space of those who lived, literally, at the margins of the city. In fact, this was included in the hire purchase agreement which required – as a notice advertising the scheme suggested – ‘keeping the place clean and tidy, and keeping the house in repair at the expense of the applicant, and about good behaviour,’ on pain of eviction and expulsion.70 The notice also made it clear that ‘the man the Council wishes to help is the decent man in regular work, and only such men will be accepted.’ Three testimonials were required as part of the application. A few examples of the applications show the inadequacy of the scheme in dealing with the reality of extended families and their mismatch to the model plans being developed. Another sticking point was the fact that women were possibly driving the applications through their status as the breadwinner. M.J. Arendse came before the Housing Committee on behalf of his wife for assistance to enlarge and complete her house in Rylands Estate on the Cape Flats. This was to allow her mother to live with them, and that the extra two rooms and the kitchen were for her use. The Chairman, W.C. Gardener, ‘felt sure the Council would not advance money for the building of two houses,’71 presumably to ensure that no sub-letting would take place leading to ‘overcrowding’ and social degeneration. In another recorded case, Mr F.G. Van Tura required a house with three rooms and a kitchen due to the fact that his sister, her husband and their three children were living with him. 72 The Assisted Housing models with their restrictions to one dwelling per plot and the ‘moral’ strictures of sex separation in the building regulations, rendered extended families such as these as abnormal and improper.

6.8 Assisted Housing in brick, 1924, Type D1 (left) and standard wood-and-iron with additional room, 1930 (right)

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The Assisted Housing Scheme was implemented to achieve some kind of simulated ‘normality’ in the marginal spaces of the city. That the Housing Committee was keen on implementing ‘proper’ houses and not simply warding off potential disease through unsanitary conditions is borne out through closer examination. Until 1924, the Housing Committee had been funding schemes for occupants of dwellings that were not particularly unsanitary and were funded either on the basis of their ‘unsightliness’ or not being ‘proper’ dwellings. In February 1924, the Sub-Committee of the Housing Committee dealing with the Assisted Housing Scheme noted the need to give priority to those people living in unsanitary conditions – assuming they had met more than 75 per cent of the payment for the land on which they lived. This suggests – up until 1924 at any rate – that it was individuals and their families closer to the middle-class values of the agents of Empire who were the main focus of this scheme. Further, the whole of the Athlone area in which wood-and-iron dwellings were largely permitted and in which houses had been developed on an ad hoc basis through the various single-house schemes, was never laid with any sewerage or other services. Yet in 1927 Councillor W. James in an interview with D.F. Malan, the Minister of the Interior and Public Health, called Athlone a ‘model village.’73 It was on the whole touted as a major success – until the area flooded in heavy rains in 1929. The point is that slop collections and septic tanks were de rigueur at Athlone much as they were in many of the informal settlement areas; its success lay in its provision of ‘proper’ houses as manifested through single-family detached units and not necessarily on the provision of sanitary infrastructure. Nearly two years after the Assisted Housing Scheme had been mooted, the City Engineer and Councillor W. James who was himself a builder, drew up plans for model brick houses to be delivered on the same lines as the wood-and-iron dwellings.74 Eventually a wide range of model plans were developed (see, as an example, Figure 6.8). Councillor James also promoted the development of an area of Athlone called Milner with many wood-and-iron dwellings being built,75 with a rider added within the very details of the dwellings themselves. They had been designed in such a way such that the roof eaves over-sailed the walls thereby allowing the corrugated iron to eventually be taken off and replaced by a brick layer.76 Although the wood-and-iron dwellings were restricted to areas set aside for their development, James’s brick houses were also permitted within these areas. Eventually, however the Milner scheme restricted the development of brick dwellings to plots 191 to 196 and the wood-and-iron to plots 5 to 10.77 The Assisted Housing Schemes, contrary to their general ad hoc nature of implementation, veered close to outright racial segregation when a major development planned for the area on the ‘opposite side of Klipfontein Road at Athlone’ was intended for ‘Europeans.’78 This scheme was not developed. The structuring of class through space was further implemented when the Claremont Ratepayers Association complained that the Assisted Housing Scheme’s proposed brick houses for Livingstone Road in Claremont were on plots ‘too small and not suitable for a suburban district, and [asked] that a more suitable plan be devised.’79 By May 1927, 87 wood-and-iron dwellings and 201 brick dwellings had been built under the Assisted Housing Schemes.80 Separate figures were given for Athlone with 146 wood-and-iron dwellings and 115 concrete dwellings built,

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presumably under the same scheme.81 The PH&BRC eventually decided to restrict, in general, the building of wood-and-iron houses limited to the west through the Cape Flats railway line and bounded by Klipfontein Road in the north and Wetton Road in the South.82 There was, however, no boundary to the east; the space of the Other could extend into the wilderness.

Wells Square Slum Clearance and the City’s first Garden Suburb Housing Projects The New Year’s festivities of 1915 saw the City of Cape Town wake up to a rather large hangover. In the first week of January, the City Council received a petition, signed by 87 concerned people, regarding the conditions at Wells Square and Bloemhof, nominally in the District Six area (Figures 5.1 and 6.9).83 Although this petition was not itself racially motivated, or discriminatory, it initiated a chain of events that led to segregation. The petition was a sincere response to the deepening social-spatial contradictions that the early colonization of the Cape had manifested. The petitioners were mostly from the streets surrounding Wells Square and their description of it was as follows: Wells Square is the home of a number of prostitutes and criminals, many of the houses are brothels and shebeens kept solely for these purposes. The amount of liquor sold, mostly on Sundays, is amazing, last Sunday smuggling took place all day and at one time thirty drunken men were counted about. The respectable neighbourhood is awakened all hours of the early morning by the yelling emanating from Wells Square. Many of the houses are overcrowded and in our opinion are unfit for human habitation and ought to be condemned. Numerous complaints have been made to the Police who maintain that the only remedy is to condemn these dens.84

A surprise evening inspection by the Acting Medical Officer of Health (MOH) and seven inspectors on the 13 January revealed a few instances of ‘overcrowding.’ For example, ‘No. 47. Room III, with a capacity of 972 cubic feet was occupied by two adults and three children, this room having two children in excess,’85 as well as a few minor defects in paving of the yards, broken windows and door frames, and dirty walls. The Acting MOH was not convinced that the residences of Wells Square were ‘unfit for human habitation’ which would have been the only legitimate reason to remove people from the site. He felt they simply needed some remedial work.86 Nevertheless, the Deputy Commissioner of the South African Police, G.D. Gray, gave his reaction to the petition: Undoubtedly the majority of the inhabitants of Wells Square are of a low social type, and it may fairly be described as one of the slums of the City … I quite agree that many of the houses are overcrowded and unfit for human habitation, and undoubtedly the insanitary dwellings, bad surroundings, and the one and two-roomed houses of Wells Square, in which the decencies of life are not possible, have a great deal to do with the criminal behaviour of

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6.9  Wells Square, from Thom’s Survey, 1898

its population, and very sensibly effect their present social condition … The remedy lies in sweeping away these slums and substituting for them healthy and cheap dwellings.87

As we have seen in Chapters 4 and 5, the dense urban fabric of fractured and internalized space that the administrators of the city found so problematic from an aesthetic and social point of view, was embodied in Wells Square. The MOH distilled the ruling approach to such an ‘eyesore’ a few months later, in the very title of his report to the City Council’s Public Health Building Regulation Committee (hereafter PH&BRC): ‘Slum Property’. He urged action against ‘the parts of the City in which the houses are so congested and so badly arranged

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that it would be far better to clear the area on which the houses stand, lay it out afresh, and erect thereon proper dwellings.’88 The report instantiates state ambitions to actively set the disorder of the city straight, to erase and begin again, to ‘lay it out afresh’ and re-order those people and places inimical to the ruling fantasies animating the colonial project. That moralizing re-ordering impulse is the basis of all utopian schemes. Lived layers of complicated social history, the ongoing manifestation of people and places over time, which colonization’s creolization had brought, was to be remade in ways more seemly.89 In September 1916, the PH&BRC received another petition from residents in the vicinity of Wells Square. This time the signatures came from people resident as far away as Plein and Hope Streets.90 The MOH, Jasper Anderson, like the Acting MOH before him, considered that ‘the buildings themselves were in a fair sanitary condition.’91 Councillor I.J. Honikman suggested that ‘if the area were opened out the evil would disappear.’92 In a report dated 13 November 1916, the City Engineer submitted Scheme A and Scheme B on the proposed remodelling of Wells Square (Figure 6.10).93 Although Scheme A was adopted, both schemes were intended to expropriate and remove the buildings in the centre of the square and provide two electric lamps, with Scheme B intended to extend the existing road infrastructure through the site. No progress was made on the matter until December 1917,94 when the enrolled voters met to vote on a £34,000 extensive proposal to ultimately expropriate all the properties of Wells Square. Even though J.D. Cartwright proclaimed, to much cheering, that Wells Square was ‘acknowledged to be a great evil in our midst, and in the name of our fair city, in the name of our civilisation, and in the name of our Christianity it was our duty as intelligent citizens to say that such a foul spot should exist no longer,’95 the proposal was narrowly rejected on the basis of ‘Adequate Housing, then Demolition.’ The original Wells Square petition had led to an Overcrowding Sub-Committee of six councillors, including the MOH and the City Engineer, to consider ‘the question of making a recommendation to the Council to build cottages for their own employees, and to afford better facilities in the direction of City land being acquired for building cottages for the labouring classes.’96 It was the chance for the City to provide an edifying model for how its citizens ought to live, to secure a totemic housing project in support of the project of Empire. Or not. Their initial plan was to build 450 ‘cottages’ for municipal employees on municipal land dotted around the city. Workers were expected to rent the cottages at 6 shillings a week deducted from wages.97 A housing project on municipal land some six kilometres from the CBD in an area that would become known as Maitland Garden Village was the result. Although the Housing & Estates Committee had initially considered letting the cottages to ‘European or coloured employees of the Council who are in receipt of wages not exceeding 1/6d per hour,’98 it effectively became a Coloured neighbourhood.99 The City Engineer’s Phase One approach was hardly the apogee of Garden Suburb design (Figure 6.11).

6.10  Wells Square slum clearance proposal A (above) and B (below), 1916. Hatching indicates buildings to be removed. Note the two street lights indicated by ‘bulls-eyes’

6.11  Maitland Garden Village, 1919, Phase One on the left and Phase Two un-built on the right and Cottage Type B and C1

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Apart from a central area for ‘recreation’ the project was simply a planning exercise in low-density semi-detached suburbia. A humanist bright spot was an attempt to alternate the house types ‘and so break the monotony.’100 The main interest that Maitland Garden Village holds is in the design and presentation of its ‘cottages.’ Significantly, Type B with its baroque gables shows the influence of the Cape Dutch revival at the time (as noted in Chapters 2 and 3). This relatively extravagant cottage was intended for the caretakers of the village and was suggestively located at the main entrance next to the recreation ground for both surveillance and hierarchical status. There is an Arts and Crafts sensibility evident in the Tudor-style of Type C1 of which 66 were to be built. Contrary to the recommendation of the Acting MOH for cottages of at least three rooms – because ‘relatives or friends, poor and unfortunate, will always be accommodated’,101 – the remainder of the site was distributed with 52 Type C2 two-roomed dwellings. These cottages were designed by the City Engineer’s architectural assistant G. Angelini, and were showcased in the Municipal Journal in 1919,102 presumably to illustrate the possibilities for municipal contribution to social housing. The illustrations represent the dual desires of the age very clearly: the perspective view at the top with wisps of smoke and a well-kept garden hints at a Romantic rural idyll sentimentally lost to England’s past, whilst the plan above, with labelled spartan rooms and minimum dimensions, describes a calculated scientifically determined conception of correct living in the modern world. The insistent line of the dimension string chimes with the wisps of smoke; they bolster each other through the neurotic representational moves of discourse. As the eye travels between the two radically different representation techniques, from orthographic drawing to perspective and back again, the fantasy of remaking the city’s Others in the image of the Self is emboldened, doubled. These overcompensating dual rationalities anxiously refuse to be informed by the complicated social reality of the city. Whilst the cottages of Maitland Garden Village were being built, the Housing & Estates Committee and the Overcrowding Sub-Committee looked to new sites for further development with the assistance of the architect Frank Kendall and other members of the Cape Institute of Architects (CIoA),103 although it seemed fairly certain that the Committee would favour extending Maitland Garden Village into a ‘model village.’104 At a meeting of registered municipal voters, recovering from the recent and deadly influenza epidemic, the extension of Maitland Garden Village and a similar scheme at the top end of Roeland Street in the City Bowl were overwhelmingly approved with a loan of £250,000.105 Death, it seemed, was a stronger motivator than fiduciary prudence. Delbridge and Hawke, as representatives of the CIoA, framed the rules and requirements for these schemes and were the judges of the open competition that followed.106 The winners of the layout design were J. Lyon and W.A. Ritchie Fallon, whilst J. Perry and F.M. Glennie were winners of Type B, D and E, and Type A and C cottages respectively.107 John Perry, who also went on to win the initial layout of the Pinelands Garden City, had visited Wells Square a few years before as a consultant to the Municipal Reform Association, advising on the physical problems of the area.108

6.12 Roeland Street Housing Scheme, 1919 with Type A cottages

6.13  A close up of old Cape Town, Langschmidt, Long Street in 1844

6.14  Wells Square and Roeland Street Scheme – relative densities (notes by the author), aerial photo 1926

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Although the Maitland Garden Village extension, or Oude Molen Scheme in a later incarnation, was quashed through pressure by the representatives of the Pinelands Garden City and others,109 it does suggest, with its curvilinear streets, low densities and central civic zone, a Garden Suburb-inspired vision of social housing. The design for the Roeland Street scheme showed similar attributes, though due to the hilly nature of the site and its fairly close proximity to the city centre, it contained only a school as part of its civic infrastructure. Notably, the Housing & Estates Committee referred to the Roeland Street scheme as a ‘village,’ underlining its anti-urban basis despite, or rather, because, of its proximity to the city centre. Indeed, at 8 dwellings to the acre, the layout was low even for Garden City ideals. It was also explicitly reserved for ‘European Employees of the Council’ half way through its construction.110 Though Maitland Garden Village was not ostensibly inspired by segregationist ideals, only five years later it was clear that the Council had already begun to see its employees as divisible into distinctive racial groups. Though segregation as a customary ordering principle had been gathering momentum over the preceding ten years (as we saw in Chapter 5), it became an official requirement of the state’s Central Housing Board whose money was used in the development of the Roeland Street Scheme (Figure 6.12). The later racial designation of the Roeland Street Scheme would not have been known to Glennie when he designed it but the type of cottage he imagined is suggestive of prevailing social attitudes. Although without gables, it has many of the design attributes of workers’ housing on a Cape Dutch homestead or that of the BoKaap houses across Table Valley, as if Glennie was referencing the Cape’s ‘feudal’ history (Figure 6.13). This was a common design strategy within the Garden City Movement and its Arts and Crafts inspired architecture. Certainly, its design was purposefully construed – the monopitch concrete roof was decisively not in line with the double-pitch required by regulation 964 of the 1920 building regulations. The densities of the Roeland Street scheme c.1926 compared to that of Wells Square are very different (Figure 6.14). The contrast makes clear that whatever Romantic vision may have driven Glennie’s design, it was to be set within the lowdensity, anti-urban ethos of the Garden City Movement, not the dense fabric of Old Cape Town. The aerial photograph of 1926 depicts the Roeland Street buildings as positive objects set starkly against an almost bleached empty space, whilst Wells Square is objectless and internalized, resembling Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of a ‘smooth space.’111 Roeland Street is highly territorialized, with each unit identifiable, nameable, and easily surveyed. It gets at Empire’s ambitions for a categorical and singular taxonomic cohesion between space and subject – it was for White employees of the City and its segregated form and space removed any ambiguity in this regard. The production of the city as a White space is literally embedded in the spatiality of this small-scale housing project. By 1926, Wells Square was itself being reordered. Even though the MOH had warned that if the dwellings in Wells Square were ‘condemned as being unfit for human habitation it would mean that a very large percentage of properties in other parts of the City would have to be closed down for similar reasons,’112 the Council was committed to an attritional slum-clearance scheme, slowly acquiring or expropriating targeted properties. By the beginning of 1926 the Council had

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6.15 Wells Square after ‘slum clearance’

only bought four houses and demolished two in the Square itself, whilst only three had been bought in Canterbury Street.113 Enough expropriation and demolition had taken place by 1931 for the Council to consider turning half the square into a playground and the other half into a parking lot to manage increased business in the area anticipated by the City’s proposed foreshore development (Figure 6.15).114 This proposal was rejected at the end of 1931 and the Council started to find favour in the idea mooted by the Citizens’ Housing League to use the space to provide flats for ‘Non-Europeans.’115 It would be wrong to consider this a massive turnaround in the Council’s opinion against the desirability of single-family detached units – Canterbury Flats (the flats that were erected) was essentially groups of three cottages stacked vertically (Figure 6.16). It was only in 1938 when the Council opened the nearby Bloemhof Flats that the idea of the single-family detached dwelling lessened its grip on the Council’s housing policies. Allocating the Canterbury Flats for Coloureds close to the centre of the city did not reflect a shift in policy away from segregation and spatial dislocation as an ideal. The truth was applications from municipal employees to occupy Maitland Garden Village had been minimal: 26 were received for the 70 cottages available by the end of 1919.116 Occupancy was so slow that it was eventually proposed to compel Municipal employees living ‘under insanitary conditions’ to live in the village.117 Later, some of the empty cottages were used as clearing houses when the PH&BRC started its slow process of slum clearances.118 That the village was located a good few miles from the city centre played a part in this aversion as did the disallowing of sub-letting for fear of undermining one of the reasons for the establishment of the village, namely to prevent overcrowding.119

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Apart from a series of regulations governing the use of the houses, restrictions and control of the environment accompanied its development. When, for example, ovens and chicken huts erected by tenants in their back yards were considered ‘most unsightly’120 they were told to place them in a ‘uniform line.’ The City Engineer soon provided obligatory guidelines for the ‘character and height of structures.’121 This concern over appearances also meant tenants were ‘expected to work the garden ground in front of their houses and keep the same tidy.’122 The Garden City notion of moral health through gardening was not lost on the Chairman of the Housing & Estates Committee, W.F. Fish, who instituted a series of prizes for the best kept trees and gardens in the village.123 By 1925 an annual first prize of £4 and two runner-up prizes of £2 were being awarded to the ‘best kept house and garden,’ whilst a first prize of £2 and two runner-up prizes of £1 were awarded to the ‘best kept house’ and for the ‘best kept garden’ separately.124 The interior of cottages was also brought under the ‘uplifting’ gaze. In 1928, the Housing & Estates Committee began to entertain the possibility of developing blocks of flats in the Schotsche Kloof area of District Two.125 In the decade since the City had begun to thrash out its role in the provision of houses for the poorer classes, the debate had changed from class upliftment through Garden City ideals to administering racial segregation through slum clearance and re-housing along ‘scientific’ lines. Not that single-family detached units were no longer the dominant approach to housing. On the contrary, the first sub-economic housing scheme – at Bokmakirie – indicates the extent of their use and hints at future suburban apartheid environments implemented through the 51/9 housing type (Figure 6.17). Though spawned out of English conceptions of the ‘home’ and it’s social and aesthetic potential for ‘upliftment,’ the housing schemes that emerged in the 1930s (and during the apartheid years) lack that aura of Romantic pretence key to the Garden City Movement. But Garden City ideals of social–spatial clarity in zoning and of low-density living at the periphery of cities remain fundamental to the apartheid model. In fact, it was at a meeting in 1928 concerning the Maitland Garden Village extension, that the Administrator of the Cape suggested that ‘the City should be completely zoned … so that certain sections would be set apart as European areas, others as non-European areas, industrial areas and areas where noxious trades might be established.’126 Twenty years before the National Party was elected to power on the back of its policy of apartheid, the agents of Empire had already planned and implemented many of its key social–spatial strategies.

6.16 Wells Square aerial photo showing Canterbury flats, 1935 (left, notes by the author) and Canterbury flats today (right, photo by the author)

6.17  Bokmakirie, ‘sub-economic’ housing project, 1932

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Conclusion For agents of Empire, the ‘home’ was a social condition invariably characterized by a single-family detached unit. Any other dwelling type, ‘unusual’ building materials or techniques were considered Other and less than adequate. Under the influence of the idea of environmental determinism along with the emerging dominance of the Garden City Movement and its Arts and Crafts houses, the agents of Empire began to imagine ‘cottages’ as instruments by which Others could be rendered unthreatening – if not as a Self then by appearing to be the Same. Through a series of representations involving competitions, exhibitions and events played out as spectacles in the public space of the city, the identity of Englishness (as signified through the cottage) was paraded and ‘naturalized’ as essential, whilst other ways of being in the city were excluded or downplayed. The city’s building regulations meant designated areas were structured by ‘class.’ Policing the density of dwellings to the acre allowed the exclusion of Others from certain areas of the city, while ensuring specific allocation to the permissible sort of city dweller. These regulatory models of the Self were behind Cape Town’s first slum-clearance projects – aimed at eradicating a racially-based socio-spatial ‘disorder.’ This was also the deeper purpose of Cape Town’s first racially segregated, Garden-City-inspired housing projects. Remaking African subjects of the King in his own image was an ongoing challenge for the agents of Empire, one we will deal with in the next chapter. The design of Cape Town’s first ‘township’ Ndabeni, and the subsequent re-imagining of African subjectivity in the Garden City project of Langa, would prove to be landmark instances in the racial reordering of the city.

Notes 1

Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 17, no. 5 (December, 1933), p.26.

2

Bauer, C., Modern Housing, (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1935), p.67.

3

Meacham, S., Regaining Paradise.

4

Ibid., p.16.

5

Ibid., p.43.

6

As quoted in Perry, E., ‘Housing Conditions in Cape Town and Cape Province,’ Garden Cities and Town Planning, vol. xx, no. 9, p.275.

7

KAB CCC 3/CT-4/1/4/504: Assisted Housing Cape Flats, 22 May 1925.

8

Cape Argus 7 August 1925: ‘Crime due to Bad Housing.’

9

For a polite contestation of this idea see Bickford-Smith, V., Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Cape Town, (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995).

10 Swanson, M., ‘The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900–1909;’ Van Heyningen, E., ‘Public Health and Society in Cape Town 1880–1910.’ 11 Bickford-Smith, V., Worden, N., and Van Heyningen, E., Cape Town, p.179; Easton, J., Four Questions of the Day, (Cape Town: J.C. Juta & Co, 1888).

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12 Elias, C., ‘A Comparative Analysis of Government Housing Policy and Cape Town City Council Housing Policy, 1890–1935,’ (University of Stellenbosch: Unpublished Masters Thesis, 1980). 13 KAB CCC Mayoral Minutes, 22 September 1904. 14 Phillips, H., ‘Black October’. The Impact of the Spanish Influenza Epidemic of 1918 on South Africa, (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1990). 15 Cape Times 7 February 1922: ‘A Tour of the Shebeens.’ 16 Cape Times 9 February 1922: ‘The City’s Needs.’ 17 Cape Times 13 February 1922: ‘The Underworld of Cape Town.’ 18 Cape Times 22 June 1936: ‘Squalor of Peninsula Slum Quarters.’ 19 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 8, no. 12, (July, 1925), p.25. 20 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 10, no. 8, (March, 1927), p.22. 21 Colls and Dodd point to the idea that to speak of a ‘British’ identity at this time, was essentially to mean an ‘English’ one. See their Preface in Hawkins, A., in Colls, R. and Dodd, P., Englishness. Politics and Culture, 1880–1920. 22 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 10, no. 8, (March, 1927), p.23. 23 Cape Times 18 June 1914: ‘Town Planning. “A new science: an old art.” Points for Municipalities.’ 24 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 8, no. 12, (July, 1925), p.25. 25 Union Government Central Housing Board Report: 31 December 1935, p.6. 26 Ibid., p.9. 27 Ibid., p.10. 28 Cape Times 18 June 1914: ‘Town Planning.’ 29 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/12: Housing Committee, 17 March 1927. 30 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/14: Housing Committee, 16 May 1929. 31 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/12: Housing Committee, 22 September 1927. 32 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/12: Housing Committee, 28 September 1927. 33 Cape Times 17 August 1929: ‘The Case for Garden Villages.’ 34 Cape Times 27 April 1907: ‘Cape Institute of Architects Presidential Address.’ 35 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 8, no. 5, (December, 1924), p.24. 36 Ibid. 37 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 7, no. 11, (June, 1924), p.27. 38 Swenarton, M., Building the New Jerusalem, ‘Houses of Paper and Brown Cardboard.’ 39 Cape Times 12 August 1929: ‘Housing Week Begins: Scenes in Saturday’s Procession.’ 40 See, KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/16: PHBRC, 1922.08.11; KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/16: PHBRC, 20 August 1924. 41 Union Government Central Housing Board Report: 31 December, 1920, p.1. 42 Cape Argus 11 November 1926: ‘Argus Gardening Competition.’

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43 Cape Argus 20 January 1923: ‘The Argus Model House.’ 44 KAB CCC 3/CT 1/4/9/1/1/12: Housing Committee, 22 September 1927. 45 KAB CCC 3/CT 1/4/9/1/1/14: Housing Committee, 16 May 1929. 46 KAB CCC 3/CT 1/4/9/1/1/13: Housing Committee, 21 June 1928. 47 KAB CCC 3/CT 1/4/9/1/1/12: Housing Committee, 24 October 1927. 48 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 11, no. 2 (September, 1927), p.13 49 The idea that fine art, especially painting, could uplift and educate the morally bereft working classes was a common middle and upper class sentiment, see, Waterford, G., Art for the People. Culture in the Slums of Late Victorian Britain, (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1994). 50 Cape Times 21 June 1919: ‘S.A. Guild of Arts & Crafts.’ 51 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 11, no. 5 (December, 1927), pp.8–13. 52 KAB CCC A1659 vol. 1/3: CIoA, 18 May 1917. 53 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/7: PH&BRC, 7 October 1915. 54 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/17: PH&BRC, 13 February 1923. 55 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/17: PH&BRC, 19 February 1923. 56 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/22: PH&BRC, 19 November 1924. 57 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/29: PH&BRC, 2 April 1928. 58 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/30: PH&BRC, 21 June 1929. 59 Ibid. 60 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/30: PH&BRC, 2 August 1929. 61 Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 13, no. 5, (December, 1929), p.20. 62 Ibid. 63 Cape Provincial Government Ordinance No.23 of 1919: Municipal (Provision of Homes) Ordinance. 64 Union Government Act 35, 1920 (Housing Act). 65 Elias, C., ‘A Comparative Analysis of Government Housing Policy and Cape Town City Council Housing Policy, 1890–1935,’ p.222; Barnett, N., ‘Race, Housing and Town Planning in Cape Town, c.1920–1940’, p.174. 66 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/6: Housing Committee, 15 November 1923. 67 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/15: PH&BRC, 15 September 1927. 68 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/15: PH&BRC, 10 May 1922. 69 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/4: Housing Committee, 13 November 1922. 70 KAB CCC 3/CT 4/1/4/504: Assisted Housing Cape Flats, Conditions regarding Applications for Assisting Housing in the Cape Flats Area. 71 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/6: Housing Committee, 15 February 1924. 72 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/5: Housing Committee, 12 July 1923. 73 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/12: Housing Committee, 23 March 1927.

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74 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/7: Housing Committee, 21 February 1924. 75 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/9: Housing Committee, 18 May 1925. 76 Ibid. 77 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/10: Housing Committee, 16 July 1925. 78 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/10: Housing Committee, 19 November 1925. 79 Ibid. 80 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/12: Housing Committee, 15 September 1927. 81 Ibid. 82 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/22: PH&BRC, 3 April 1925. 83 Bloemhof and Wells Square were technically in District One, but were popularly considered to be part of the ‘problem’ area of District Six. Wells Square was bounded by Constitution Street to the north, Canterbury Street to the West, Bloemhof St to the South and Drury Lane to the East. Bloemhof was to the east of Wells Square. 84 KAB CCC 3/CT-4/1/3/97 (31/3): Improvements to Wells Square 1915–1918, 9 January 1915. 85 Ibid. 86 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/6: PH&BRC, 21 January 1915. 87 KAB CCC 3/CT-4/1/3/97 (31/3): Improvements to Wells Square 1915–1918, 23 February 1915. 88 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/7: PH&BRC, 4 November 1915. Emphasis added. 89 For example, through Du Plessis, I.D., The Cape Malays, (Cape Town: [unknown], 1944). 90 KAB CCC 3/CT-4/1/3/97 (31/3): Improvements to Wells Square 1915–1918, 22 September 1916. 91 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/8: PH&BRC, 25 October 1916. 92 Ibid. 93 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/8: PH&BRC, 13 November 1916. 94 Note the timing of the Architect Builder & Engineer’s ‘Hotbed of Horrors’ article two months earlier. 95 Cape Times 8 December 1917, ‘Future of Wells Square.’ 96 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/7: PH&BRC, 4 November 1915. 97 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/8: PH&BRC, 18 October 1916. 98 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/1: Housing Committee, 2 December 1919. 99 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/2: Housing Committee, 2 August 1921. 100 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/5/1/1/8: Special Committee, 23 July 1918. 101 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/5/1/1/8: Special Committee, 29 June 1918. 102 Municipal Journal of South Africa, vol. 1, no. 2, (January, 1919). 103 KAB CCC A1659 vol. 1/3: CIoA, 23 December 1918. 104 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/5/1/1/8: Special Committee, 5 November 1918.

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105 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/5/1/1/9: Special Committee, 12 August 1919. 106 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/5/1/1/9: Special Committee, 14 May 1919. 107 KAB CCC A1659 vol. 1/3: CIoA, 28 May 1920. 108 KAB CCC 3/CT-4/1/3/97 (31/3): Improvements to Wells Square 1915–1918, 18 May 1917. 109 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/13: Housing Committee, 28 February 1928. 110 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/2: Housing Committee, 2 August 1921. 111 Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Coetzer, N., ‘Exploring “Place-Making,” City Squares & Other Places,’ in South African Journal of Art History, vol. 23, no. 1, (2008). 112 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/5/1/1/8: Special Committee, 22 November 1917. 113 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/7/1/1/26: PH&BRC, 11 February 1926. 114 KAB CCC 3/CT-4/1/5/137(B718/5): Letter from Ben Fine to Councillor Bloomberg. 115 KAB CCC 3/CT 4/2/1/1/371(31/31): 21 November 1931, Letter from Acting Town Clerk to City Engineer. 116 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/1: Housing Committee, 11 November 1919. 117 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/7: Housing Committee, 19 June 1924. 118 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/8: Housing Committee, 16 October 1924. 119 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/1: Housing Committee, 28 October 1919. 120 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/1: Housing Committee, 23 March 1920. 121 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/2: Housing Committee, 7 June 1921. 122 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/3: Housing Committee, 14 September 1921. 123 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/2: Housing Committee, 23 May 1921. 124 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/9: Housing Committee, 16 April 1925. 125 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/13: Housing Committee, 20 September 1928. 126 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/9/1/1/13: Housing Committee, 21 June 1928.

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7 Distortions in the Mirror: Segregation, Control and Garden City Ideals at Langa Native Village

To put the matter in an extreme way, the native home is essentially a place of refuge from the weather, from wild beasts, from the observation of possible enemies, and for the fulfilment of those perfectly natural functions of cover and shelter that savour rather of the bird’s nest than of the highly organized and complicated villa which the European considers as essential for his requirements. No sewing rooms, boudoirs, studies, offices, billiard rooms and music salons, or other apartmental concomitants of a complex social life enter into the picture, and the problem being thus reduced to the simplest possible elements is one which should be capable of a simple and satisfactory solution … Simple, however, as the needs may be, there are certain requirements that must be satisfied in every reasonably human habitation, and those requirements are stated as follows:- The need for shelter, warmth, reasonable privacy, the storage of food, attention to hygiene, durability, comfort, and ease of ingress and egress. Most of these requirements are ignored in the ordinary Kaffir hut, but all of them are met singly in varieties which we have had opportunities for seeing and studying upon records. The ordinary hut contains little, if any, means of egress for the smoke of a fire from within, takes no thought for the necessity of food storage, gives a maximum amount of inconvenience in ingress and egress by reason of the smallness of its entrance doorway and the awkwardness of the placing of its roof-props from within, takes no account of sanitation owing to defects in light and air, has no arrangement for privacy, and few, if any, of the requirements incidental to the lowest conceivable standard of human comfort.1

Assessing how and where Natives should live in the city was first answered in 1884 when the colonial government of the Cape of Good Hope implemented the Native Locations Act.2 Locations suggest Native American ‘reservations’ – territories within the state where the cultural life of Natives supposedly continues regardless of the catastrophic upheaval of colonization. Locations were territories through which Empire could contain ‘Africa.’ More to the point, however, the legislation became a line snaking across the land, circling, quarantining and segregating out peripheral areas contaminated by colonialism. The aim of the Act was to rationalize the management and space of locations – particularly those on private land, which had tended to emerge somewhat organically over time. It was precisely because

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urbanizing black people were being housed in marginal zones surrounding urban areas – on private farms beyond municipal control – that it was enacted. These areas were not tribal territories, though they began to show threatening signs of Native space within White territories, or at its boundary. In terms of the Act, a location was any area containing dwellings of three or more Native men – ‘Kafirs, Fingoes, Basutos, Hottentots, Bushmen and the like’ – who were not in the employment of the farmer on whose land they were residing. Implicit in the Act was the understanding that single unemployed black men who had moved from tribal protectorates into urbanizing areas were a potential threat that needed to be managed and controlled. In fact, it went so far as to give the Governor and his agents the power not only to delimit the area to be used for the erection of dwellings on private and public land, but also to limit the number of dwellings allowed in the space, in other words, to plan the very space of the location. Once the licensed location was established, an inspector would be appointed whose duties included keeping a register of the number of dwellings as well as the names and occupations of the inhabitants. This inspector had to be given notice if an inhabitant of the location wanted to erect a new dwelling, presumably to maintain order within the space. The understanding of black urbanites as transient inhabitants of the White city was strong enough to allow a hut in a location that had not been occupied during that calendar year to be destroyed. Although the Act did not restrict the kind of dwellings that could be erected in the location, its concern for containment and the allowance for the planning of the space was one of the first uses of ‘White space’ in the control of Natives. By setting aside the territory, its distinctive Otherness could be managed – psychically, as well as literally. It is important to realize that the Natives Location Act and its amendment of 1899 did not restrict black people’s ability to purchase land or prevent their access to accommodation within the municipal areas themselves. District Six in Cape Town was an area in which many jobseekers were accommodated as rent-payers. It took the Native Reserve Location Act of 1902 to fundamentally change this.3 This Act gave the Governor power to proclaim specific municipalities as exclusionary zones wherein Natives, with a few exceptions, could no longer reside. This was ostensibly to limit the spread of future outbreaks of bubonic plague which had struck Cape Town in 1901 – even though there had been no evidence that the incidence of the disease was higher in Native areas than in European suburbs. The corollary of this exclusion of Natives from the space of the city was the need to establish the Reserve Locations in which those employed in the municipal areas were required to live. The Native Reserve Locations Act was the first instance of housing per se as a conceptual responsibility of the State, although this occurred largely through default of the State’s attempts to sanitize the city as a White space. Not only was the Governor allowed to make rules on the provision of dwellings, he could regulate ‘the erection and use of private dwellings, buildings and other structures in the location, and the ventilation, lighting, materials, and manner of construction of all such dwellings, buildings, and other structures.’ Whereas the Native Location Act had considered the containment of Native space in the city through means of boundaries sufficient in the ‘sanitizing’ of the city, the

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Native Reserve Locations Act went one step further. It anticipated the potential eradication of Native space in the city. Government architects could now define the built environment of the location on their own terms. Finally, the Native Reserve Locations Amendment Act of 1905 allowed Natives to erect their own dwellings on terms and conditions agreed to by the Governor.4 However this affirming possibility of self-built housing was not enacted in any substantial way.

The Visible Presence of Natives in the City and the Making of Ndabeni Cape Town, unlike the two ‘frontier towns’ of Port Elizabeth and East London, had no immediate local Native population from which to draw unskilled labour and consequently had no history of using ‘locations’ to avoid housing unskilled labour whilst simultaneously maintaining racial segregation through spatial boundaries. In the minutes of the Commission on a Native Location for Capetown5 in 1900 (hereafter CNL), concern was voiced over the physical presence of ‘the Native’ within the space of the city, which in the view of one of the interlocutors had already been ‘turned into a location.’6 To say as much would be to suggest that the city had become a Native space and was suffering a kind of invasion of Otherness. The idea of a location was approached with much ambivalence during the Commission and even though the idea of what constituted a location was changing, the very word7 was likely to conjure an image of uncontrolled areas of Native dwellings and insanitary conditions as had developed in Port Elizabeth8 and East London9 – rather than the highly controlled social space later associated with it.10 In Cape Town, the Native Locations Act was used to house indentured labourers in barracks at the docks much like the mine compounds in Kimberley and Johannesburg. But by the end of the nineteenth century there was a growing immigrant population of mobile Natives who found accommodation within the space of the city itself. It was a real problem for the agents of Empire and the White middle class in general. Contrary to the English reverence for laissez faire development, free markets and the sanctity of individual liberty, the CNL was established to deal with this ‘invasion’ and maintain the city as a White space. How to resolve the spatial contradiction between the need to house what the Cape Times called ‘a floating population of uncivilized natives’11 near their place of work (largely in the docks, brickfields and in the city itself ) while ridding the city of the visible presence of this ‘alien Kafir population,’12 was one of the main thrusts of the CNL. It was actually the arrival of the bubonic plague in February 1901 and the enactment of quarantine laws of the Public Health Act of 1897 that ultimately brought about selected forced segregation in the City, albeit informed and guided by the recommendations of the CNL.13 Nevertheless, the raw verbatim reports of the witnesses and interlocutors at the commission explored below indicate the views of those in power at the time and offer insight into their understanding of race and the production of the city as a White space. One of the main causes for concern was the extensive spatial distribution of Natives in many dwelling houses throughout the city. The Cape Times quoted statistics from the MOH of some 80 places at which 1,600 Natives were living

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within the city proper.14 Aside from the lone voice of the City Engineer, the general agreement of those giving evidence was that having Natives distributed throughout the city was an intolerable affair, not only due to the decrease in value of property next to lodging houses,15 but also in terms of limiting the distribution of what Dr E.B. Fuller, the MOH, called ‘Kafir foci’16 and the ‘nuisance’ associated with the dwellers themselves.17 Black people were living in lodging houses established by Missions and Churches such as St. Columba’s Home and St Philip’s Mission, or in the 200-roomed Metropole run by the Salvation Army, and in residences owned by black people in Hortsley Street. Whatever the precise distribution, the majority found accommodation in the racially and ethnically heterogeneous District One and District Six.18 It was not only the distribution of their dwelling spaces throughout the city that was the governing concern but the unchecked visible presence of black people in public that rattled those in positions of power. In fact, one of the spurs for the CNL had been a ‘tribal fight’ almost a year before within the city itself and had caused much talk of how to get rid of the ‘barbarians,’19 although it should be noted that the establishment of a location was a longstanding consideration of the City Council before this particular event.20 Labourers from rural areas were the main focus of the commission and the attitude of those giving evidence about removing educated or ‘civilized Natives’ was somewhat ambivalent.21 Poorer black people, marked as ‘primitive’ through the combination of skin colour and their ‘tribal’ clothing, were an extreme Other. There was a strong desire to rid the city of ‘raw kafirs.’22 As Dr Jane Waterston observed: ‘Another tremendous mistake seems to me to consist in the natives being allowed to pass through the principal thoroughfares on their way to their work. The men who come down Grave Street every morning are nearly all raw Kafirs, and they make a great noise. Up-country the raw aboriginal Kafir is never under any condition put amongst civilized people or allowed near to houses.’23 There was also concern over Natives ‘walking about (with exception of a blanket) in a perfectly nude condition,’24 whilst the City Engineer admitted receiving complaints of ‘the passing to and fro in the streets of natives.’25 The Mayor of Cape Town, Thomas O’Reilly, wasn’t sold on a Native location for the city since ‘there would be a procession of natives through the streets to and from their work two or three times a day’ suggesting more sporadic, less dense movement was more acceptable. He preferred a location at Maitland so ‘you would be able to take the men direct from there to the Docks and back again,’ presumably by train.26 For the middle class, who were starting to display their identity in the commercial precincts of Adderley and St. George’s Streets, and the pier at the harbour, and the Company Gardens,27 such obvious signs of Otherness would have made their pretences to respectability and Englishness more transparent. The Commission reached a draft agreement on the 17 October 1900, which set out some basic principles for the new location at the periphery of the city (Figure 7.1).28 Three classes of Natives were defined, namely, ‘the temporary or migratory, the permanent or settled and the educated or superior natives,’ but only two kinds of accommodation were suggested, namely, ‘a few small cottages for some stable natives especially those with families [and] a few larger rooms or barrack rooms

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for accommodation of migratory natives’. This draft agreement suggests that had the plague not hit Cape Town in 1901, bringing about the rapid removal of Natives to the area that eventually became known as Ndabeni, then the accommodation of Cape Town’s first location would have been more in keeping with European standards than the stripped-down dwellings that were hastily erected. The dwellings were to have been constructed of brick, with a minimum airspace of 400 cu ft per adult – the standard minimum in England. It was, however, not ‘feasible’ to provide gardens (Figure 7.2). Here, then, was the first instance in Cape Town of Empire attempting to classify and differentiate colonial subjects into spatial conditions matching their position on the roster of ‘civilization.’ Socio-spatial types were starting to gain fixity and definition. However, the unbuilt accommodation that the City Engineer had designed for 480 men was suddenly increased to that for 4,000 men with the arrival of the plague.29 Lewis Mansergh, as Secretary of the Public Works Department, even allowed, in the emergency conditions, 12 families to erect wattle huts, contravening the draft agreement of the CNL that had explicitly intended to exclude Natives from building their own homes.30 Furthermore, the floors of some dwellings were constructed of mud.31 A few months after Ndabeni was hurriedly put together, efforts were made to make the environment more attractive and differentiated, with churches, a hospital, and a recreation hall planned. The ambivalence with which Ndabeni was approached comes through in the provision of the recreation hall, with Mansergh suggesting that the ‘design already framed might be slightly altered from its

7.1  Map locating Maitland Garden Village, Ndabeni, Pinelands, Langa, and Bokmakirie

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7.2  Ndabeni, ‘Better Class Houses’ 30 September 1902

present severity of outline in order to make the Hall somewhat more of a feature in the Location.’32 The clerk of works suggested a year later that ‘a market place should be established with stalls erected something similar to those used on the market places in English Country Towns.’33 The Public Works Department was even intent on building some ‘model cottages’ in 1902.34 These are important observations; they suggest that even before Garden City ideas came to dominate Cape Town’s housing concerns, there was an impulse on the part of the administrators of the city to fashion an environment they were familiar with, one which may have come to pass were it not for the plague of 1901. They illustrate the tension Empire manifests for its administrators: unsettling recognition of the inadequacy of its housing projects in relation to the richness of the motherland ‘model’ and the mismatch of that model in relation to Other subjects. The anxiety is present in how Mansergh fussed over decoration in an attempt to overcome the severity of the architecture being manifested.

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7.3 Ndabeni Native Location ‘CT Black People 2 and 3,’ date unknown

Ultimately, though, Ndabeni resembled the architecture of the concentration and military camps of the South African War (Figures 7.3–7.4). Furthermore, the seven-inch numbers35 attached to the dwellings were a sign, not for postal services, but for the more efficient management and control of an urban workforce, and an index that routed Natives back to a magisterial district in the tribal areas from where they came. The Acting Superintendent of Natives at Ndabeni, W. Power Leary suggested: That the huts be numbered in blocks of 25 huts each, less or more according to situation, thus – A1/M and so on; even numbers on the one side, and odd numbers on the other. Each man registered has his hut number in the register, and particulars relating to his home address. The ‘M’ under ‘A/1’ indicates a Municipal hut. The above particulars are also entered on the identification card given to each individual on registration.36

Consequently, Ndabeni did not enact planned or imagined social hierarchies of ‘civilized Natives’ in ‘cottages’ versus tradition-oriented migrant labourers in compounds. The constant removal of signs of Otherness – such as wattle-and-daub

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7.4 Ndabeni, layout 1902 (left) and aerial photograph, 1926 (right).

wind screens – as well as the relentless rigour of Ndabeni’s layout suggest it was, even at its initiation, considered a potentially problematic Native space that had to be ordered and managed because of its proximity to ‘civilization.’ The later establishment of temporary round huts or tents to the east of the settlement points to the ambivalence of the conception of the location; here Ndabeni is both a ‘location’ or Native space as well as a highly-ordered and regularized White space. The circle as the ‘archetypal’ signifier of ‘Africa’ ironically returns here, but proclaims the territory as a neutered Native space and its inhabitants temporary visitors to the city from another place.

Going Round in Circles or Squares: How to house ‘the Native’ The 1914 report of the Tuberculosis Commission was one of the first major investigations into the way people lived in different parts of the country, signalling the beginnings of a comprehensive mapping of the lived domestic space of South Africa. The report tends to idealize the life of rural Natives and their relationship to their dwellings which is not to say that the Commission did not find aspects of Native dwellings problematic. Nevertheless, it has many such rosily patronizing descriptions: ‘The raw native in his kraal lives in the main an easy, healthy open-air life. Much time is passed idling in the sun. The hut is usually occupied only at night and when shelter from the weather is required.’37 Although they were concerned about the perceived lack of ventilation and the comparatively large amounts of dust

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from dirt floors and their possible effects on the health of lungs, the Commission found that there was generally a healthy symbiosis between Native, dwelling and environment. Ideally then, Native space could be located adjacent to the city: ‘If means could be devised by which native women could resort to the labour centres in proportionate numbers to the men, and when there live without deterioration, as native families and under native conditions, it would be an advantage, as well on health grounds as for other reasons.’38 These ‘other reasons’ would have included savings to the local municipalities spared having to invest in housing per se. Yet this cut-and-paste of different worlds suggests an even stronger desire for homeostasis, of retaining the static, unthreatening, and distant world of rural Natives – a key and failed ambition of apartheid’s future ‘homeland’ project. Colonial society felt least threatened by the Other in the figure of extreme Other. It was when the Native began to resemble the colonial master –Homi Bhabha’s ‘mimic man’39 – that the tenuous construct of the Self was under pressure in the uncomfortable recognition of the reflective proximity of the Other to Self. To have a White city and a native village side-by-side, their boundaries clearly demarcated, would have been the ideal ‘solution’ to one of the undesired ‘side-effects’ of colonialism. Yet the reforming impulses of the English presented them with a paradox of their own making. There had been a longstanding desire on the part of missionaries to remove the circle as a structuring device from Native dwellings and buildings, as a way of continuing the ‘civilizing’ mission – the instrumentalist programme par excellence.40 The Natal government had even offered tax incentives to those Natives who lived in orthogonal dwellings filled with Western furniture.41 Both these moves were part of an attempt to inculcate Western values, especially privacy and individuality, through the compartmentalization of use-spaces in specifically orthogonal rooms. It is clear that those writing the Tuberculosis Commission report in 1914 were happy to promote the development of dwellings with multiple separate spaces as typified in the recent growth of orthogonal homes, largely as this would give ‘greater space and privacy to the individual occupants.’42 Yet they also presented these dwellings as problematic, incomplete places of either the Self or the Other. It was particularly in the use of space that the mismatch was exposed. The Report identified dirt as the main problem: ‘For the square hut is generally much dirtier, its corners do not get cleaned out, its windows are frequently closed up, the materials of which it is constructed are less pervious to natural ventilation, and European furniture more often than not means the collecting of all sorts of rubbish of not the slightest utility, which is never shifted and is the harbourer of dirt.’43 A condition in-between that of the ‘pure’ Native dwelling and the ‘desired’ detached Western dwelling, was basically intolerable. Not only was this in-betweeness considered dangerous, in its social and health dimensions, for the potential ‘damage’ to Natives in this colonial dystopia, but also because such hybridity pointed, in a psychological sense, to the potential breakdown of the Self. In other words, the hybrid hut made a mockery of the niceties and foibles of standards and practices dear to the agents of Empire, the aesthetics of cleanliness and utility. The Other needed to be maintained in a simulacra of the Self and that simulacra of the Self would later appear in the form of a supremely socializing housing phenomenon, the Garden City Movement.

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The example of the Tuberculosis Commission is not to suggest that the structural unity of the Native and his dwelling was thoroughly and consistently idealized. The Comaroffs have shown, through an analysis of earlier colonial times in South Africa44 that the dominant idea in missionary representations was that Natives and the Native hut were part of the natural world and consequently lacked cultural sophistication to mark their being human. To understand the depth of this sentiment it is worth exploring two quotes. The first, from an Architect, Builder & Engineer article titled ‘Native Housing. Physical and Social Conditions’ (at the beginning of this chapter) partly concerns the Native hut in its rural setting. Here the representation of Native dwellings allows the reader to associate Natives with the natural or animal world, if not animals themselves. Not only is ‘the Native home’ seen to lack cultural sophistication, it lacks characteristics and qualities basic and necessary to any human dwelling. It should be noted that this article was published right at the time Cape Town’s new Native location of Langa was being imagined and could therefore be read as part of the process in the legitimizing of the building of simple dwellings for Natives based on their ‘naturally lesser’ needs. Clearly the complexities of African urban settlement were lost on a conventional architectural discourse used to appraise a home through its single family inhabitants and vice versa; other kinds of cultural practices get blurred in such a focused lens. The Native’s hut was a ‘bird’s nest’ and part of the natural world. A phrase like ‘every reasonably human habitation’ and the list of defining requirements suggests that both the hut and the Native are not part of the human world at all. These associational qualities also reinforced the notion that Natives were animal-like and of the ‘natural’ world. That being so, they had no legitimate right to the sophisticated cosmopolitan space of the city. This article was also written when debate was raging on the soon to be passed Native (Urban Areas) Act – an Act that effectively limited black peoples’ access to South Africa’s cities through registration, work passes, and residential segregation. Consider the second example of the rural dwelling used as an associational device defining the identity of Natives as Other: ‘The native likes everything in circles: they think in circles. After all, this is the type of hut that you find universally all over South Africa. It is as natural for a native to live in a round hut as a snake to live in a hole.’45 This from a paper read at the Thirteenth Session of the Association of Municipal Corporations of the Cape Province, held at Grahamstown, from 10 to 12 May 1920, and deals explicitly with the Bill leading to the The Native (Urban Areas) Act (NUAA) and municipalities’ responsibilities in providing housing for Natives and controlling their presence in the city. This paper seems to have been largely based on the findings of the Tuberculosis Commission, especially the ambivalence as regards the use of circular dwellings for housing Natives in urban areas. The rhetorical devices persist, principally through the simile associating Natives with the animal world, and a dangerous and threatening one at that. Here the circular space and form of the Native dwelling is also used to define Natives as fundamentally irrational, pointing to a need for guidance. The Native, defined through his ‘natural’ dwelling, is unsophisticated, animal-like, threatening and clearly lacking any claim or right to the city whilst ‘belonging’ to the rural landscape. For a Native to live in the city at all it would have to be on European terms under highly controlled conditions.

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This notion of the Native as essentially rural and a peasant is one of the main sentiments expressed at the time the NUAA was debated.46

The Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 The Native (Urban Areas) Act of 192347 brought about a nation-wide policy similar to that of the Native Reserve Locations Act through which Ndabeni had been realized – although the related Stallard Commission leading to the Act had proposed that all Natives were ultimately to be considered as rural people required to return to the Reserves if and when their labour was no longer needed in the cities. In an infamous comment in the report of the Commission, the understanding of the city as a White space could not be more clearly voiced. Not only were the ‘habitually unemployed’ to be removed but anyone not a model citizen was in perpetual danger of what effectively amounted to deportation to the reservations, that is to say: ‘he be removed from the urban area or proclaimed area as the case may be and sent to the place to which he belongs’ [emphasis added]. Urban Natives were a spatial anomaly best resolved through their temporary residence in, or leasing of, a White space wherein the visible signs of their Otherness might be erased. Indeed, the Natives Land Act of 1913 had effectively removed the possibility of any Native purchasing land outside of areas that were essentially tribal reserves or pre-existing locations such as Ndabeni, although it was still possible for a Native to purchase property within the boundaries of a municipality or local authority.48 The Cape, having a longer history of land ownership by those other than European, was excluded from this limitation by allowing anyone wealthy enough to be on the voters’ role free access to purchase any property. In a move designed to remove this disordering presence of Natives within the White space of the city, the NUAA offered municipalities the option to opt into the Act and to declare themselves as territories where no Native could purchase land. In contrast to the Native Reserve Locations Act which had placed the onus of housing on the State, the NUAA made the housing and management of Natives in locations the responsibility of local authorities in whose boundaries the locations had been established. Whilst the design and supply of housing was the charge of the local authority, there was opportunity for Natives to erect their own dwellings, the design, dimensions and materials of which were subject to the approval of the local authority based on any rules and regulations it had passed in this regard. Rather than being driven by a consideration of individual desires for selfdetermination, this clause was included in the hope that the cost of dwellings could be reduced through owner-built labour. The Act did, in a similar manner, allow for a number of institutions such as ‘banks, hospitals, dispensaries, maternity homes, lodging houses, baths, wash-houses, recreation buildings or grounds, eating houses’ to be developed in the locations. However, the paternalist impulse still sought to control, as expressed in the sentiment that these must be ‘deemed by the urban local authority to be necessary or advisable in the interests of natives.’ Ultimately though, the elements of design were at the approval of the Minister of Native Affairs, including the ‘suitability of area and situation of the land set apart

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and the title thereto, the general plan and layout of the location or native village, the situation, nature and dimensions of any building and the provision made for water, lighting, sanitary and other necessary services for the location, native village or hostel as the case may be.’ The location was an un-negotiable space where hybrid spatial possibilities were policed. The un-negotiated and un-negotiable space of the location was in many ways the expression of Whiteness working at resolving the contradictions of race and exploitation in the colonial context. Its inhabitants, understood to be transients, were disallowed a vested interest in the specifics of the place. The location, as a smaller, bounded version of the White space of the city could remain undisrupted and unmarked by the passing of black bodies within its regularized and regulated space with all the opportunity for the reverse to occur. Finally, in order to reinforce the potential of social control through spatial means, the NUAA made it illegal for any Native to dwell within three miles of a local authority’s boundary except within the location and unless specifically employed by the person on whose land the Native was dwelling. This three mile exclusion zone effectively twisted ‘Africa’ outside and beyond the frame of reference of the administrators of the city, providing welcome psychic relief that this ordering strategy provided.

Distortions in the mirror: Garden City Ideals at Langa Native Village If Wells Square had pressured the City into providing segregated housing for its employees, the passing of the NUAA also put the onus of providing accommodation for the Native residents of the city in the hands of the Council. That the Council had long avoided taking over the management of Ndabeni49 suggests how strong the general sentiment was that ‘the Native Problem’ was to be dealt with by the Central Government who had always regulated the labour supply from the tribal areas. In fact, even though Ndabeni was within the borders of the City, it was legally separate, and as a Government reserve was exempt from legislation such as the NUAA. Ndabeni was only incorporated into Cape Town under the NUAA on 1 April 192650 since the registering and control of Natives in the city, through their allocation in space that this Act facilitated, would have been rendered inoperable had Ndabeni remained as a Government reserve. Thus, the question of how and where people should live fell squarely on the City Council and its various committees who had already started to develop state-funded housing projects through Maitland Garden Village and the Roeland Street scheme. To deal with the need to establish a new location, the Council constituted the Natives Township Committee in 1922, which a little while later became the Native Affairs Committee (hereafter NAC). The importance of the work at hand was indicated by the presence of the various mayors of Cape Town at its meetings who were also often enough members when not holding that office. Right from its first meeting in November 1922, the Committee considered the location as a ‘township,’51 in other words, a new residential development of Cape Town rather than a space of the Other which the term ‘location’ tended to signify. The fact that the township was to be developed with loans supported by the ratepayers

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under the Municipal Provision of Homes Ordinance potentially put it on the same standing as Maitland Garden Village. The NUAA had allowed for the provision of a ‘location’ or a ‘native village,’ the latter signifying the ability for natives to become homeowners on land leased from the local authority. Contrary to what may be understood by the term today, ‘native village’ denoted a sense of an English village rather than a rural African village and was part of the common discourse that had developed around the idea of the Garden City Movement in Cape Town at the time. In the parliamentary debate on the draft bill General Smuts argued that the ‘native villages’ were intended for those ‘natives who are no longer of a semi-barbarous type and who have been taught and developed, and their housing conditions must necessarily be of a different character.’52 As will be seen, the initial township layout by A.J. Thompson certainly supports this. In the NAC’s advert for the Superintendent of Natives of the proposed Native township, Langa is called ‘Langaville’ and the Superintendent would be required to advise the Committee in the laying out of the ‘Village.’53 At the suggestion of the City Engineer, T.B. Lloyd Davies, the Council engaged the English architect Albert John Thompson who had successfully completed the design of the adjacent Pinelands Garden City, to prepare the layout for the township of 5,000 residents, capable of expanding to allow for 10,000.54 Thompson, who as early as 1921 had been lecturing members of the Cape Institute of Architects (CIoA) including Delbridge, Glennie, Ritchie Fallon and John Perry on his work in England, had been used by the Pinelands Garden City Trust at the recommendation of Raymond Unwin to rationalize John Perry’s winning design for Pinelands layout and oversee the submittals of plans. Pinelands, with its Arts and Crafts cottages as exemplars of Englishness, quickly became reserved for Whites only (Figure 7.5).

7.5 Pinelands Garden City, Cape Dutch revival cottage, at Links Drive and South Way

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The accommodation for 5,000 residents at Langa was intended to cover the number of residents at Ndabeni that needed to be catered for so that Ndabeni could be closed down. However, following discussion the NAC and consideration of a police report suggesting that as many as 5,000 Natives were resident in the city, the numbers were upped to 8,000 for the first phase and 12,000 for the total. The township was also to include administrative quarters, a hospital, a school, a police station, shops, and staff cottages. In keeping with Garden City ideals, Langa was to be located some eight kilometres from the city centre in the State-owned pine forest of Uitvlugt. The ambition was to save the working classes from the easily accessible temptations of the city doubled with the desire to remove Natives from White space. There is scant evidence to suggest that the architect involved in the design and planning of Langa was motivated by any directly racist ideologies, yet there was much to suggest intended social ordering and exclusion. Thompson had worked in Unwin & Parker’s office through the duration of the Letchworth and Hampstead Garden Suburb projects55 in the UK and had gone on to design Swanpool Garden Suburb in Lincoln with Hennel and James. Working under Unwin on the Hampstead Garden Suburb suggests that he approached the ‘Garden Suburb’ as a social machine in which Arts and Crafts aesthetics and relatively low housing densities was to have an uplifting affect on the ‘class’ of person it was designed for. From the very beginning, Langa was conceived programmatically as a place divided between those who were understood to be permanent married residents of Cape Town and those who were single, the latter social status further differentiated between men and women. Thus the residential requirements were considered to be 500 cottages, one hostel for 2,000 single men and one hostel for 100 single women. Thompson, who had been contracted on 27 April 1923, submitted his initial report and layout to the NAC on the 28 June 1923 (Figure 7.6).56 The only layout drawing remaining from that initial design is a drainage-plan overlay using the basic layout plan underneath. The primary structuring device Thompson used in the layout of the township was to locate the main roads, eastwest and north-south, on the line of the existing fire-paths that ran through the forest, the reason being to retain ‘some of the very fine trees which are already existing on the lines of these proposed roads.’ The railway line was to be pushed to the boundary of the township so that no traffic – except that for the hospital – would be required to cross it. The train station and the eating hall of one hostel formed the main axial terminations for Station Avenue running north-south, whilst the other hostel’s eating hall formed a minor axial termination for Central Avenue running east-west and crossing Station Avenue at Central Square. Central Square was the intended location of the administration and police quarters, as well as a cinema and two churches – a sort of church and state power-bloc. On the other hand, the station and its square was to form the commercial centre of the scheme, with fish and meat market halls, and fruit and vegetable market halls flanking Station Avenue, and rows of shops flanking the station. The women’s hostel was to be located opposite the school, and a pool was to be built at the southwest corner of the scheme, mainly to assist in controlling water run-off at the site’s lowest point.

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These points aside, it seems clear – from Thompson’s concern for placing the school away from the traffic of the main roads together with his concern for trees and his leaving open play areas behind the cottages through Unwin-style road layouts – that he was basing the design of Langa on Garden City ideas. The 1,920 houses dotted around the scheme – 8.5 to the net acre as he pointed out – are of a density characteristic of the emerging Garden Suburbs in England and were indicative of the extent to which the township may have been developed in the future. Each plot size was to be standard suburban sizes of 50’ × 100’. It seems fairly apparent that Thompson used basic Garden Suburb principles he’d learnt as Unwin’s ‘protégé’ and ‘office manager’57 in his initial and subsequent layout designs of Langa. This is suggested by comparisons made between the Langa layout and the Hampstead Garden Suburb (Figure 7.7) in London along with the First World War munitions townships of Gretna/Eastriggs (Figure 7.8) outside Carlisle and confirmed in his layout of Pinelands (Figure 7.9). These four layout designs share a similar, and somewhat formal and orthogonal, civic and commercial axis typical of Unwin’s ordered-picturesque – although Langa exhibits a far more symmetrical design. All four have a main square designated Central Square, whilst Gretna, Pinelands and Langa have avenues extending from this called Central Avenue – although this name did not remain in use at Langa nor at Eastriggs whose roads where tellingly named as a roll-call of the major cities of the Dominions of the British Empire. Hampstead, Pinelands and Langa have culde-sacs as well as communal areas behind the dwellings forming internal squares, although in Pinelands these were largely subsumed by cul-de-sacs. Furthermore,

7.6  Langa layout, from Drainage plan, 1923. Key: A. School, B. Meat market, C. Fruit and vegetable market, D. Compound for 200 single women, E. Churches, F. Picture theatre, G. Police station, H. Admin, K. Compound for 2,000 single men, L. Church house. Notes by the author

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7.7 Hampstead Garden Suburb interim layout

both Pinelands and Langa show the development of a women’s hostel ‘protected’ from the street in a quadrangle form behind a row of houses. For its part Pinelands shows a remarkable similarity to Hampstead in its disposition of the buildings in and around the Central Square. And whilst Hampstead and Pinelands have a far more ‘organic’ and web-like layout, both Gretna/Eastriggs and Langa show a fairly rigid disposition of dwelling accommodation, suggesting their common status as labour centres rather than fully-fledged Garden Suburbs. As we shall see there is a lot to suggest that Thompson used the lessons learnt at Gretna/Eastriggs in his design for Langa despite the fact that he served as an officer for the duration of World War One and would not have worked on the design in Unwin’s office; the concluding compromise of Langa bares remarkable similarities to the more austere cottages of Gretna/Eastriggs. It was also not insignificant that the City Engineer referred to the dwellings in Thompson’s original layout as ‘cottages.’58 At Langa there were telltale elements of the design that, in this dislocating condition of Empire, revealed the more totalitarian tendencies that normally

7.8 Raymond Unwin – Layout of Gretna and Eastriggs munitions supply townships, c.1917

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7.9 A.J. Thompson – Pinelands, layout of initial development, 1920

lay hidden behind the bucolic Arts and Crafts architecture of the Garden City Movement. The tendencies to control and segregate embedded within the model sprang to the fore as Thompson easily morphed the master plan to accommodate the ambitions contained in the newly-passed NUAA. The Police Station was specifically located to give ‘efficient police control,’ whereby, Thompson noted A man on duty at the tower will be able to see over the whole Estate, and again a man on point duty at the centre of what you might call the Central Square will be able to see not only from end to end of the Central Avenue, but will be able to look into each of the large Compounds and directly up to the Station Square, and a Police Patrol on the roads running North and South would get immediate view East and West down all the other roads and across the open spaces.59

Furthermore, Thompson suggested that his ‘compounds’ were modelled on those on the Crown Mines in Johannesburg (although the 27’ × 30’ unit was intended to accommodate 25 men and not 40 as in Johannesburg) – it should be noted that ‘hostel,’ rather than ‘compound,’ was the standard form of group housing in the typical Garden Suburb. Although the City Engineer had been given complete control of the development of Langa until a Superintendent of Natives – a paternalist position of mediation and control akin to the status of a White ‘chief’ – could be selected,60 he specifically requested that Thompson be retained as ‘Consulting Architect’ on the project for a year.61 Thompson was commissioned to design inter alia: a meat market, a fruit and vegetable market, a hostel for 200 single women, two hostels each for 2,000 single

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men, a Police station, administration offices, administration quarters, and cottages for married natives and their families. Together they set about interpreting the comments from the Provincial Secretary reporting suggestions made by Colonel Trew, Deputy Commissioner of Police, and Dr Wilmot, Assistant Medical Officer of Health for the Union of South Africa. These included: 2). A Compound should not hold more than 1,000 natives and should be so designed that not more than 250 men should occupy one section and further that the sections be so planned that in case of emergency each can be closed to access from any other section. 3). The Compounds should be so placed that they are in the vicinity of the railway station so as to avoid passage through the area set apart for married natives. 4). The Compounds should be surrounded by an open space. It is considered that the suggestion No.3 would be in the interests of morality and all would greatly facilitate police control.62

That the compound was considered to be a space apart – without the Romantic pretences of Hampstead Garden Suburb and its ‘medieval’ wall – is confirmed by the quote above and revealed in the resulting design in which the suggestions of Trew and Wilmot were taken into account in the star-shaped compound indicated (Figure 7.10).

7.10 Langa layout, c.1926

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Single males were further classified and ordered into appropriate accommodation; migrant labourers considered most likely to return to tribal areas after contract labour ended would occupy the Compounds (or barracks as they were now being called), and those resident in the city a fairly long time and not considered ‘temporaries’ were housed on the ‘cubicle system’ or ‘Quarters’ for more ‘comfort and privacy.’63 The second layout design shows the compound at the west end of what became Washington Street replaced by these ‘Quarters’ with ablution facilities located between the units. While the permanent, single men of the city may have preferred these single room dwellings64 and could have afforded the higher rents intended, the basic urge to keep migrant labourers separate from permanently urbanized Natives for fear of mutual social and moral ‘contamination’ plays itself out in the interim and final design. Whilst Hampstead and Letchworth had largely failed at bringing different classes together in areas of common interest, the design at Langa – true to the hardening taxonomies of race and class in Imperial Cape Town – shows a clear intention of ‘class’ segregation. Open interaction was spatially consigned to the communal kitchen and dining area now at the centre of the ‘barracks’. As for the compound, Thompson stated, in a report dated 20 November 1923, ‘we should endeavour to make it look as little like a barracks as possible.’65 Control of the ‘inmates’ was, however, a major concern. The barracks (‘compound’ seems more appropriate to the overall fenced-in space of Langa itself ) were divided into four 250 person ‘wings’ (shown as large U’s on the layout, and perhaps similar to Garden City quadrangle accommodation) to better isolate potential unrest. The design essentially had the U’s turn their backs on the outside world, setting up a series of contained courtyards focused in on the kitchen, eating house and ablution blocks. The revised design, although having no central guard-tower, does resemble the general radial patterns of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prisons based on the panopticon66 system of surveillance, and is a distinct move away from the initial quadrangle design similar to the hostels of Hampstead and other Garden Suburbs. Certainly the main axial entrance to the barracks was between the admin building and the Superintendent’s house, as well as between two of his assistants’ houses, allowing visual control over who entered and left the barracks (Figure 7.11). The City Engineer even made plans to provide ‘powerful “arc” lamps’ in the spaces around the compound for added surveillance.67 Following what Jennifer Robinson has noted as the emergence of a ‘location strategy,’68 the space of locations in general was overlaid with a complementary set of regulations and rules. As proposed by the Native Affairs Department these included: needing permission to be out the ‘depot’ between 9pm and 4am and only being able to enter or leave ‘the depot except by regular entrances or exits.’69 Natives were not to create disturbances, be intoxicated, misuse latrines or commit ‘indecent acts’ and ‘Every inmate shall keep his clothes, effects and person clean and shall if required by the superintendent or matron submit to such measures for the cleansing of himself and his clothing and effects as the superintendent or matron may deem necessary.’ Cook, as the Superintendent of Natives for Langa proposed these regulations, amongst many others:

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7.11 Langa layout, aerial photograph, 1935

11. The register shall set out the name, race and occupation of every registered occupier, and the name, sex and age of each member of his family, and shall specify the dwelling or dwelling place of or in which he or she resides. 15. The Superintendent shall number each dwelling or dwelling place, and shall, for the purpose, be provided by the Council with proper tin-plates, bearing the number of the dwelling or dwelling place legibly painted thereon in large figures. 21. Every occupier of a dwelling or dwelling place shall keep the dwellings and places allotted to him or her in a clean condition. 23. No outhouse, shed, fence or structure shall be erected on or around any dwelling, unless the written permission of the Superintendent shall first have been obtained; and such permission shall only be given if the Superintendent is satisfied that it is necessary. 35. No person, other than an occupier of a dwelling or dwelling place, his wife and family and members under 18 years of age, or married daughters, shall be in the Native Township between the hours of 9p.m. and sunrise, unless he can shew that his presence in the Township is for good and sufficient reasons. 36. No dance, tea-party or entertainment shall be given without the written permission of the Superintendent. 39. The Superintendent or any official of the Native Township Staff shall at all times have access to all buildings of part thereof within the Township, for the purpose of inspection, and no person shall at any time obstruct him or them from such inspection; or refuse or interfere with such access aforesaid.70

That the administrators of these rules were located so close to their subjects was clearly part of this strategy of control. That their dwellings were fairly large and had tiled roofs compared to the corrugated roofs of the other dwellings would have

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7.12 Langa compound details c.1924

set them further apart. Although the six foot high barbed-wire topped fence that was designed71 to enclose Langa was initially required as part of the conditions by which the central government had granted the city the land in order to ‘protect’ the adjacent forest,72 it no doubt served the obvious added purpose of forcing people to enter and leave Langa via a single point. The detail design of the barracks also contributed to this attempt at control. Thompson pointed out that the windows at the back walls of the barracks were all fixed-panes so that ‘parcels could not be passed through from the outside of the compound’ (Figure 7.12).73 This was a nod to the temperance sensibilities prevalent at the time as well as the restrictions on the type of alcohol Natives could legally consume. The fixing shut of the windows of the barracks brings to light another aspect of the design for Langa. As a further indication of the locations’ Otherness, and following the NUAA, the space of locations was exempt from Municipal building regulations, although the more ‘scientific’ aspects of dwelling inhabitation were implemented through the Public Health Act, albeit in a less stringent form. Consequently, and in keeping with the emerging ‘science’ of inhabitation introduced into the building regulations, a ridge vent and vent grilles in the walls had to be included to maintain

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7.13 Langa, compound of single huts for men, c.1924

the ‘correct’ air circulation. This requirement also had an influence on the design of the Quarters for single men and women (Figure 7.13). The original sketch design by Thompson shows a hand-written acknowledgement that the design was illegitimate as it was ‘back to back’ and the ceiling was potentially too low at 8’ 6”.74 The dwelling type was eventually built without ceilings with dividing walls that didn’t extend to the roof thereby facilitating cross-ventilation. The obsession over fresh-air as a preventative measure against disease and ill-health – not forgetting the addition of ‘sleeping verandahs’ in middle-class house designs of the period – made the barracks and Quarters very draughty, such that it became a major cause for complaint by the inhabitants.75 Residents of the barracks also complained that the central fireplace in each unit caused the rooms to be filled with smoke even though they had chimneys. Locating the fireplace in the centre of the room obviously gave greater heating efficiency but this may really have been an intentional reference to the central fireplace of the rural ‘hut.’ Other reasons for complaint were the concrete bunks. Initially, 725 dwellings for married Natives were to be built by the residents themselves, following the designs and example of two model cottages suggested

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7.14 Eastriggs, temporary huts

by G.P. Cook, the Superintendent for Langa.76 Cook, who was Superintendent of the location at Bloemfontein, felt that this approach had been used to good effect there. Qualifying for the married quarters, however, was onerous. Cook recommended that the husband – female heads of households and widows could not apply – would have to prove being resident in Cape Town for a number of years as well as be of a ‘good character’ and ‘legally married otherwise there would be a danger of the wrong class getting a hold of stands.’77 It is important to note that this social management strategy parallels similar tendencies developed by Octavia Hill in England and applied in South Africa.78 Eventually, Cook recommended that the Self-built cottages be abandoned in favour of cottages provided by the Council to facilitate the managed removal of residents from Ndabeni to Langa, a process the ad hoc self-built approach would have prevented.79 Although Thompson’s scheme had initially shown detached single-family units, the dwellings that were eventually built were grouped into 6 units of 2 rooms each, 150 of them being handed over for occupation towards the end of 192880 and 300 having been completed by August 1929.81 That Langa was to receive no subsidy82 from the government effected this cost saving strategy, although their disposition and basic and rudimentary spatial arrangement did bare a remarkable similarity to the temporary cottages Unwin designed at Eastriggs which might have been their legitimating precedent (Figure 7.14). Three elements of this change in design and

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product suggest the piecemeal abandonment of the idea of Langa as a Garden Suburb on lines similar to Maitland Garden Village and Roeland Street: firstly, the maximum grouping of dwelling units as at Roeland Street was four and not six; secondly, most Garden Suburb dwellings for the working classes were at least three-roomed and not the two-roomed dwellings that were built; thirdly, the plans themselves show the two rooms vaguely labelled as ‘room’ as if the interior space was impossible to define through any ‘standard’ functions of the home (Figure 7.15).83 This whittling-away of Garden Suburb standards is also reflected in the way Langa changed its official and colloquial title from Township or Village to Location over the years. It signifies the changes in perception of the reality that the NAC and the City Engineer had created through various economic compromises. Yet the design, as it developed, did not lose all of its Garden Suburb sentiments or values. The Postal Authorities suggested that the proposed post-office and savings bank be located in the station building as this was the ‘business quarter.’84 The City Engineer and the NAC, responding to the Railways Department, even opposed wood-and-iron dwellings for the station: Read memorandum from the City Engineer dated 6th October, 1923, stating that in his opinion wood-and-iron buildings would not be in keeping with the scheme the Council were about to undertake and further stating that permanent buildings with ample accommodation should be provided, and that the plans of the station and buildings connected therewith should be submitted for the approval of the Committee before construction was commenced.85

All the buildings at Langa were indeed built of brick. The first few years of Langa’s development saw the city having to manage the location of Ndabeni while removing residents to Langa. In fact, prior to the married quarters becoming available, the accommodation at Ndabeni had to be increased with the introduction of Nissen tents as mentioned earlier.86 The establishment and development of Langa had been urged in 1924 by A.G. Godley, the Secretary of Native Affairs, as the only way for the ‘Council to achieve any measure of success in cleaning up the City.’87 The first ten years saw a significant amount of ongoing building at Langa, yet, and as Saunders notes,88 the City was plagued by the general avoidance of living at Langa and consequently large parts of it remained empty. This had a lot to do with the contradiction between the labour requirements of industrial capitalism and the desires of the agents of Empire to secure the city as a place of Whiteness. Many employers used the allowances in the NUAA to apply to establish mini-locations at the point of employment, pock-marking the city with blackness. Cook, as the Superintendent of Natives for Cape Town, received many applications from dairies and brickfields in this regard as the deputation from the Cape Dairymen’s Association pleaded: It is an acknowledged fact that natives will stay with one employer – with short holidays to Kaffirland – for years and this is proof that they are, even now, reasonably treated. These boys are the better class of Kaffirs – untainted by

7.15  Langa, details of two-roomed blocks, 1932

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civilisation – who come from King Williams Town and the Transkei, and we as Dairymen, feel it incumbent on us to look after their welfare – and return them to their kraals as they were when they came to us.89

Many such applications were denied but those that were approved, becoming mini-locations within the White space of the city, were especially surveyed by the MOH. There were some who managed to remain beyond the fences of Langa and the controlling influence of its administrators: domestic workers resided in the suburbs as live-in servants, whilst a few Natives avoided Langa as property owners on the voters roll, although even then Cook was keen to have their living conditions investigated.90 Mostly, the avoidance of residing in Langa was based on its unaffordable rents as the Langa residents’ Natives Advisory Board conveyed in a protest meeting with the Natives Advisory Committee.91 High rents to cover the cost of Langa was a point of contention for the administrators of the city. As the State’s Secretary for Native Affairs, J.F. Herbst noted in a report in 1927 on the problems at Langa, the accommodation was ‘probably more than the temporary native resident needs, and the rental is certainly more than he can afford to pay.’92 He did, however, acknowledge the importance that Langa presented to ‘civilized Natives:’ This has had a very beneficial effect in convincing the natives that the European public is interested in their well-being. The non-native sections of the community need to be reminded that N’dabeni Location and Langa Native Village are of as much concern to natives as are other parts of the City to them. If natives are to have their separate residential area it should be really their home [original emphasis] with all the freedom and liberty which that word connotes.

But Langa certainly did not constitute a home to its residents. Again, in October 1927 the Natives Advisory Board met with the NAC to discuss the problems of Langa.93 Concerns included being forced to eat food prepared in the central kitchens and the lavatories and latrines being ‘out of keeping with the habits of the native people.’ The fact that the police could enter the accommodation at Langa without a search warrant was noted. The biggest problem, however, was the draughtiness of both the Quarters and the rooms of the barracks. The Rev. Mtimkulu noted: Langa was supposed to be a model township, but the heathen man did not understand the ventilation of the barracks, and to train him by force was to ask him to run wild. The wall partitions should be raised to roof height. If the suggestions he had outlined were given effect to, the hearts of the native people would be won, and Langa would be full in a few weeks time.

No action was taken to ameliorate these conditions. In fact the Town Clerk had met with the Secretary for Justice and the Deputy Commissioner for Police a few days before in order to legalize the appointment of special City-employed constables whose job it was to round up and escort all unregistered Natives in Cape Town to Langa.94 This was done with immediate effect and arrests made for November 1927 were 242.95 Certainly by 1936, after the

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increase in accommodation at Langa and the eventual closing of Ndabeni, much of the ‘cleaning up’ of the City had occurred, with most Natives being required to live at Langa. Yet many more avoided being brought under control through the establishment of informal settlements located at the three mile periphery of the city, beyond the space that had been produced and surveyed, or in the back alleys of District Six. Even so, it could be said that Langa, for a brief period, temporarily erased the contradictions of an Empire intent on preserving tribalism whilst simultaneously crafting Natives into ‘civilized’ and ordered labourer–visitors. Langa suggested for a time the imperative of making exploited subjects simultaneously present and absent could be made to work.

Conclusion A look in the mirror of the city would have pleased politicos, administrators and architects in the mid-1930s. There, set within the optimistic frame of discourse and policies, they would have seen a White city of their making: ordered, regulated and without ambiguity. The Native (Urban Areas) Act had sequestered Natives into a singular bounded and fenced territory, a policed compound. An ‘improvement’ on the use of locations that had preceded the Act – the city was no longer as pockmarked with ‘African’ territories spread like a rash over its body. No signs of ‘Africa’ were within this territory; not even thatch – that much-loved Arts and Crafts roofing material – was allowed to soften the roofscape of Langa. It was to all extents and purposes a White space – highly ordered with different ‘types’ of people allocated to different ‘types’ of accommodation. A look in the mirror would have shown how all married Christian Africans were living in the same area, in superior accommodation as befitted the order of things. Their two-roomed homes would have been adequate for their status – not quite the level needed for White residents but a mark up on the ladder of civilization nevertheless. Unmarried labourers would be carefully controlled and policed in barracks, their movements overseen by a nearby police station. All of this was rendered in whitewashed brick walls, in neat and orderly streetscapes with rows of terrace houses punctuated occasionally by churches and trees. The city itself was showing signs of order. The ‘ugly,’ dense and fractured spaces of the older parts of Cape Town were being demolished, turned inside out, and ‘opened up’. Its ‘disorderly’ inhabitants were being investigated, re-housed, consolidated as a ‘race.’ Their new accommodation in free-standing and semidetached cottages in suburban areas would have struck these mirror-gazers as being wholly appropriate to their station in civilization. They had been given their rightful place in the city, or rather, at the periphery of the city where they might better find their way to Self-hood. The mirror would also have revealed a group of White Capetonians, self-electing their identity as English – in hot pursuit of a Romantic English rural past in Pinelands, establishing England at the safe edge of the city, at a safe distance from the troubling and messy physical history of the city itself.

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The Empire, it seemed, was just as it should be. Closer inspection would have revealed the mirror’s distorting surface, a torturing of the territory needed to produce the ordering fantasy. As administered spaces of Whiteness, the stripped-down starkness of Langa and Maitland Garden Village nevertheless revealed their insistent difference, the lingering troubling presence of Otherness. It was in the labels on the drawings of Langa, the vague slippage of ‘room’ instead of ‘bedroom,’ it was in the lack of ceilings of the back-to-back houses built there and the implications for privacy and private property this suggested. But mostly the distortions were in the way that Langa and Maitland Garden Village had none of the Romantic charm needed to disguise the ordering and segregationist policies at the heart of the Garden City Movement. Within their heightened administrative regimes, Langa and Maitland Garden Village revealed the future repression that would be needed to control these Empire’s Others. Their location at the periphery of the city revealed the impasse at the heart of colonialism and its exploitative processes – how could ‘these people’ be both present and absent from the space of the city itself? How could they go on being housed at a burgeoning periphery that may ultimately become the centre? At what cost would the White space of the city be maintained? Aiming to avoid the ugly and troubling realities of industrialization, the Garden City Movement had, ironically, pushed everyone to the periphery of the city. And there, once again, Whiteness found itself surrounded by unsettling neighbours.

Notes 1

Architect Builder & Engineer, vol. 6, no. 10, (May, 1923), p.10.

2

Cape Government Act 37, 1884, (Native Locations Act).

3

Cape Government Act 40, 1902 (Native Reserve Locations Act).

4

Cape Government Act 8, 1905 (Native Reserve Locations Amendment Act).

5 KAB NA 457: Minutes of Evidence. Commission on a Native Location for Capetown, October, 1900. 6 KAB NA 457: CNL: Robert Wynne-Roberts, (City Engineer). 7 KAB NA 457: CNL: John McGregor, (Chairman, Maitland Village Board of Management). 8

Baines, G., ‘New Brighton, Port Elizabeth c1903-1953. A History of an Urban African Community.’

9

Minkley, G., ‘“Corpses behind screens:” Native Space in the City.’

10 Consider the idea of the ‘location strategy’ as a means of social-spatial control in Robinson, J., The Power of Apartheid. 11 Cape Times 8 February 1900: Editorial, ‘The Aboriginal Immigrant.’ 12 Cape Times 27 December 1899: Editorial, ‘The Kafir Problem.’ 13 Bickford-Smith, V., Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Cape Town, p.160. 14 Notwithstanding a newspaper’s propensity for exaggeration and drama: Cape Times 27 December 1899: Editorial, ‘The Kafir Problem.’

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15 KAB NA 457: CNL: George Behr, (Woodstock Mayor). 16 KAB NA 457: CNL: Joseph Corben, (Sanitary Superintendent). 17 KAB NA 457: CNL: Thomas O’Reilly, (Mayor). 18 Cape Times 27 December 1899: Editorial, ‘The Kafir Problem.’ 19 Ibid. 20 KAB CCC NA 457: CNL, Letter from Noel Janisch, Under Colonial Secretary to the Town Clerk, 11 February 1901. 21 KAB NA 457: CNL: Compare Thomas O’Reilly (Mayor) to Samuel Tonkin (Mowbray Mayor). 22 KAB NA 457: Dr Jane Waterston. 23 KAB NA 457: Dr Jane Waterston. 24 KAB NA 457: CNL: Charles Matthews (Councillor) and George Behr (Mayor of Woodstock). 25 KAB NA 457: Robert Wynne-Roberts (City Engineer). 26 KAB NA 457: Thomas O’Reilly (Mayor). 27 Murray, N., ‘The Imperial Landscape at Cape Town’s Gardens,’ (unpublished M.Arch, University of Cape Town, 2001). 28 Cape Government NA 457: 17 October 1900. 29 Cape Government NA 457: 28 February 1901, letter from Mansergh to Chairman of Native Location Advisory Board. 30 Cape Government NA 457: 8 March 1901, letter from Mansergh to Noel Janisch, Under Colonial Secretary. 31 Cape Government PWD 2/1/30: 25 May 1901, letter from Mansergh to Newey. 32 Cape Government PWD 2/1/30: 9 April 1901, letter from Mansergh to The Chief Inspector of Public Works. 33 Cape Government PWD 2/1/30: 15 July 1901, report from J. Edward Fitt. 34 Cape Government PWD 2/1/30: 16 January 1902, letter from Mansergh to The Chief Inspector of Public Works. 35 Cape Government PWD 2/1/30: 24 November 1902, Requisition by the Clerk of Works. 36 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 27 November 1923. 37 Union Government 34-1914, Report of the Tuberculosis Commission, p.101. 38 Ibid., p.107. 39 Young, R., White Mythologies, p.147. 40 For a thorough analysis of this with regards the Tswana people, see Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J., Of Revelation and Revolution, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp.287–322. 41 Union Government 34-1914, Report of the Tuberculosis Commission, p.102. 42 Ibid., p.104. 43 Ibid., p.104.

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44 Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J., Of Revelation and Revolution. The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, p.280. 45 Saunders, F.A., ‘Municipal Control of Locations,’ paper read at the Thirteenth Session of the Association of Municipal Corporations of the Cape Province, held at Grahamstown, 10, 11 and 12 May 1920, pp.9–10. 46 See for example Cape Times 7 May 1923: Editorial, ‘The native is essentially a peasant; he is not an urban resident…’ 47 Union Government Act 21, 1923 (Native (Urban Areas) Act). 48 Union Government Act 27, 1913 (Natives Land Act). 49 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/5/1/1/9: Special Committee, 16 October 1919. 50 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/2: NAC, 16 April 1926. 51 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 6 November 1922, Letter to the Secretary of the Divisional Council, 6 October 1922. 52 As cited in Morris, P., A History of Black Housing in South Africa, (Johannesburg: South African Foundation, 1981), p.19. 53 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 28 August 1923. 54 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 27 April 1923. Report by the City Engineer dated 18 April 1923. 55 Miller, M., Raymond Unwin. Garden Cities and Town Planning, (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), p.53. 56 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 4 July 1923. 57 Miller, M., Raymond Unwin, p.89. 58 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 28 August 1923. 59 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 4 July 1923. Report submitted by A.J. Thompson, 28 June 1923. 60 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 18 July 1923. 61 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 12 September 1923. 62 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 12 September 1923. 63 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 28 August 1923. 64 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 27 November 1923, the idea of Quarters came after meeting with the Cape Peninsula Native Welfare Society. 65 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 27 November 1923. 66 Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, p.197. 67 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 27 November 1923. 68 Robinson, J., The Power of Apartheid, p.59. 69 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 27 November 1923. 70 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 19 July 1924. 71 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 22 December 1924. 72 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 14 February 1923.

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73 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 27 November 1923. 74 KAB Map M1/3380. 75 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/2: NAC, 25 October 1927. 76 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 5 February 1924. 77 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 29 July 1924. 78 Robinson, J. ‘Octavia Hill Women Housing Managers in South Africa: Femininity and Urban Government,’ Journal of Historic Geography, vol. 24, no. 4 (1998), pp.459–81. 79 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 29 July 1924. 80 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/3: NAC, 15 October 1928. 81 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/3: NAC, 19 August 1929. 82 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 27 August 1924. 83 For reference to the importance of rooms and labels in the colonial context see John and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Chapter 6: ‘Mansions of the Lord.’ 84 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 5 February 1924. 85 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 11 October 1923. 86 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 15 May 1923. 87 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/1: NAC, 19 November 1924. 88 Saunders, C., ‘From Ndabeni to Langa’ in Studies in the History of Cape Town, vol. 1, (1979). 89 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/2: NAC, 9 June 1926. 90 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/3: NAC, 15 April 1929. 91 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/2: NAC, 16 May 1927. 92 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/2: NAC, 20 June 1927. 93 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/2: NAC, 25 October 1927. 94 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/2: NAC, 18 October 1927. 95 KAB CCC 3/CT-1/4/10/1/1/3: NAC, 19 December 1927.

Conclusion: The Production of the City as a White Space: On Architecture and Order

On the steps of an old Dutch house the Guide broke the silence. ‘Here in this place you see the Divine plan; order out of chaos, light from darkness, reversed. The new order is corruption after decency, foulness where once cleanliness and beauty reigned. Once this dwelling was a home – one family dwelt here – the name____ You remember it in the old Cape books. The old man – I see him now – found pride in the spotless white steps, the well-oiled doors and the shining brass. Not far away stands the old Theatre, and down this road the nobility of the day walked in the cool of the evening. Lady Anne Barnard was no stranger here; it seems as yesterday. But come, let us enter.’ 1 Archdeacon Lavis, ‘The Pity of It … and Bethlehem.’

Only days before Christmas in 1924, Archdeacon Lavis (later Bishop), a crusading housing reformer pushing for slum clearances in Cape Town, provides readers of The Cape with a Grinch-like horror story. Channelling Dickens, Lavis presents a character called Tomkins visited on Christmas Eve by ‘The Spirit of Cape Town as God Meant It To Be’ who is spirited off on a journey – the spatiality involved is telling – from the suburbs into ‘Old Capetown’. He enters his ‘pet aversion’ – a slum where ‘foulness reigns.’ And there finds rooms ‘divided for two families, the box room, the forage store, queer little extra cubby holes, each with its quota of human souls.’ After the tour where ‘devils lurk in the dark rumbling passages of a human warren like this, as surely as in the dark lanes outside,’ the Guide petitions Tomkins that a ‘“Home” and not a “hovel,”’ is the right of ‘the poorest men and women and of each little child.’ A right that includes having ‘an environment which will develop and not retard the upward, onward, physical and spiritual movement in each human life!’ This is not possible in the city itself, the Guide suggests, since it is a place where ‘the loss of happiness, beauty, power and love’ never ends. The Guide demands that Tomkins tells the residents of Cape Town about the slum: Tell of the young wife, straight from domestic service, nobly attempting the impossible task of making a clean home in a slum room, till very soon the dreadful slum miasma breathes its fateful spell over her and poisons and kills

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higher aspirations. Tell of that great disaster – the moral deterioration, the spiritual paralysis which overtakes the victims. Cry aloud that as surely as you place a man in the slums, you create a slum in the man.

The Bishop-to-be’s Christmas story offers a suggestive summary of this book. Firstly, Tomkins and the Guide speak for Englishness in the service of Empire. Phrases like ‘old Dutch house’ and ‘Lady Anne Barnard was no stranger here’ and ‘it seems as yesterday’ places Englishness within an originating Cape Dutch architecture while telegraphing both into the present: it is obvious that the building requires preservation to protect this ‘common’ English and Dutch past. History, as represented through architectural artefacts, is an emphatic and undeniable prompt for the Union of South Africa. This is the central idea in Chapter 1 which established the role of Cape Dutch architecture in the forging of a common English/Afrikaner identity in service of Empire, consolidating the future of South Africa around Whiteness. A Cape Dutch building, however, is not simply a relic from the past, as shown in Chapter 2, but evidence of Western civilization’s, or rather, the British Empire’s, unquestionable mission to re-make the world. Phrases like ‘Divine plan; order out of chaos, light from darkness’ suggest an almost religious conviction in the moral correctness of the cultural artefacts of Western civilization – one echoed in the spectral form of the Guide as ‘The Spirit of Cape Town as God Meant It To Be.’ There is also an expectation that the ‘heroes’ of the past are to be known and are to be remembered ‘in the old Cape books’ whilst the phrase ‘the nobility of the day,’ suggests the Romantic undertone with which the agents of Empire re-imagined themselves as a landed gentry through the Cape Dutch homestead. The idea of the aesthetics of the visual, explored in Chapter 4, is present in Lavis’ story in the valuing of ‘cleanliness and beauty’ and the ‘spotless steps’ and ‘shining brass’ – all sullied by Otherness. Chapter 5 examined how slums were represented as places where ‘devils lurk’ and how an ascription of Otherness was made through the dwelling and the use of its space. The phrase ‘let us enter’ also indicates the way in which these Other-spaces came to be mapped and investigated. The last two chapters of this book are hinted at in a number of ways in the article. The idea of the ‘home’ as strictly a single-family detached dwelling located in the suburbs is suggested in the fact that Tomkins himself is from the suburbs, and that the old Dutch dwelling was ‘a home – one family dwelt here’ Another key idea from Chapter 6 – environmental determinism – is suggested in the words ‘develop’ the ‘upward, onward, physical and spiritual movement in each human life’ and that if you ‘place a man in the slums, you create a slum in the man.’ Finally, the Garden City Movement of Chapter 7 is hinted at in the sense that an urban environment spells the ‘loss of happiness, beauty, power and love.’ Lavis’s article also offers a description of the central ideas that structured this book into three parts. The Self is secured by a cultural life based on the ‘History of Western Civilisation,’ typically located outside of the city (although located in the city in Lavis’s article for greater dramatic effect) and symbolized through the ‘beautiful’ artefacts of ‘high’ architecture. These buildings are also symbolic markers of the legitimate and necessary possession of the land by the colonizer. In contrast, the threatening Other is located within the city with its lack of boundaries, order

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and aesthetic appeal. The Other might undo the Self by putting in danger the ‘high’ architecture of Western civilization – one of the abiding assurances of a stable White identity. The ‘solution’ is removing Others from the dangerous fluidity of the ugly city into the tame Whiteness of the suburbs where boundaries are maintained and where the Other can be made into the Same, eradicating hybridity. Garden Suburbs are a simulacra of the Self that hold out the hope of resolving the contradictions of colonization. They remove the visual evidence of the urban and hybridized effects of Empire and provide an answer, however temporary, to the question of where and how people are to live. Cape Town was not alone in this kind of representation and re-ordering of the Self and ‘his’ Others. Octavia Hill’s efforts at valorizing and protecting England’s bucolic architectural heritage through the National Trust and her slum clearance and re-housing activities are good examples of how the construction of Self and Other are simultaneous activities. Her work reflects the same concerns for ‘culture’ and the ‘proper’ way of living as those at the Cape. It is easy to hear the words of her friend and mentor, John Ruskin, and see his influence permeating the representations and restructuring of the spaces of Cape Town we have looked at. As J.R. Finch, Town Clerk and author of the official guidebook to Cape Town, says: ‘Bring your trout rod and your books on nature, your gun, your volumes of Ruskin, when starting Southward Ho!’2 It is in this sense that the pre-apartheid restructuring of the spaces of Cape Town was not simply the result of an early desire for racial segregation, but also the effects of a set of particularly English values that saw the agents of Empire set about reordering Cape Town into a set of spaces after their own image. Nor was this simply the ‘neutral’ effect of cultural activity. It was this representing and reordering that set up a series of inclusions and exclusions, legitimate and illegitimate ways of being, that legitimized the possession of the land and its history, and dispossessed Others of their own land and place in history. Historicizing Cape Town and its architecture through the lens of postcolonial theory obviously has the potential to deliver new insights into South Africa’s preapartheid cities. Hopefully this book confirms that, for example, engaging with the design of Groote Schuur in 1892 and the design of Ndabeni in 1900, or the design of the Cape Dutch South Africa pavilion at the Empire Exhibition in Wembley in 1924, and the beginnings of the design of Langa location in 1923, or the declaration of Groot Constantia as a national monument in 1936 and the Slums Act in 1934, is not simply to study events in the built environment held together by time and place, but gets at how culture and identity, through architecture and order, are integral parts of the processes of colonial possession and dispossession. Architects and other agents of Empire were actively constructing Cape Town and South Africa into a territory of the British Empire – mapped out, ordered and remade through architecture into a landscape legitimizing their continued control and exploitation of the land and its people. Research for this book effectively began in 1999 as a Ph.D. thesis when postcolonial theory and issues of Whiteness and the binaries of Self and Other were fairly novel – at least in architectural discourse. It may seem a somewhat overdone historiographical tendency by now. Re-encountering these terms over and over again in this text

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has been at times deflating, even for me. Yet it has proved sincerely impossible to write these essentializing binary words out of the text, largely because they are the essential story of pre-apartheid and apartheid era South Africa – however much the new South Africa likes to conceive of itself as a many-hued Rainbow Nation. What this book lacks is an exposition of the sites of resistance to this hegemonic construct. I ask the reader to spare me on this – my dual roles as architect and design educator promotes the role and agency of the architect to the forefront of my concerns. In doing so, I have yet again managed to silence the subaltern voice, blocking ‘other narratives from forming.’3 This is one of the key problems with architecture for me. It is the voice of authority. It is the legitimizing construct of power.4 It has the correcting impulse of order as its most basic precept – architecture is, after all, an overwriting correction that puts things in line. Evidence of those ordering impulses litter this book. Architecture has to work very hard to maintain an interest in the marginalized, to let the subaltern speak – and to offer a legitimate translation of that voice into form and space, or at least to recognize the form and space that the voice of the subaltern might take. The architects and agents of Empire had the exact opposite as their concern. It is clear that in Imperial Cape Town the city was being actively produced as a White space through architecture and order. This can be literally read in the racial segregation that was undertaken in South Africa’s cities in the pre-apartheid era of Empire. It might also be understood as the result of the failed attempts at the production of the city as a space of Englishness. At the heart of the humanist project of the Garden City Movement, with its visions of a universal Englishness, was a desire to bring to the world that which was ‘proper’ and ‘ideal,’ namely, the English village and its cottages. The City, with its messy vitality, fluidity of identities and uterine spaces, needed to be eradicated, or made uninhabited, or turned inside-out and bleached in the bright light of Whiteness – essentially made to look correct and ordered. Other ways of being in the world were excluded and the threat of hybridity contained. Yet models of the Self prevailed in forms far removed from the ideal. Garden City representations of the cottage and its wisps of chimney-smoke became, in reality, the neutered, isolationist space of the homogenous suburb of modernism. Looking on, to the gridded and arid landscape of suburban apartheid townships that followed these initial housing schemes, there is a sense that they were somehow construed as a punitive measure, a sortof intentionally dehumanizing project that only the monster of apartheid could construct. This book suggests that this dehumanized landscape was in fact born out of the ‘humanist’ and anti-urban project that the English and their Empire brought with them to the Cape. Apartheid is often characterized as an irrational anti-modern event – an anomaly like the rise of Nazi Germany and the holocaust. But writers such as Zygmunt Baumann – following Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt – show how the holocaust was an instrumental component of modernity and by no means contradictory to it.5 The same could be said here: the Ruskinian values of Englishness as manifested in the architecture at the Cape – the innocuous seeming disinterestedness of order and aesthetic judgements – were a necessary articulation of difference, exclusion, and Othering. The architecture of order unfolds without contradiction from Empire to apartheid.

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But the architecture and order underway at the Cape in the formative period covered in this text is not just about housing models and slum clearances or about answering the vexing question of how and where people should live. It is about how Empire legitimized its dominance in the world and reproduced its identity through the control and representation of cultural products such as the socially and spatially decontextualized ‘high’ architecture of Western civilization. All while simultaneously delegitimizing the activities and spaces of Otherness. It is about securing the city as the space in which only Whiteness appears – and in the abstracted space of the White city, things appear, before they are. Everything has its place and its boundaries; the Self there in the museum and the home, and the Native frozen in his ‘hut’ or safely corralled and delayed in the hierarchical White space of the Garden City, undergoing normative shaping into a proper Christian Self. But hybridity, like urbanity itself, is unsettling in the vitality of disorder it creates. Boundaries never stop being broken as unscheduled everyday pathways are cut into the White city. Surprising relationships provoke renewed strategies of recuperation and order: there is no lasting certainty in the easy polarities of Self and Other.

Notes 1

The Cape, vol. 19, no. 492, (December, 1924).

2

Finch, J.R., The Cape of Good Hope, p.12.

3

Said, E.W., Culture and Imperialism, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), p.xiii.

4

Hollier, D., Against Architecture. The Writings of Georges Bataille, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

5

Baumann, Z., Modernity and the Holocaust, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).

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Postscript: Post-Apartheid/Apartheid/Pre-Apartheid

For visiting architects – modern day Herbert Bakers fresh from Ghana or China say – or tourists not too jetlagged to notice, the drive into the city from the airport on the aptly-named ‘Settlers Way’ N2 highway reveals the past 100 years of Cape Town’s troubled history in stark built form. It is a story told from the present – the uneasy present of land invasion and forced evictions, ‘slums’ and suburbs, and the gap between expectation and ‘service delivery,’ between policy and the complex spatial architecture of community – back in space and time to the originating conditions of architecture and order in Imperial Cape Town. Just outside the airport a fading billboard proclaims: ‘N2 Gateway: From Shacklands to Dignity. Houses! Security! Comfort!’ and it speaks volumes about the ongoing complexities of where and how people are to live (Figure 8.1). Hidden behind the cheerful and transformative tableau presented in the faded billboard – the pictured transformation from shacklands to neat and ordered cottages – is an unlikely African National Congress vision to eradicate informal settlements by 2014. This quasi-policy1 of slum eradication is intended to work not only through indirect processes of economic development but literal forced removals and a growing ambition to criminalize land invasions and informal settlements.2 The historically familiar strategy of ‘slum eradication’ marks a post-liberation return of repressive tactics. Those in power today want an aesthetic order overlaying the city as a proxy salve for the glaring failure of the State to equalize social disparities. The N2 Gateway project, not coincidently, started with the 2010 Soccer World Cup in mind; it illustrates the continuing tropes of ‘gateway’ and the aesthetics of order that played out in Imperial Cape Town and their longevity in post-apartheid Cape Town. Below the billboard is the New Rest housing development – evidence of the deployment of informal settlement upgrading as an instrument of governmentsanctioned housing development along the N2 Gateway project. Not quite in alignment, the layout of these neat and simple gabled houses indicates a compromise on the aesthetics of order; the straight-line regularization of sewerruns and other services slightly skewed by the accretive and ad-hoc pattern of the

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8.1  ‘New Rest’ housing on the N2 highway – ‘From Shacklands to Dignity’ faded sign

original informal settlement.3 The cheek-by-jowl tiny cottages are the result of a like-for-like, in situ replacement of shacks with model cottages – but still impossible to match the density of dwellings that the original informal settlement managed. If the in situ upgrading of informal settlements is the closest the City and State can come to recognizing and assisting the urban poor in their right to the city it nevertheless presents a lingering problem. The mismatch of numbers between original shacks and new cottages is made up by those considered illegitimate – not on the list – who are moved to the dreaded and benignly termed ‘temporary relocation areas.’ Notwithstanding the respectful retention of a pre-existing spatial logic, the houses at New Rest show the lingering dominance of the cottage as a model for living, their corrugated iron roofs carefully crimped and painted to look like clay tiles. Further down the N2 highway, the initiating development of the N2 Gateway project shows another kind of spatiality, another model for living. A devastating fire in the original informal settlement gave the City and State a seemingly tabula rasa opportunity to build rentable housing in line with the City’s densification strategy. At Joe Slovo 1, between the highway and Langa, the two-and threestorey tenement dwellings indicated a possibly radical – but short lived? – shift to densification and urbanity away from the first post-apartheid government’s Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) housing of single family cottages. In the 1930s Langa had relied on Ndabeni as a way station whilst order was being made in the city, so too did Joe Slovo 1, which saw the original inhabitants dislocated to the ‘temporary relocation area’ of Delft during the building process. Notwithstanding its promise of urbanity and its potential challenge to the cottage as a model for living, the N2 Gateway project went into a legal logjam leading to forced evictions and the relocation of returning inhabitants to Delft. Ultimately, the tenements became too expensive for the former inhabitants of the area to afford

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which suggests why the cottage, as a simple containable and deliverable unit, continues to dominate housing provision – not to forget the complexities involved in negotiating the reconfiguration of a community’s pre-existing spatial ontology in the shift from single-family dwelling to tenement. At Delft there are some examples of the million-plus 40m2 RDP cottages dotting the land of South Africa since 1994, their endless distribution across the terrain without accompanying urban infrastructure evidence of their hurried ‘delivery’ by the first democratic government of South Africa. Across the highway from Joe Slovo 1 is the ‘coloured’ township of Bridgetown. Still visible behind the additions and alterations is the ubiquitous ‘Non-European’ 51/9 housing unit, the apartheid state’s answer to how and where people shall live (Figure 8.2). Ironically, these designs from 1951 are more spatially salubrious and a better constructed house than the post-apartheid RDP houses. The semidetached units speak of the lingering power of the Garden City Movement and the impossible desire of the agents of Empire (and those that followed) to have their subjects marked out as different while ameliorating their alterity by imposing visual order: cottages set within highly regularized and controlled space. The similarities between the 51/9 and the married quarters housing units of Thompson’s Langa

8.2  NE 51/9 apartheid-era housing type

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8.3 Mofolo township layout, Soweto, 1953

are obvious – except that with the apartheid model the sanitary space moved into the unit itself. Though I have uncovered no clear link between Thompson and the architects behind the 51/9 it is remarkable how the cottage lingered as a viable apartheid housing model even for strong supporters of modernism such as Connell and Calderwood.4 As Japha argues, the 51/9 suburbs grew out of a newfound use of Clarence Perry’s ‘Neighbourhood Unit’ which had itself been born on a transatlantic gestation of Garden City ideas. The connection between Thompson’s Langa and the 51/9 suburbs of the apartheid state is elliptical, but fundamental nevertheless. If Langa imagined the Native sequestered in a highly managed and policed village with a business district and markets and churches, the initial apartheid housing projects such as the Mofolo township in Klipspruit, Soweto speak of the lingering concern to provide urban black residents with the amenities of a suburban life-world – at least initially (Figure 8.3). Antecedent to the suburban gridded settlement pattern of the 51/9 is the 1930s suburb of Bokmakirie, the next project on the highway into Cape Town after Bridgetown. Across the highway from Bokmakirie and appropriately squeezed between Pinelands and Langa is evidence of the lingering presence, need and use of ‘native space’ in Cape Town. Set within the low trees and bush are small huts made from the off-cuts and off-casts of modern industrial economy. If Langa was intended to resolve the use of space into clearly demarcated hierarchies in relation to Whiteness it also legitimized ‘native space’ – but only as a condition to be encountered in rural

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South Africa. The impossibility of this ambition lingers here where modern citydwellers nevertheless attend to traditional practices and rites of passage that must necessarily play themselves out in ‘rural’ space. But this area is also the ‘buffer strip’ between Langa and Pinelands that must be recognized as a key precursor to the spatial strategy of apartheid. Here the railway line divides the space of the city into carefully distinct race-based sectors. Pinelands, with its remaining thatch and quasiCape Dutch Arts and Crafts homes retains its sleepy suburban air, a once-genteel and privileged past. Langa, on the other hand, is a space of hybridity, of informal housing additions and backyard dwellers filling out the White space so carefully considered and marked out by Thompson and the ideology of Englishness of the Garden City Movement. Architecture, it is clear, is never entirely the instrument of order that architects imagine it to be. And if our visiting tourist is still bothering to look on this highway into the city they might get a sense of Maitland Garden Village – that precursor to Pinelands and Langa – far off to the right with the ghost of Ndabeni as its neighbour, before the road rises dramatically up the slopes of Devil’s Peak, past the Victorian-era houses of Mowbray, Observatory and Woodstock and descends into the great void of space that is District Six. Here the slum demolition and removal programme, begun in Wells Square in the 1920s and completed by the apartheid government from the 1960s onwards, is still in evidence, a horrible scar on the landscape below Table Mountain. The new houses being built are the beginnings of a return of a version of District Six, a return of urbanity and inner-city living as a legitimate and desired way of life. Finally, as the highway dips down into Strand Street, the once ideologically charged remnants of Cape Dutch architecture present themselves in the form of the Koopman’s de Wet museum. This single building galvanized Afrikaner and Englishman alike in the conservation of Cape Dutch architecture as the locus of a common identity of Whiteness around the time of the Union of South Africa in 1910. The museum is not much visited today – the life and times and possessions of its former owner are not of much interest and have little traction in post-apartheid South Africa. For the real Cape Dutch architecture, our tourist visitor will have to leave the city and head back past the airport on Settler’s Way to the rural territories once commandeered by the English in the interests of Empire. The power of rural Cape Dutch homesteads lingers as strong as ever, their sculptural forms and languid spaces a powerful permanent marker in the Cape landscape. And yet ... new wine estates are being made free from the iconic signifiers of Cape Dutch, while Cape Dutch wine farms are begrudgingly beginning to tell the story of slavery, bringing a necessary uncomfortable tinge to the otherwise White-washed walls of settler history. In the new South Africa architecture has found a new ideological agenda, a new identity to represent. The unanswerable questions linger: What is a South African architecture? What is an African architecture? Notwithstanding the desire to talk back to the hegemony of Western civilization in the globalized world, these questions only sound absurd if rephrased as ‘What is an Italian architecture? What is a European architecture?’ An anxiety pervades, an overzealous ‘correction’ to architecture’s earlier ‘mis-speaking’ for Englishness and Whiteness. Jonathan Noble’s

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African Identity in Post-Apartheid Public Architecture 5 traces this troubled tussle of architecture to ‘correctly’ represent this new South Africa paraphrased as ‘black masks over white skins.’ In this, Cape Town is strangely quiet.6 Visionary ‘new South Africa’ projects are largely absent. It is easy to suggest that Cape Town is troubled by Africanness, that it is conservative in its architectural culture. Certainly, the city and its surrounds are replete with monuments, a longevity of built history that might suggest complacency in the arrested narratives told by the old buildings of the Mother City. This book suggests that Cape Town – in its embarrassing catalogue of Imperial machinations and pre-apartheid social engineering – has the luxury of being suspicious of architecture and its monumentalizing and totalizing ambitions. Perhaps the next time architecture is made to speak it will speak not for the generic but for the particular, not for the a priori but for the unknown, not for something other than itself but simply for itself. For it is when architecture engages in an openended dialogue with the particularities of individuals, site, context, form, space, material and light that it pulls people close and also lets them be.

Notes 1

Huchzermeyer, M., ‘Pounding the Tip of the Iceberg: the Dominant Politics of Informal Settlement Eradication in South Africa,’ in Politikon, vol. 37, no.1, (April 2010), pp.129–48; Huchzermeyer, M., Cities with Slums: From Informal Settlement Eradication to a Right to the City in Africa, (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2011).

2

Huchzermeyer, M., ‘Pounding the Tip of the Iceberg,’ pp.141–4.

3

Abbott, J., ‘The Use of GIS in Informal Settlement Upgrading: Its Role and Impact on the Community and on Local Government,’ in Habitat International, no.27, (2003), pp.575–93.

4

Japha, D., ‘The Social Programme of the South African Modern Movement.’

5

Noble, J.A., African Identity in Post-Apartheid Public Architecture. White Skin, Black Masks, (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011).

6

Noted in conversation with Sharone Tomer.

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KAB CCC 3/CT-1/5/1/1, Special Committee,

Special Committee Minutes

KAB CCC 3/CT-1/5/13/1, SCSC

Slum Clearance Special Committee

KAB CCC Mayor’s Minute

Mayor’s annual report

University of Cape Town UCT Manuscripts & Archives BC206

Herbert Baker Collection

UCT Manuscripts & Archives images BC206

Images in the Herbert Baker Collection

South African Heritage Resources Agency SAHRA Historical Monuments Commission

Historical Monuments Commission Minutes

Victoria and Albert Museum, London RIBA Archives, BaH

Herbert Baker Archive

Cape Government (Pre-Union) Acts Cape Government Act 30, 1899

(Native Locations Amendment Act).

Cape Government Act 37, 1884

(Native Locations Act)

Cape Government Act 40, 1902

(Native Reserve Locations Act)

Cape Government Act 8, 1905

(Native Reserve Locations Amendment Act)

Cape Province (Post-Union) Ordinance Cape Provincial Government Ordinance 13, 1927

(Township Ordinance of the Cape Province)

Cape Provincial Government Ordinance 23, 1919

Municipal (Provision of Homes) Ordinance

Central Government (Post-Union) Government Reports Union Government 34-1914

Report of the Tuberculosis Commission

Union Government 4-1920

Report of the Housing Committee

Acts Union Government Act 21, 1923

(Native (Urban Areas) Act)

Union Government Act 27, 1913

(Natives Land Act)

Union Government Act 35, 1920

(Housing Act)

Union Government Act 36, 1919

(Public Health Act)

Union Government Act 53, 1934

(Slums Act)

Bibliography

Magazines and Journals South African Nation AA

African Architect

SAAE&SJ

SA Architect, Engineer & Surveyor’s Journal

AB&E

Architect, Builder & Engineer

Building Education Gazette MJSA

Municipal Journal of South Africa

SAAR

South African Architectural Record

South African Railways and Harbours Magazine The State

Newspapers Cape Argus Cape Times Daily Dispatch Diamond Fields Advertiser. Natal Mercury Rand Daily Mail The Cape The Journal, Grahamstown Transvaal Leader

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Index

References to illustrations are in bold. 1820 Association 65 51/9 apartheid house type 173, 221–2, 221 Abdurahman, Dr Abdullah 99, 121 accommodation ‘better class’ of Native 184 Langa 194, 199, 200, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207–8 Native 94, 182–4 Ndabeni 184–5, 205 overcrowding 124, 143 tenements 101, 117, 145–7, 220–21 terrace housing, see housing, terrace Acts Housing Act 1920 127, 142, 158–9 Housing and Working Class Act (England) 1890 142 Native (Urban Areas) Act 190–93, 198, 202, 205, 208 Native Location Act 182 Native Locations Act 1884 181, 183 Native Reserve Locations Act 1902 182–3, 191 Native Reserve Locations Amendment Act 1905 183 Natives Land Act 1913 142, 191 Public Health Act 1897 183 Public Health Act 1919 142, 202 Slums Act 1934 86, 98–9, 119, 215 Town Planning Act (England) 1909 84 Adamastor 49, 50 Adderley Street 2, 2, 81, 184 administrators of the city 164, 186, 192, 207–8 advertising campaigns 93

aesthetics of order, see order, aesthetics of African Architect 36–7, 42, 53 African architectural identity 223 animalistic associations herd 115, 117, 145 hovels 96, 106, 114–19, 129, 160, 213 not human habitation 115, 181, 190 kennels 114–15, 118 nest 49, 60, 181, 190 rabbit holes 113, 115 rats 115 Anreith, Anton 55–6, 72 apartheid 13, 82, 114, 135–7, 173, 189, 216, 223 homeland 135, 189 city 136 fantasy 135–7 Archdeacon Lavis 140, 213 Architect, Builder & Engineer, see Delbridge, William John Architect of Empire 1; see also Rhodes, Cecil areas, congested 116, 123–4 Arts and Crafts ambitions at the Cape 43, 57, 64, 69, 72, 84, 102, 106, 150, 152–4, 171 buildings 67, 69, 71, 73, 154, 167, 193 origins 8 Assisted Housing Scheme 158–62, 161 Athlone 104, 162 Atlantis 59 Baker, Herbert 1, 4–5, 6, 22, 22, 24–6, 28–9, 33–4, 36, 40, 49, 53–4, 61–2, 66, 68–9, 79, 89–90 barbarism 6, 52–3, 125

236 Building Apartheid

beauty, operational agency of 80, 82–4, 87, 89–90, 94, 96, 98, 107, 140, 189, 213–14, 219 Bhabha, Homi 11, 137, 189 BoKaap 4, 171 Bokmakirie 173, 174, 185, 222 Boschendal 54, 54, 67 Botha, General 19, 21 Botha, Graham 29, 51–2, 56 brick, see building, materials, brick British Empire 1, 5, 13, 21, 38, 40, 44, 95, 101, 195, 214–15 Brownlee, J.H. 154 building apartheid 13 building density 115, 155, 175, 220 —— class hierarchy 155 —— moral health 8, 124, 173 materials —— brick 103, 106, 147, 160, 162, 185, 205 —— corrugated iron 82, 101–2, 104–5, 107, 154, 161, 162, 205, 220 —— ‘foreign’ 57 —— hierarchy 104 —— mud 53, 58, 105, 148 —— sun-dried bricks 4, 100, 104–5 —— thatch 32, 43, 81, 102, 105, 152, 223 —— unusual 104–5, 162, 175 —— wattle and daub 104, 106, 160 regulations 4, 96, 98, 103–6, 152, 155–9, 161, 171, 175, 202 —— bedroom norms 124–5, 153, 160, 209 —— temporary structures 104 —— Tudor-style house 106 buildings derelict 113 dirt 114 temporary 104 Camps Bay 103, 105 Canterbury Flats 172, 173 Cape Dutch as ancient 30, 55, 59 appropriated history 21 and building materials 53, 58, 81, 148 buildings —— Groot Constantia 29–35, 38, 40, 42, 44, 52–3, 56, 60–63, 69–72, 74, 215

—— Groot Constantia restoration 29–31, 34 —— Koopmans-de-Wet 28 —— Morgenster 20, 26 —— Normal College 29 —— Old Supreme Court building 33, 90, 91; see also Thibault, Louis Michel —— Rustenberg 68 —— Schoongezicht 20, 26, 49, 67 —— Tulbagh Drostdy 25–6, 29, 68 —— Vergelegen 40, 42, 60, 63–6, 64, 67 —— Welgemeend 5, 32, 67 gables as signifier 22, 22–4, 31–5, 38, 43, 38–40, 43–4, 49, 51–3, 64–6, 69–74 indigeneity 55, 57–9 as manor/country house 62–72, 74–5, 214 as monuments 27–9, 43, 59 as national monuments 29, 215 and nation-building 19, 21–2, 24–9, 31, 33, 36, 40, 42–3, 69, 81, 214 national style 19, 33–4, 36–40, 42–3, 69, 81 and the ‘Other’ 53–5 pilgrimage 35, 43, 57, 59, 63 preservation and restoration 19, 21, 24–5, 27–30, 32–3, 35, 43–4, 52, 67, 74, 214 revival style —— Baker revival style 22, 24, 34, 40, 49, 61–2, 66, 69, 215 —— Groote Schuur 22, 23, 24, 24, 49, 61–2, 66, 69, 215 —— Hockly 72, 73 —— Lidcote 67, 68 —— Lourensford 69–71, 69, 70 —— Luncarty 71, 71, 72 —— South Africa House 40, 49, 58, 62 —— Stellandal 73, 74 and Rhodes 22, 24, 49–50 slave bell-towers 54, 54–5, 70, 74 surveying and mapping out 27, 29, 34–6 Tongaat 32, 33 traffic planning 90 as vernacular 57–8 and Western civilization 55–7 Cape Peninsula Publicity Association 40, 85 Cape Province’s Township Ordinance 87 Cape to Cairo 5

index

census, 1891 4 Central Housing Board 116–17, 143–6, 148, 150, 150, 158–9, 171 Chaplin, Drummond 54 children, see slum, children CIoA (Cape Institute of Architects) 27, 35, 51, 85–7, 98, 101, 147, 155, 168, 193 City Beautiful 53, 81, 84, 89, 107 City Engineer 85–6, 89, 96, 99–100, 102–7, 115–16, 128, 156, 165, 168, 173, 184–5, 193, 196, 205 city fabric 83, 87 City of Cape Town, Housing & Estates Committee 146, 165, 168, 171, 173 Improvements Committee 85–6, 93 Overcrowding Sub-Committee 121, 142, 165, 168 Public Health & Building Regulations Committee 86, 94, 96, 103–6, 150, 156–7, 159, 163–5, 172 Special Committee 93 cityscape 79, 83–4, 96, 102, 107 civilizing mission 11, 106, 189 class better 115, 155–6, 205 middle 12, 96, 119–20, 128, 143–4, 184 of Natives 184 undesirable 128 working 8, 10–11, 80, 94, 139–40, 142, 146–7, 156, 159, 194, 205 class and race 2, 70, 122, 137, 159, 200 Closer Union Society 25–6, 67–8, 70–71 Colerain 54, 55 Coffee Lane 88 Comaroff, John and Jean 190 Commission for a Native Location for Cape Town 115, 128, 183–5; see also Ndabeni common English/Afrikaner identity 21, 25–6, 30, 33, 36, 43, 214 common heritage 21, 24–7, 43 competitions Cape Dutch revival 36–7 drawing 35 housing 150, 151, 152–3, 154, 155, 175 concentration camps 5, 19 conditions, living 8, 96, 98–9, 115–19, 122, 124, 135, 141–2, 145, 153, 163, 184, 207 Cook, G.P. 200, 204–5, 207; see also Superintendent of Natives Cornish-Bowden, A.H. 87, 157

237

corrugated iron, see building, materials, corrugated iron cottages 105, 116–17, 139, 144–7, 149, 150–55, 151, 153, 154, 155, 159–60, 160, 161,165, 167, 168, 169, 171–3, 174,175, 186, 193, 194–6, 204, 220–22 country houses 11–12, 63; see also manor houses Country Life 12 Curtis, Lionel 6, 6, 11 Delbridge, William John 29–30, 35, 43, 53, 56–8, 63, 86, 101–2, 118, 152–4, 168, 193 Deleuze and Guattari 171 Delft housing 220–21 density of bodies 115, 125, 147, 157 of buildings 115, 147, 156–7, 159, 171 detached dwelling, single-family 144–6, 172, 214; see also cottages dirt 11, 80, 106, 114, 189 discourse and representation 12, 81–2, 84, 136, 168, 208 disorder 135–7, 141, 165, 175, 217 District Six 4, 85, 85, 87, 88, 89, 92, 93, 94, 99, 100, 107, 113–17, 119, 120, 123, 126, 127, 137, 141, 157, 164, 166, 172, 173, 223 fractured disordered 89 districts important residential 156 ordinary residential 156 racial 156 dwellings proper 106, 162 rural 190 slum 127, 148 temporary 103–4 two-roomed 168, 205 Eastriggs and Gretna 195–6, 197, 204, 204 Elephant Man 80, 148 Empire agents of 6, 7, 11, 13 Architect of 1; see also Rhodes, Cecil building 12 Exhibition 38, 39, 35, 38, 40, 93, 215 image of 82, 87, 107 imperatives of 8, 13, 106

238 Building Apartheid

interests of 26, 223 service of 214 Empire’s cityscape 104 Empire’s vulnerabilities 55, 81 English architects at the Cape 4 Cape Town 2, 4, 208 identity and architecture 10–11, 81, 117, 139, 144–5, 189 identity in South Africa 145 European culture 21, 57–8, 60, 74, 122, 181; see also Western civilization Exhibition Great 139 Modern Homes 139 eyesore 87, 94–5, 98, 102–3, 164 Fairbridge, Dorothea 26–7, 32, 35, 40, 55–6, 59–63, 65 Fallon, Ritchie 86, 168, 193 families, extended 123–4, 161 family life, atmosphere of 143 Finch, J.R. 31, 93, 215 First World War, impact on housing 142–3, 195 flats 117, 143–7, 156, 172–3 Foucault, Michel 12 Fuller, Dr E.B. 184; see also MOH Gabriel, A.J. 56 Garden City Movement 7, 9–13, 136–7, 139–40, 171, 173, 175, 189, 198, 209, 216, 221, 223 anti-urban 10, 80–81, 137, 140–41, 171, 216 Eastriggs and Gretna 195–6, 197, 204, 204 Garden Suburbs 10, 194, 198, 200, 205, 215 Hampstead Garden Suburb 10, 194–6, 196, 199–200 Langa 185, 193, 195,198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 209 Letchworth 10 Maitland Garden Village 165, 167, 168, 171–3, 185, 192–3, 209 Pinelands 67, 137, 152, 168, 171, 185, 193, 195–6, 198, 208, 222–3 Richard Stuttaford 67 Roeland Street Scheme 168, 169, 170, 171, 192, 205 Swanpool 194

gardens, the need for 125, 144–5, 157, 173, 185 gateway, Cape Town as a 89, 94, 219 Glennie, Fred M. 168, 171, 193 Goodman, Gwelo 32–3, 40, 42 grand manner, see City Beautiful great men 31, 55–6, 59–61, 72, 74, 105 architects 56 Gretna 195–6, 197 Groot Constantia 22, 29–35, 38, 38, 40, 42, 42, 43, 44, 52–3, 56, 60–63, 69–72, 74, 215 restoration 29–31, 34 Groote Schuur 22, 23, 24, 24, 49, 61–2, 62, 66, 69, 215 guidebook, official Cape Town City 60, 93 Gurland, Max 99 Hampstead Garden Suburb 10, 194–6, 196, 199–200 Hay, Sereld 71 health, standards of 124–5, 173 hegemony, cultural 13, 51 Hennel and James Architects 194 higgeldy piggeldy 79–80 Higgins, Tom Shadick (MOH) 106 Hill, Octavia 4, 8, 12, 204, 215 Hinksey Road 7–8 Historical Monuments Commission 28–9, 31–2 Hockly 72, 73 Hofmeyr, Jan Hendrik (‘Onze Jan’) 5 home ideal 125, 135, 144, 173, 175, 214 model 150, 152 houses, freak 147–8 housing apartheid —— 51/9 173, 221–2, 221 —— Mofolo township, Soweto 222, 222 applications and building permits 101–3, 146, 156, 161, 172, 205, 207 Bokmakirie 173, 174, 222 and crime 121, 139, 141 competitions 150, 151, 152–3, 154, 155, 175 conditions 141–2, 193 and ‘decency’ 117, 121, 124, 153, 163, 213 not fit for human habitation 116, 163, 171

index

flats 117, 143–7, 156, 172–3 informal settlements 96, 106, 129, 159, 208 Metropole 142, 184 middle class standards 116, 140 municipal Assisted Housing Scheme 158–62 municipal employees 160, 165, 172 parade 148, 149, 150 Parade Cottage 152–3, 153 for the poorer class 140, 146, 153–4, 157, 159, 173 post-apartheid —— Delft 220–21 —— informal settlement upgrading 219–20 —— Joe Slovo informal settlement 220–21 —— N2 Gateway 219–20 —— New Rest 219–20, 220 and privacy 124, 146, 152–3, 181, 189, 209 problem 94, 103, 105–6, 122, 141, 143, 150 programmes 106, 142–3, 148 projects —— apartheid fantasy 135–6 —— first City Council 142 single-family detached 117, 144, 150, 154, 158, 162, 172–3, 175 sub-economic 159, 173 subsidized 146, 159 tenements 101, 117, 145–7, 220–21 terrace 147, 156–7, 208 Housing & Estates Committee 116, 146, 152, 159, 161–2, 165, 168, 171, 173 Housing Act 1920 127, 142, 158–9 Housing and Working Class Act (England) 1890 142 Housing Committee (Union Government) 86, 124 Housing Survey 1932 121 Howard, Ebenezer 9–10 hybridity 96, 97, 189, 216–17, 223

239

Joe Slovo informal settlement 220–21 Juta, Jan 40, 42 Kendall, Frank 28–9, 31–6, 39–40, 54–5, 68–9, 71–2, 86, 101, 153, 155, 168 Kensington Estate 105–6 Kindergarten 5–7, 6 Kipling, Rudyard 58 Klipfontein Road 104, 162–3 Koeberg Road 104 Kolbe, F.C. 25 Koopmans-de-Wet 28

ideology and architecture 80, 136 Imperial Architect 1, 5; see also Baker, Herbert Improvements Committee 85–6, 93 informal settlements 96, 106, 159, 208

Lady Anne Barnard 113, 213–14 laissez faire development 4, 83, 85, 85, 87, 89, 93, 127, 183 landed gentry 12, 62–5, 69, 75, 214 Langa 137, 175, 190, 193–6, 200, 202, 204–5, 207–9, 220, 222–3 accommodation 194, 200, 205, 207–8 barracks and compound 198–200, 202–3, 202, 203, 207–8 ceilings 203, 203, 209 class segregation 194, 199–200, 203–4, 207–8 control and rules 200–202, 207 development of 198, 205 exempt from building regulations 202 Garden City Movement 193, 198, 209 hostels 194, 196, 198, 200 initial density 195 layout 195, 195, 199, 201 lesser standards 205 Quarters 199, 200, 203, 206, 207 special constables 207 surveillance 200 as township 192–5, 201, 205 ventilation 202, 203, 203, 207 windows 202 Letchworth 10 Lidcote 68, 68 living conditions 142, 207 Lloyd Davies, T.B., 193; see also City Engineer Locations, Governor’s power 182–3 Lockwood Hall, J. 152 Lourensford 69–71, 69, 70 Louis XVI 56 Luncarty 71, 71, 72 Luytens, Edwin 68

Jagger, J.W. 69–70 jerry-built 4, 80 Jews 115, 123

Maitland Garden Village 165, 167, 168, 171–3, 185, 192–3, 209 Malan, D.F. 150, 162

240 Building Apartheid

Malan, F.S. 30 Malay identity 4, 40, 53, 123 Manhattan 79–80 manor houses 12–13 Mansergh, Lewis 185–6 Martienssen, Rex 34–5, 57 Masey, Francis 25–6, 49, 69 Meacham, Standish 10–11, 140 Medical Office of Health, see MOH Mein, Wallace 54 Meiring Beck, J.H. 26, 68 Merrick, Joseph 80 Metropole housing 142, 184 Lord Milner 1, 5, 7, 11, 162 mimic man 11, 137, 189; see also Bhabha, Homi miscegenation 121–2, 146 model cottages 139, 148, 149, 150, 150, 186, 203, 220 model dwellings 94, 139, 146 Moerdyk, Gerard 35, 37, 57, 89, 94 design for Prime Minister’s residence 37 MOH (Medical Office of Health) 98–106, 121, 124–5, 163–5, 171, 183–4, 207 Acting 101, 163, 165, 168 Morgenster 20, 26 Morris, James 67, 69 Morris, William 7–11, 64, 84 ‘May Day’ 7 motoring and vistas 103 mud, see building, materials, mud Muizenberg 32, 86, 105, 128 N2 Gateway housing 219–20 National Society 27–33, 67–8, 70–71, 86, 90 National Trust 12, 19, 64, 215 national identity, see African architectural identity; Cape Dutch Native (Urban Areas) Act 190–93, 198, 202, 205, 208 Native Affairs Department 116, 200 Native dwellings as problem and ideal 148, 183, 188–90 Native Location Act 182 Native Location for Cape Town, see Commission for a Native Location for Cape Town Native Locations Act 1884 181, 183 the Native Problem 121, 192 the Native Question 6–7 Native Reserve Locations Act 1902 182–3, 191

Native Reserve Locations Amendment Act 1905 183 Native space 182–3, 188–9, 222 Native village 193 Natives in city space 123 civilized 184, 187 control of 182, 192 married 122, 199, 203 rural 96, 188–9 urbanized 114, 200 Natives Advisory Board 207 Natives Land Act 1913 142, 191 Natives Township Committee 192 Ndabeni 185, 188, accommodation types 184–5, 186, 187, 205 class hierarchy 185, 187–8 closing 192, 204–5, 208 Nissen tents 205 White space 187–8 New Rest housing 219–20 Normal College 29 Old Cape Town 3, 81–2, 85, 85, 88, 90, 98, 107, 113–14, 117, 120, 122, 124–5, 126, 127–8, 141–2, 159, 166, 170 Old Supreme Court building 32, 33, 90 order aesthetics of 80, 82–3, 90, 107, 219; see also beauty, operational agency of alignment 87, 93, 141, 219 and Empire 7–8, 12, 215–16 stoeps 90, 92, 92, 101, 157 visual 79–80, 83–4, 101, 221 Ordinance Municipal Provision of Homes Ordinance 1919 158–9, 160, 161, 193 Township Ordinance 1927 87 Other as Same 11–13, 130, 141, 168, 175, 215 Other-spaces 114, 118–21, 125, 214 Otherness 81, 95, 97, 113, 115, 119–20, 128, 129, 140, 183–4, 187, 191, 202, 209, 214, 217 ascribing 113–15, 117, 119; see also animalistic associations ‘boy’ 70–71, 70, 72, 118, 205 domestic space 117, 120, 141–2, 150, 159 house planning 106, 160

index

Overcrowding Sub-Committee 121, 142, 165, 168 Overseas League 69 Parade Cottage 152–3, 153 Pearse, Geoffrey 22, 35, 42 periphery 104, 107, 128, 129, 130, 173, 184, 208–9 Perry, John 168, 193 Phillips, Lionel and Florence 63–6 Pierneef 58 Pinelands Garden City 137, 152, 168, 171, 185, 193, 193, 195–6, 198, 208, 222–3 pise-de-terre, see building, materials, mud pondokkies 114, 129 Porter, Harold 90, 95 postcolonial theory 215; see also Bhabha, Homi; Said, Edward Prince Albert 139 Princess Alice 28, 65, 113, 117, 150 prizes, house and garden keeping 173 Public Health Act 1897 183 Public Health Act 1919 142, 202 public spectacles 13, 175; see also housing, parade Public Works Department 37, 185–6 Publicity Association 32, 85–6, 93–4, 100 Pugin, A.W.N. 7, 84, 140 Radford, Dennis 69 RDP (Reconstruction and Development Programme) 220 Regulations Committee 86, 94, 96, 103–6, 150, 156–7, 159, 163–5, 172 Reid, Arthur Henry 86, 89–90 Rhodes, Cecil 1, 5, 19, 22, 24, 32, 49–50, 61–3, 65–7, 69, 102, 105, 135 Architect of Empire 1 Roeland Street Scheme 168, 169, 171, 192, 205 rookeries 11, 80 Royal Institute of British Architects 35, 145 Ruskin, John 5, 7–10, 56, 58, 84, 215 Rustenberg 68 Said, Edward 1, 12 Sauer, J.W. 67–8 Schoongezicht 20, 26 Schutte, Herman 55–6 segregation 122, 135–6, 163, 171–2, 181

241

Self identity formation 11–12, 114, 124 loss of 113, 125 models of 141, 175, 216 threat to the 113, 115, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125, 127 serf, see Cape Dutch, and the ‘Other’; Cape Dutch, slave bell-towers settler history 31, 44, 51, 53–4, 68, 223 shebeens 125, 163 Simpson & Ayrton Architects 38 single-family detached housing 117, 144, 150, 154, 158, 162, 172–3, 175 slave, see Cape Dutch, and the ‘Other’; Cape Dutch, slave bell-towers slum 4, 8, 10–13, 81–3, 88, 93–5, 98–100, 107, 113–15, 118–25, 120, 126, 127, 130, 136, 141–8, 149, 163–4, 166, 172, 213–14 areas 93, 95, 123, 125 children 99, 117, 121–5, 126, 128, 153, 157, 161, 163 clearance, Wells Square 114, 116, 119, 125, 127, 137, 142, 163–5, 166, 168, 171, 172, 192, 223 clearances 122, 139, 157, 172–3, 166, 172, 213, 215, 217 conditions 114, 116, 135, 142 congestion 85, 115, 124 eradication 219 overcrowding 9, 98–9, 115–16, 118, 124, 127, 161, 163, 172 Slumland 113, 125 Slums Act 1934 86, 98–9, 119, 215 Smuts, J.C. 27, 56, 65 Snape, Professor A.E. 34 Solomon, J.M. 31, 54, 66, 89 South Africa, the New 223 South Africa House 40, 41, 49, 50, 58, 62 South African Architectural Record 36–7, 42, 95 South African National Society, see National Society Soweto 222 space isolationist 147, 216 mapping out interior 120, 127 misuse of 125–6 smooth 171 un-negotiable 192 Spanish influenza 86, 141, 143 Special Committee 93

242 Building Apartheid

Stellandal 73, 74 Stellenbosch 25, 52, 60–61, 67–8 stoeps 90, 92, 92, 101, 157 Strand Street 2, 3, 81 street improvements 93, 98 Struben, Edith 72 structures unauthorized 105–6 unsightly 82, 96 Stuttaford, Richard 67–8 sub-economic housing 159, 173 subaltern 216 subsidized housing 146, 159 Superintendent of Natives 193, 198, 200, 205 Swanpool 194 thatch, see building materials, thatch Thibault, Louis Michel 55–6, 90 Thompson, Albert John 193–6, 198, 200, 202–3, 221–3 totalizing, architecture 13–14, 224 tourism 83, 93, 95 tourist destination 93–4 town planning 60, 80, 83–7, 89–90, 94, 107, 113, 145 aesthetic concerns 83–4, 87 agenda 60, 85–6, 89 architectural gems 83, 89 scheme for Cape Town 85–6 street widths 89 subdivision 86–7, 156 traffic planning 90, 91 Town Planning Act (England) 1909 84 Townships Board 157 tram 2, 2, 3 Trotter, Alys 53, 58–60, 62 Tuberculosis Commission 97, 142, 188, 190 Tulbagh Drostdy 25, 29 ugly 81–2, 99, 101–2, 105, 107, 208–9 Underworld of Cape Town 115 unsightliness 82, 87, 90, 93–6, 99–102, 107, 162, 173 Unwin, Raymond 8, 10, 67, 83–5, 117, 145, 157, 193–5 Van der Stel ‘great men’ 30–32, 59–61, 65–6, 74, 89 Groot Constantia 30–32, 60–61

other houses 30, 74 town planner 89 Vergelegen 40, 60, 63 Van der Stel, Simon 31, 59–61, 89 Van der Stel, Willem Adriaan 40, 60, 62–3, 65 Van Riebeeck, Jan 22, 24, 50, 59–61, 62, 65 Vergelegen 42, 63–6, 64, 67 Verwoerd, Hendrik 135 Victorian City 2, 3, 8, 10, 80 vistas 92–5 Walgate, Charles Percy 34–5, 52, 54, 66 Walmer Estate 100, 100, 156 washerwomen 118–19 Waterston, Jane 118, 184 Waugh, E.H. 37, 95 Wells Square 120, 164, 166, 170, 172, 173 fractured space 127 petition 163, 165 slum clearance 114, 116, 119, 125, 127, 137, 142, 163–5, 168, 171, 192 Western civilization apotheosis 50, 52, 66, 74, 214 architecture of 215, 217 threat to 50, 113, 118, 130 White city 136, 182, 189, 217 White identity formation 21–2, 25–6, 29, 43, 50, 61, 65–6 White space, the city as a 81, 107, 120–21, 128, 136, 171, 182–3, 191–2, 194, 207–9, 213, 216–17, 223 Whiteness 11, 122, 124, 137, 192, 205, 209, 214–17, 222–3 whites, poor 122–3, 142 Wilde, Oscar 7 wood-and-iron areas 103–4, 159–60, 162; see also building, materials, corrugated iron wood-and-iron dwellings 103–5, 161, 162; see also building, materials, corrugated iron World’s War on Slums 95 Wynne-Roberts, Robert 115; see also City Engineer