Building Apartheid

On Architecture and Order in Imperial Cape Town

Nicholas Coetzer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317171034
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Through a specific architectural lens, this book exposes the role the British Empire played in the development of apartheid. Through reference to previously unexamined archival material, the book uncovers a myriad of mechanisms through which Empire laid the foundations onto which the edifice of apartheid was built. It unearths the significant role British architects and British architectural ideas played in facilitating white dominance and racial segregation in pre-apartheid Cape Town. To achieve this, the book follows the progenitor of the Garden City Movement, Ebenezer Howard, in its tripartite structure of Country/Town/Suburb, acknowledging the Garden City Movement's dominance at the Cape at the time. This tripartite structure also provides a significant match to postcolonial schemas of Self/Other/Same which underpin the three parts to the book. Much is owed to Edward Said's discourse-analytical approach in Orientalism - and the work of Homi Bhabha - in the definition and interpretation of archival material. This material ranges across written and visual representations in journals and newspapers, through exhibitions and events, to legislative acts, as well as the physicality of the various architectural objects studied. The book concludes by drawing attention to the ideological potency of architecture which tends to be veiled more so through its ubiquitous presence and in doing so, it presents not only a story peculiar to Imperial Cape Town, but one inherent to architecture more broadly. The concluding chapter also provides a timely mirror for the machinations currently at play in establishing a 'post-apartheid' architecture and urbanity in the 'new' South Africa.

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 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

1.1 Adderley Street, Union celebrations, 1910

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 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.

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

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 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 (Figure 1.4).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:

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

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 nativ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Ashgate Studies in Architecture Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• List of Abbreviations
• The Agents of Empire
• Self/Countryside
• Other/City
• Same/Suburb
• Bibliography
• Index