Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

Modernism and its Doubles

The South African Experience 19142014

Curated by Lemaseya Khama & Jean-Pierre de la Porte

Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

Absorbing Modernity
OR HOW SOUTH AFRICAS
DEFINING STRUGGLE WAS
CONCEIVED AND FOUGHT
IN MODERNIST TERMS

Modernity has had a difficult time absorbing

itself and identifying its own fundamentals.
By the mid-20th century it had become
clear in Europe that the great 19th century
encapsulations of modernities in Freud,
Nietzsche and Marx omitted more than they
enclosed. By 1966, a new periodisation and
provenance for modernity had
been proposed.
In Michel Foucaults The Order of Things, the usual criteria of a
break with the past of relentless war against illusions, generalised
critique and a focus on the present were all dismissed in favour
of a stranger, more permeable conception of modernity that
resulted from broad and often undramatic shifts in northern
European styles of thought since the Renaissance.
This was a long time ago in the lifetime of ideas, and today with
ease Bruno Latour characterises modernity as little more than
a set of purifying ideals running across the last six centuries of
European and later American experience. Beneath these ideals
of nature as a unity of facts and of society as irreconcilable
differences of opinion are tracts of hybrids that can neither
be assigned to nature or to society and whose reality is still being
explored by Michel Serres, Donna Haraway, New Historicists,
Object Oriented Ontologists and Latour himself.
Closer to architecture, Peter Sloterdijk has reassembled into
spheres or environments, the modernity that Latour scattered.
Sloterdijks premise is that whoever defines and occupies an
environment also defines and controls all actions and events
within it: this insight now underpins our understanding of
Eurocentrism, colonial administrations and the tangled politics
of environmental crisis. It is scarcely noticed that beneath the
controversy Sloterdijk elicits, he has formulated an underlying
principle of modernity, a quest for comprehensive environmental
design and the planability of futures that comes along with it.
To a mind primed by Latour and Sloterdijk and able to look past
the tired post-modern critiques-of-critique, the South African
experience between 1914 and 1924 can be read in a very different
perspective. The purpose of the South African Pavilion this year is
to provide elements of this perspective that encourage all others
managing modernity to see South Africa as a unique laboratory
and ally in understanding it. The Pavilion is also offered to all
South Africans as a probe into what may have shaped, at the

intersection of space and autonomy, the defining century of their

country and their emancipation.
Throughout most of South Africas 20th century it seemed
fairly simple to locate and understand modernity. By the 1970s
some felt they had finally identified all the contradictions in the
economic infrastructure that were the source of the extraordinarily
varied and escalating conflicts erupting in South Africa: it
would only be a matter of time before the progenitors of these
conflicts, the capitalists and workers appeared personally on
stage. In parallel was an American style liberal understanding
of what the good society in South Africa might be. Against the
academically proposed Marxist revolution, a tolerant society
built on dialogue, rights, social justice, freedom from State, and
collective interference would be achieved. By 1980, when South
Africa erupted into an undeclared civil war, academic Marxist
and Liberal modernities seemed no more than versions of Soviet
and American social engineering. These ideal modernities
remained plausible until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
globalisation of American power. By 1994 it was clear that their
ability to inform the South African present was limited. Their
learned successors such as post-colonial studies, the politics
of minorities, multitudes, Zizekian neo-communism, deliberative
democracy, Badiouian events and so forth did little to inform
action and policy for twenty years.
South Africas transformation during the 1990s did not fulfil
any of the expectations in post-colonial scenarios. It became
clear that South Africa had met typical post-colonial challenges
almost a century earlier, although not in the usual space between
liberator and oppressor but between British rulers and separatist
republics. It also became clear that the African National Congress
differed from most liberation movements in its ability to reverse
engineer the 1961 Republic into an instrument of universal
franchise, comprehensive rights and recognition.
Powerful clues to recomposing 20th century South African
minority and majority experience came from a young generation
studying records of urban planning and public architecture.
It was recognised that problems of occupancy, mobility, place
and management of cities were the reasons for embracing
modernistic solutions. Both the nascent African National
Congress, reacting to a catastrophic British land dispossession
casting millions into a Diaspora and the dissident Boer Republics
trying to establish a cultural, institutional, national and eventually
total republican presence were involved in identifying and
overwriting the networks of the British Empire. South African
modernity is thus the result of autonomies finding ways to

Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

envisage, design and realise environments

through which to shape and reshape
themselves. The tragedy of 20th century
South African history comes from the failure
of these parallel realisations of modernity
to profit from one anothers presence.
The South African black experience in
the 20th century is inseparable from the
decisions made in the midst of events
between 1913 and 1949 that address
survival in the Diaspora; decisions that
destroyed economic self-determination,
place and subsistence. Rather than
continue the quest for land restitution,
the permanent condition of internal
refugee-ism was defined in the modernistic
terms as a stage in the realisation of
inclusive democracy. This demanded ways
of inventing presence in the workplace,
in the city, in the arts, in family life and
in the underground politics of solidarity
threading through these. A futurism based
on reinvention and improvisation emerged
in contrast to the powerful urge to restoring
life to what it was before white social
engineering.
A by-line to majority nation building
although a very important one is the less
easily recognised self-shaping of Afrikaner
people. A dissident group of white settlers
who had removed themselves from British
colonial territory and jurisdiction, the future
Afrikaners experimented with republican
forms throughout the 19th century. After
wars with the British Empires control
of mineral rich territories the Afrikaner
republics were systematically impoverished
then offered a place within a Union with
British territories. This gave rise to highly
a deliberate project of Afrikaner nationalism
that led to the assumption of State power
in South Africa in 1948. The declaration
of South Africa as a Republic sublimated
Afrikaner nationalism into a socially
engineered system designed to include
whites of any origin in a western-aligned

durable nation, and all non-socialist blacks

as voting citizens in a commonwealth of
black-led states designed by white social
scientists and labour economists.
Although continuing British colonial
motifs such as mono-racial supremacism
and denial of invaded peoples rights,
the Afrikaner experience rejected British
derivation of westernism based on
imitating the mother country in favour of
more general concepts of western-ness
and modernity. Much like the early ANC
benchmarking different ways of asserting
rights and presence, the Afrikaners scoured
philosophy and social sciences for formulae
to achieve autonomous western-ness
outside of the West. As Lenin speculated
that German idealist philosophy, French
Socialism and English political economy
were the sources of Communism, Herders
speculation that language and folk culture
created legitimate nationalism provided the
Afrikaner with a recipe to realise nationalism
and eventually a republic unreliant on
nationalism. Thus, highly modernist
explanations of culture, nations and
republics were deployed as programmes,
much as Kennedy in America used social
sciences as guides to policy content as
well as tools of implementation, or Hitler
used the hypothesis of a third way between
Communism and American Capitalism to
articulate modern German-ness.
Afrikaner architects like Gerard Moerdyk
dissolved Lutyens and Bakers British
colonial public building principles
into highly imaginative indigenous
variations that were worthy of the 1980s
in their subversive eclectic-ness. Leaping
from new-found cultural institutions
like universities, language academies
and churches to public administration
buildings and city planning early 20th
century Afrikaners modulated equally off
contemporary Soviet and German National
Socialist precedents. The Afrikaners cultural

and later political and civic mobilisation

resulted in proposals for cities selected
for the civic metabolisms they favoured.
Combined with media, South African
cities in the 20th century were capable
of presenting a convincing experience
to western-ness conducive to whites and
alienating to everybody else. In 1948, this
bootstrapping exercise in making minority
experience seems like the only benchmark
for the majority future led to winning the
national election, scattered British influence
to regions and proposed to lead the
modernisation of South Africa.
In the decades remembered for African
liberation movements and the colonial
collapse Afrikaners designed a constellation
of independent black states on sites of the
old 1913 reserves to control the rate of
urbanisation to their expanding industrial
cities. This would result in what selfdeclared social engineer and first Republic
president Hendrik Verwoerd called a
Commonwealth in which urbanised South
Africans dispossessed of nationality and
rights would be able to seek work in white
zones while being repatriated at any time
to gulags styled as independent ethnic
based nations. Afrikaners recapitulated
their 20th century history in reverse by
taking cosmopolitan post-Diaspora Africans
backward into nations and tying these to
institutions of cultural transmission such as
tribes. This anticipation of contemporary
EU migrant labour and Israels suspension
of people in statelessness became
notorious as apartheid. It was concealed
in absolutely modernistic and progressive
terms and formed an ingenious
multicultural automaton able to induce
underdevelopment as the flip side of raceexclusive modernisation.
20th century South Africa was a modernist
gamble on the power of carefully designed
environments to shape all aspects of the
life and experience of people placed within

them: opposing this ingenuity was an

equally modernist project of paradoxically
dismantling the masters house with the
masters tools.
In 1994 beneath the rightly proclaimed
peaceful transition, reconciliation, the
establishment of a universal franchise and
determination to address the injustices of
the past, these two great modernities of
20th century South Africa simply flowed
together under the de facto ownership
of South Africas overwhelming majority.
The generation who reached the threshold
of adulthood in 1994 have had to make their
way forward with the help of, and often the
hindrance of these dual modernities, neither
of which prevails sufficiently to eliminate the
impact of the other. The current generation
under 35 has found none of the old terms
of 20th century mobilisation effective or
convincing. They are unimpressed with
the pettiness and inertia of critiques,
finding neither liberalism nor socialism
resonant with the dual modernity of their
own experience, which has neither an
historical origin in liberal individualism, nor
an anticipated culmination in revolution.
Yet this generation is not cynical but
experimental, and actively so, in the
sense of regarding all institutions, art
worlds, traditions and alliances as tools
to be used with calculated risk and with a
sober anticipation of surprising outcomes.
This is a true generation of new South
Africans, who unlike their fore-bearers in
the 20th century could not choose their
fights or their benchmarks of success in a
highly purified atmosphere of concepts
and conflicts. They must move forward
pragmatically without being able to ignore
any of the issues emerging in the society
that has become their legacy. It is to this
generation, who are perhaps the people
most facilitated by modernisms anywhere
in the world today, to who this exhibition
is dedicated.

Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

Il modernismo
ed i suoi doppi
Lesperienza
sudafricana
1914-2014

Fra il 1914 ed il 2014 il Sudafrica ha vissuto

alcuni degli eventi piu decisivi della sua
storia.
A cominciare dalla formazione del Congresso Nazionale Africano (ANC) e
della Repubblica boera, antagonista dellImpero Britannico, i sudafricani
hanno formato visioni coerenti e ladempimento del loro futuro collettivo.
Un secolo di resistenza e contro resistenza ha separato due inconciliabili
nazionalismi, due visioni contrastanti e due futuri mutualmente esclusivi.
Questi processi sono stati immaginari tanto quanto materiali, estetici tanto
quanto politici e hanno condiviso, nonostante il loro famoso antagonismo
mondiale, una serie di impegni riguardanti il progetto di modernizzazione
e con esso, le potenzialita, i valori e le temporalita.
Queste avventure opposte allinterno del progetto moderno hanno fatto
si che il Sudafrica fosse diverso dalla maggior parte delle societa che
hanno vissuto il processo di decolonizzazione e hanno maturato una
resistenza allinvasione, al dispossesso e alla diaspora. E nella natura stessa
di questa differenza che e stato concepito il Padiglione Nazionale del
Sudafrica, e nei termini della criptica, deliberatamente effimera ma spesso
monumentalizzata nuova estetica che si e intensamente costruita.
Il visitatore e invitato a ritrovare quellinvestimento nel modernismo

Modernism and its

Doubles The South
African Experience
19142014

Between 1914 and 2014 South Africa

experienced the most decisive events in its
history.
Beginning with the formation of the African National Congress and the
Boer Republics antagonistic to the rule of the British Empire, South African
people formed coherent visions and implementations of their collective
future. A century of resistance and counter resistance ensued framed
within the modernising terms of two irreconcilable nationalisms, contrasted
visions of commonality and two mutually exclusive futures. These processes
were imaginative as much as material, aesthetic as much as political and
shared, despite their world famous antagonism, a set of commitments
to the project of modernisation and with it, to the potentials, values and
temporalities of Modernism.
These opposed adventures within the modern projects premises ensured
that South Africa differed from most societies experiencing decolonisation
and growing resistance to invasion, dispossession and Diasporas. It is
the nature of this difference that is sought in the South African National
Pavilion, and of the new aesthetic, cryptic, deliberately ephemeral but
often monumentalising terms in which it was intensely played out. The

che ha fatto del Sudafrica un argomento di discussione globale per ben

due volte negli ultimi cento anni: attraverso laltamente modernista,
sociale, ingegnosa repubblica mono razziale del 1961 e attraverso il
trionfo e lemergenza del post 1994, regno dei dispersi, delle potenti
immaginazioni e capacita che a lungo si sono opposte, finalmente hanno
battuto il regime e ne formano ora la posterita. Con linaugurazione del
primo Presidente democraticamente eletto nel 1994 e del primo governo
democratico dopo secoli di invasione, il Sudafrica ha iniziato un cammino
di riconciliazione. Questo evento tanto celebrato ha istantaneamente
macchiato i confini fra le forme e le istituzioni della maggior parte
delle esperienze ed i derivati degli storicamente molto piu visibili
confini occidentali dellallora minoranza politica. Il regno sudafricano e
limmaginazione spaziale rimangono formati da queste recenti leghe dei
modernismi una volta strategicamente opposti.
Sudafrica 1914-2014: Modernismo ed i suoi doppi traccia il percorso di due
distintamente concepiti e realizzati modernismi che hanno cosi spesso
fornito il momentum nel secolo di definizione del Sudafrica.
Molti trefoli dellesperienza contemporanea sudafricana si contendono
ancora il lascito della modernita, e la sua proprieta fornisce un laboratorio
per comprenderne il significato e cosa potrebbe ancora intendere, lontana
dal suo luogo di nascita, nellemisfero settentrionale.

viewer is invited to retrace the investment in modernism that made South

Africa a global talking point twice in the last hundred years: through the
highly modernistic social engineering of the 1961 mono-racial Republic
and through the triumph and emergence into the post 1994 public realm of
the dispersed, powerful imagination and capabilities that long opposed it,
finally overcame it and now form its posterity.
With the 1994 inauguration of the first democratically elected President
and government after centuries of invasion, South Africa embarked on a
path of reconciliation. This much celebrated event instantly blurred the
boundaries between the forms and institutions of majority experience
and the historically far more visible western derived outlines of the once
minority rulers. The South African public realm and spatial imagination
remains shaped by this recent alloying of once strategically opposed
modernisms.
South Africa 1914-2014: Modernism and its Doubles traces the paths of two
distinctly conceived and realised modernisms that so often provided the
momentum in South Africas defining century.
Most strands of contemporary South African Experience still contend over
the legacy of the modern, its ownership and denunciation and provide a
laboratory for understanding what it meant and still could mean far from its
place of birth in the northern hemisphere.

Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

Layout Diagram

LIFT

PASTS

DESIGNING FUTURES

<35

FIGHT OR SUBMIT

PRESENCE

Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

CURATOR
Lemaseya Khama
Lemaseya Khama an experienced architect and thinker who strongly advocates the role of cultural
relevance to the current built environment. Of importance for Khama is the near universal exclusion
of African experience from architecture. If an African architecture is to emerge in South Africa it
must have a thorough grasp of the forces that have so long militated against it. From his thesis at
Manchester Metropolitan University exploring the notion of a right approach to an emotive site to
providing a cultural veneer to regionally anchor the DTI Campus in Pretoria to myth-forming at the
Cradle of Mankind to truth seeking at Freedom Park to reinterpreting motifs at Sandton City Courts,
Khama has sought to prove African experience can be generate powerful change in a modernist
environment.

CURATOR
Jean-Pierre de la Porte
Jean-Pierre de la Porte is a writer and philosopher interested in the reasons why transformation
has been so slow in key areas of South African experience. He is interested in the ambiguities of
modernity and teaches an annual graduate seminar on its consequences. He is currently the Research
Director at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Infrastructure and affiliated to the
Universities of Pretoria and the Free State.

Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

Baileys African History Archive

Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

1900

PASTS
After many attempts
at establishing utopian
republics, the Boers finally
clashed with the British
Empire over the autonomy
of the Orange Free State
and Transvaal. At war over
mineral resources, the
British Empire mobilised a
global effort to eliminate
the Boers resulting in their
Vietnam, a damaging
guerrilla war that would
adversely shift Britains
place in geo-political
power.
The Boers, who were strategically
impoverished and pushed into the
immiserised margin usually reserved
for colonised people, proposed
a desperate cultural revolution to
differentiate themselves from the
dominant colonial group. They sent
emissaries to benchmark institutions
throughout the world with the
intention to return and establish
institutions of their own, centred in the
uniqueness of their language, printing
presses, media, schools, institutions
of higher learning and economic
cooperatives.

This synthesis of culture by first

creating its supporting institutions
was successful enough to draw a line
between newly reformulated Afrikaner
experiences and the London centred
experience of other whites occupying
South Africa. While it could have
remained a regional, recognised
cultural separatism, it was quickly
re-engineered into the basis of a
nation following the philosophical
assumptions of German Romantics
like Herder who had shown an organic
origin for nations in culture.
This led to the project of incubating
nationhood from a comprehensive
range of separatist cultural institutions.
In 1908 the recognition of this
unassailable and resilient cultural
nucleus by the British was achieved
and symbolised on British Empire
terms through Herbert Bakers Union
Buildings, symmetrically sharing
rule of a black South Africa between
British and Boer Republican halves.
Unimpressed by a role within a
union of British colonial territories,
Afrikaners pressed forward to mobilise
nationalism around cultural and
territorial nuclei. By 1914, the British
were committed to a war in part
encouraged by the exposure of their
vulnerability in their campaign against
the Boers. Seizing the opportunity
created by their opponents
engagement on other fronts, the
Boers built cities to manifest a
different presence in a public realm
previously defined by British planning
and style.

Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

1914

PASTS
After three centuries of wars
of colonial dispossession,
first against the Dutch
and then the British, black
South Africans made a bid
to represent themselves to
the British king in order to
achieve recognition of their
rights as subjects within his
Empire.
In preparation for this, many young
South African intellectuals from the
Eastern Cape were sent to study at
prestigious campuses in England
and the United States. In the course
of the American experience, African
Diaspora ideas of Pan-African
Nationalism were encountered and
absorbed, but remained peripheral
to the main mission of achieving
recognition by the British sovereign.
This mission failed and was insultingly
dismissed only to be followed by
the British engineered Land Act that
aimed at displacing the successful,
agrarian societies of South Africa

from their land to offer alternatives of

life exiled to tiny remote reserves or
massive urbanisation to provide labour
with the boom in mining.
This catastrophe, the 1913 Land
Act, threw the vast majority of South
Africans into a Diaspora in their own
country overnight, forcing leaders
and intellectuals to re-orientate their
mission from recognition and rights to
maintaining identity and establishing
unity and capacity for concerted
action. In this task the African National
Congress was inaugurated in 1912.
In 1914, the task of leadership was to
gain legitimacy through consensus
and through the creative shaping
of a future goal, that of an inclusive
nationalism.

Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

1948

DESIGNING
FUTURES
The futuristic path to
achieve an inclusive
nationalism in a state of
internal Diaspora was
made difficult to formulate
by events between the
two World Wars. German
experience shows how
the impact of Bolshevism
and the American New
Deal called forth growing
labour movements
and the alternative of
German indigenous massmobilisation.
In a Diaspora centred overnight on
growing industrial cities, the black
inclusivist national ideal that would
one day be the formula of South
Africas democracy, encountered
many more glamorous or urgent
competitors. Union movements were
widely embraced even becoming
clubs and societies outside of
industrial centres and hosting
apocalyptic themes. Modulating these
were Communist parties fortifying
mostly white mine workers against deskilling through technological change.
In contrast to inclusive nationalisms

were ever-present exclusive

nationalisms and regional separatisms
drawing heavily on the shared secrecy
of tradition and place.
A truly inclusive nationalism could not
afford to ignore any of these forms of
mobilisation around it, nor could it
allow itself to simply become
incorporated into their ranks. It would
have to use their successes, failures,
fates and unintended consequences
in order to shape its own highly
deliberative role. While never
losing sight of the major transition
from British colonial oppressors to
increasingly cohesive and influential
Afrikaner presence, the inclusive
nationalists had to constantly propose,
invent and advocate a different future
to those expected and endorsed
by the constituencies around them.
It is this ability to dream a future
as much as shape local events that
characterises the modernistic genius
of black South Africa between 1914
and 1948.

African National Congress Archive

10

11

Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

1948

DESIGNING
FUTURES
The dissonant republics
began establishing their
presence, much like
young republics anywhere
in history, through the
building of civic presence
that clearly spoke to cultural
and political capacity. It
is almost impossible to
conceive of a republicanism
that does not image itself in
cities or dramatic revisions
of existing city sites.
From Florence to Washington to
Pretoria, the potentials for turning
buildings and spaces into allegories
of envisioned nationhood have been
aggressively seized.
The city of Pretoria unlike its agrarian
counterpart Bloemfontein was the
subject of intense industrialisation
and hence urbanisation. It required
a modern modality of city planning
whilst simultaneously fulfilling the
obligation of symbolising Afrikaner
nationhood. In the course of a few
decades, it became a machine for
incubating a new kind of citizen
equipped with the capacities for

nation-building while at the same time

exemplifying this new citizen and its
forms and places. Poised on a razors
edge between hermetic culturalism
and the cosmopolitanism demanded
by cities, Afrikaners definitive
architect, Gerard Moerdyk, almost
recapitulates the social engineered
stages from culturalism to nationalism
to republicanism within one career.
Beginning with those primordial civic
buildings, he evolves to challenge
and subvert a high-British Roman/
Tuscan pan-empire style developed
by Baker and Lutyens. He submits his
official British public buildings and
their generated civic space to a set of
systematic variations ranging between
mega-structures and fragmented
excerpts, with incorporating
Africanised motifs in place of Roman
imperial illusions.

University of Pretoria Archive

He is chosen to pre-emptively
symbolise Afrikaner nationhood, in
one of the most powerful buildings
of the 1930s decade. Eventually
he would monumentalise growing
administrative precincts in eclectically
modernist terms, giving an inhabitable
face to the progress linked to the
infrastructured growth throughout the
part-pragmatic, part-utopian city of
Pretoria.

Standard Bank Corporate Collection

Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

1948

pRESENCE
The 1948 national elections
bring the first non-British
aligned ruler to power in
white South African history.
The culminating event
of exclusive culturalism
and nationalism is the
inauguration of Afrikaner
presidential candidate
D.F Malan. This resulted in
a return of a neo-colonial
sense of ownership of
space and of the images
and ideas allowed to
circulate in it.
Confronted by their opponents
extraordinary ability to shift fronts
of engagement between the public
and the personal, between the
collective and the individual, the
white government embarks on a
process of rigorous normalisation in
which it applies its standardisation
and managed expectations to its own
constituencies and attempts to do the
same to the majority.

This is the most instantly recognisable

period, of long-anticipated and
finally achieved nationalism. It almost
immediately gives way to a managerial
revolution in which political and ethnic
conflict is sublimated into social
engineering, developmental scenarios
and strategies of harmless diffusion.
Politics, war and disagreement are to
be transcended by the provision of a
scientific super-state, equipped with
the ability to design its way around
future conflicts while saturating a
common experience with dozens of
carefully designed and administered
smaller public realms.
This is the preparation for the 1961
Republic, a machine supposed
to transcend history, ethnicity,
inequality and conflict in favour of a
homogenised and perfected western
solution based on modernist social
science and multiculturalism.

The Heritage Foundation, Pretoria

12

13

Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

1961

PRESENce
Already, as second or
perhaps third generation
Diaspora accommodated
to someone elses urban
context, the South African
majority developed an
extraordinarily refined art
of public self- presentation
which at the same time
serves as a mask to
protect the shared secrecy
necessary to resistance.
Equipped with highly distinctive
powers of self-presentation and
withdrawal, black South Africans
embark on powerful and audacious
experiments in public presence,
indiscernibly organising wide-spread
campaigns of civil disobedience such
as school stay-aways to disempower
white attempts to strategically lower
the quality of education, bus-boycotts
to derail attempts to tax transport, and
marches on administrations, including
the Union Buildings, to protest against
the imposition to carrying a pass in
order to work and remain in cities.
This era of the South African
experience develops the visibility,
sincerity, theatricality and stealth
that are the ingredients of cultures
of occupation and protest to
extraordinary degree. Its motif is the
modernistic theme of possessing,
making, controlling and using your
own presence as a kind of power.
Anticipating the politics of minorities

and counter-cultures throughout

the 20th century, the majority of
South Africans develop an art of
self-presentation that extends not
only to mobilisation and the public
underpinning of inclusive nationalism,
but also to a creative use of leisure
and an ability to occupy while
retaining a distance from the standard
occasions of life (by then heavily
overlaid by Christianity) such as births,
weddings and funerals.
Claustrophobically meshed in the
same city space in which Afrikaners
are manifesting their identity
as destiny, black South Africa is
constantly aware that its ways of being
at home and being itself are under
erosion. A project of shared secrecy
is developed allowing individuals to
out-run the western stereotyping by
simply shedding whatever had been
co-opted and inventing something in
its place. This situation is placed within
a premium of improvisation, going
down paths that westerners could
perhaps intuit but not follow, a project
strongly encapsulated in the music of
the 1950s.
In parallel, visits to photographic
studios provided occasions to
experiment with self-presentation
in a permanent way. The portraits
of the time show this extraordinary
awareness of the ambiguity and
opportunity in presenting and
withdrawing the image of oneself.
This era of self-shaping and nonviolent collective presence was
brought to an abrupt close by the
Sharpeville massacre.

Baileys African History Archive

Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

FIGHT OR
SUBMIT

1961

The imposed republican

solution forced South
African resistance to
migrate to an international
plane of alliances,
countering the white bid for
western recognition with
the involvement of Cold
War opponents of the West.

the outstanding contributions of exiles

in all spheres of endeavour as well as
to the intensified determination of
insiles to make the white republic
ungovernable. The June 1976 studentled uprising against the political
design of education showed the
possibility of internal mass-action and
brought all the questions of unity,
alliances, strategy and discipline into
the political foreground. The scene
was set for internal and external
combat against the Republic.

This combination of militancy and

exile would disperse leadership
and create a virtual siege around
the white republic in an attempt to
prevent a family of allies. At once an
inclusive nationalism is challenged to
advocate and realise itself on a global
geopolitical platform, giving rise to

1979

The challenge to inclusive nationalism

was to choose the modalities of
this combat. In the choice between
submitting and fighting all the way
to victory or defeat against the fully
engineered destinies offered to the
majority of South Africans, the choice
was clearly fight.

African National Congress Archive

14

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Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

Aziz Tayob

Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

16

University of Pretoria Digital Repository - UPSPACE

17

Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

FIGHT OR
SUBMIT
With culturalism and
nationalism as ladders to
be climbed and thrown
away, the 1961 Republic
changes the international
status of South Africa
from a beleaguered
ex-British territory, crisscrossed by competing
British nationalisms, to
a durable western white
presence in Africa buffered
against African nationalist
aspirations, seen elsewhere
on the continent.
The cities and economies would
translate colonial experience into
white national idioms. Eventually a
Republic would be declared aiming
to benefit all western identifying
groups including western Cold War
aligned African states.
This western homogeneity,
modernistic and progressive, would
be made free of competing claims
and influences by declaring all nonwhite South Africans, non-western
and relegating them to homelands,
offering self-rule under carefully
chosen and supported dictatorships.
Thus, black South Africans could
aspire to be part of a commonwealth
of states at the periphery of a

1961
Westernised core. This policy was
euphemistically known as good
neighbourliness and stands on a par
with the geopolitical re-engineering
carried out by the Soviet Union and by
the Nazi invasions in Europe.
In its confident audacity, the city
of Pretoria becomes for the third
time the experimental site for the
republican metropolis experiment
after its previous deployment as a
culturalist and nationalist test-bed.
Now geared to exert power at a
distance, like the original colonial
centres, such as Amsterdam and
London, it undergoes metamorphoses
similar to their managerial capacity,
where alliances and affluence
accumulate within its decisionmaking matrices. Functionally
perfected, it now concentrates on
its form, benchmarking a number of
metropolises, including Niemeyers
Brazil and producing, under the
compulsion of modernistic up-todateness, a series of showcased
buildings worthy of the world expos
of the time.
This brief flowering of the fourth
great strand of modernistic social
engineering (besides Soviet Nazi
and American New Deal) alternatives
is short lived; its cost in poverty
and suffering soon turns it into the
improvised citadel of a civil war.

1979

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Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

1979
<35

Between 1988 and 1994,

facilitated by the end of
the Cold War, both sides
engaged on a democratic
terrain that could only
favour the prevailing
majority. The Diaspora
had ended, and South
Africa had been returned
to its people. Instead of
retribution, there was
reconciliation, a magisterial
constitution and the long
fought for and dreamt for
opportunity of inclusive
nationalism that put its
values into practice as a
government democratically
elected by its own people.

Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

2014
What is less obvious is that this
moment also flowed together
in a more-orless unplanned,
unanticipated fashion, the two
sides of modernity that had been
so intensely developed by South
African adversaries. This merger has
proved so elusive to participants and
commentators because it consists of
a yet to be determined alloy of two
strands of modernity.
Since there is no greater indignity
than speaking on behalf of others,
the final element in the South African
Pavilion consists of confrontations with
people and places: places shaped
by extremities of social engineering
and people whose legacy is the great
struggle to achieve the modern ideal
of an inclusive society. South Africans
under the age of 35 present their own
experience, their own summation of
where we have arrived at and their
own report on the open futures that
they now shape.

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Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

the Consul-General
of The Republic of
South Africa to
Milan, Italy
Mr Saul Kgomotso Molobi

Mr Saul Kgomotso Molobi

serving as Consul-General of
the Republic of South Africa
to Milan, Italy is a marketing
and communications
specialist who has experience
in public diplomacy,
international marketing and
communications, publishing
and journalism.

2011 he attended a Programme

in Public Diplomacy facilitated by
the DiploFoundation, an initiative
of the Mediterranean Academy
of Diplomatic Studies, based at
the University of Malta, supported
by the governments of Malta and
Switzerland.

He holds several degrees: BA

from University of the North;
BA (with Honours) and Master
of Arts (MA) from the University
of the Witwatersrand; PostGraduate Diploma from the IMM
Graduate School of Marketing.
He has also received vocational
training in public diplomacy at the
University of Southern California
and international relations at the
Netherlands Institute of International
Relations in Clingendael. In April

Private sector; having worked as

Publishing Director for Heinemann
Publishers

Mr Molobi has a full spectrum

of experience from various
backgrounds:

Public entities; having worked

as Senior Manager: Corporate
Communications for Telkom;
General Manager: Marketing &
Communications for Trade and
Investment Limpopo
Government; first as Chief Director:
Marketing Communications at the
Department of Trade and Industry;

General Manager: Provincial

Communication Services at Office
of the Premier in Limpopo province/
region; and recently as Chief
Director: Public Diplomacy at the
Department of International Relations
and Cooperation
Non-governmental organisations;
as Editor-in-Chief at Learn & Teach
Publications and Director for
Independent Magazine Group
Mr Molobi is a member of the
Institute of Marketing Management
(IMM) and the Marketing Association
of South Africa (MASA). He is also
an affiliate member of the UK-based
Chartered Institute of Marketing
(CIM).
A former student activist, poet,
childrens author and filmmaker, Mr
Molobi spent thirteen months in
detention-without-trial for opposing
apartheid colonialism in the 1980s.

Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

STATEMENT: SA PAVILLION: VENICE ARCHITECTURAL BIENNALE 2014

South Africas presence at the 14th International
Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale
marks our return to this most important global
event in the exhibition space acquired by South
Africa in 2013. The South African exhibition
addresses the specific brief of the Curator of the
2014 Biennale, Fundamentals. In fulfilling the
brief, we have been sure to contextualise the last
one hundred years of South African architecture,
from 1914-2014, in a way that take cognisance of
the vastly different experiences of South Africans
of all races.
As such, the exhibition comprises four different
components of the South African experience:
The African nationalist response and its difficult search for
defining fundamentals in both tradition and modernity.
Essentialist White Utopias 1914 to 1961 and 1961 to
1994.
Fundamentals of place-architecture without
architects.

Countercultures in search of fundamentals 1994 to

the present.
The basic elements of architecture are interwoven into
our daily lives and provide the backdrop for other cultural
manifestations that we are so proud of. Coming to terms with

our past and who we are is a fundamental part of our project

to build a cohesive and prosperous society and has particular
significance 2014; the year in which we celebrate 20 Years of
Freedom. This installation is about a balanced view of how
our past has influenced our present and how South Africa has
emerged, after 2 decades of democracy, as a place where our
future will continue to informed and shaped by the designers
who create the places and spaces that we live in.
South Africas presence at the Biennale is part of our
commitment to give exposure to the rich diversity of arts,
culture and heritage which has defined our country; opening
up opportunities for them to access new markets for
development. By strengthening trade in artistic goods and
services; we aim to ensure the sustainability of our sector
and enhance its contribution to the national effort to create
jobs and grow our economy so that we may participate on
platforms such as these for many years to come. The South
African Department of Arts and Culture is pleased to provide
our support to this exhibition.

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Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

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Modernism and its Doubles: The South African Experience 19142014

Modernism and its Doubles

The South African Experience 19142014
Pavilion of South Africa at the 14th International
Architecture Exhibition l a Biennale di Venezia
Sale dArmi Nord, Arsenale, Castello, 30122, Venezia
07 June 23 November 2014
Curated by Lemaseya Khama & Jean-Pierre de la Porte
www.southafricanarchitecturebiennale.com