modernism and its double- catálogoáfricadosulbienalde arquiteturadeveneza_2014

ModernisM and its doubles: The SouTh AfricAn experience 1914–2014 2

ModernisM and its doublesThe SouTh AfricAn experience 1914–2014

curated by Lemaseya Khama & Jean-pierre de la porte


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 Foucault’s 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. Sloterdijk’s 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 Africa’s 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 Africa’s 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

ABSORBINg MODERNITy OR HOW SOUTH AFRICA’S DEFININg STRUggLE WAS CONCEIVED AND FOUgHT IN MODERNIST TERMS

ModernisM and its doubles: The SouTh AfricAn experience 1914–20143

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 another’s 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 Empire’s 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, Herder’s 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 Baker’s 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 Afrikaner’s 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 self-declared 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 Israel’s 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 race-exclusive 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 master’s house with the master’s 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 Africa’s 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.


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 dell’Impero Britannico, i sudafricani hanno formato visioni coerenti e l’adempimento 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 all’interno 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 all’invasione, 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 quell’investimento nel modernismo

che ha fatto del Sudafrica un argomento di discussione globale per ben due volte negli ultimi cento anni: attraverso l’altamente modernista, sociale, ingegnosa repubblica mono razziale del 1961 e attraverso il trionfo e l’emergenza 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 l’inaugurazione 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 dell’allora minoranza politica. Il regno sudafricano e l’immaginazione 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 dell’esperienza 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, nell’emisfero settentrionale.

IL MODERNISMO ED I SUOI DOPPI L’ESPERIENZA SUDAFRICANA 1914-2014

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 project’s 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

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 Africa’s 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 1914–2014


LAyOUT DIAgRAM

LIFT

PASTS DESIGNING FUTURES

FIGHT OR SUBMIT<35

PRESENCE


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.

CURATOR JEAN-PIERRE DE LA PORTE

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 LEMASEyA KHAMA


Bailey’s African History Archive


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 Britain’s 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 Baker’s 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 opponent’s engagement on other fronts, the Boers built cities to manifest a different presence in a public realm previously defined by British planning and style.

1900


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.

1914


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 mass-mobilisation.

In a Diaspora centred overnight on growing industrial cities, the black inclusivist national ideal that would one day be the formula of South Africa’s 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 de-skilling 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.

1948

African National Congress Archive


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 razor’s 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.

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.

1948

Standard Bank Corporate Collection

University of Pretoria Archive


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

1948


PRESENCE

Already, as second or perhaps third generation Diaspora accommodated to someone else’s 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 non-violent collective presence was brought to an abrupt close by the Sharpeville massacre.

1961

Bailey’s African History Archive


FIgHT OR SUBMIT

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.

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

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 student-led 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.

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.

19791961

African National Congress Archive


Aziz Tayob


University of Pretoria Digital Repository - UPSPACE


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, criss-crossed 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 non-white 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

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 decision-making matrices. Functionally perfected, it now concentrates on its form, benchmarking a number of metropolises, including Niemeyer’s Brazil and producing, under the compulsion of modernistic up-to-dateness, 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.

19791961


<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.

What is less obvious is that this moment also flowed together in a more-or–less 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.

1979 2014

ModernisM and its doubles: THE SOUTH AFRICAN ExPERIENCE 1914–2014 18


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.

He holds several degrees: BA from University of the North; BA (with Honours) and Master of Arts (MA) from the University of the Witwatersrand; Post-graduate 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

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.

Mr Molobi has a full spectrum of experience from various backgrounds:

Private sector; having worked as Publishing Director for Heinemann Publishers

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, children’s author and filmmaker, Mr Molobi spent thirteen months in detention-without-trial for opposing apartheid colonialism in the 1980s.


South Africa’s 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:

• TheAfricannationalistresponseanditsdifficultsearchfordefining fundamentals in both tradition and modernity.

• EssentialistWhiteUtopias1914to1961and1961to1994.

• Fundamentalsofplace-architecturewithout architects.

• Counterculturesinsearchoffundamentals1994tothe 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 Africa’s 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.

STATEMENT: SA PAVILLION: VENICE ARCHITECTURAL BIENNALE 2014


ModernisM and its doubles the south african exPerience 1914–2014

pavilion of South Africa at the 14th international Architecture exhibition – l a Biennale di VeneziaSale d’Armi nord, Arsenale, castello, 30122, Venezia 07 June – 23 november 2014

Curated by lemaseya Khama & Jean-Pierre de la Porte

www.southafricanarchitecturebiennale.com

modernism and its double- catálogoáfricadosulbienalde arquiteturadeveneza_2014

Documents

south african pavilion

south africas

south africans

american experience

defining century

ease bruno latour

peter sloterdijk

controversy sloterdijk