by David Smiedt
In the early 80s, countryside of mild undulation and grassy hue separated Johannesburg and Pretoria to the extent that the halfway point was marked by a solitary oak by the side of the highway. Today the green belt has shrunk to a shoelace as business parks and factories flee ever northwards from Johannesburg’s CBD and industrial suburbs. At the same time Pretoria is expanding southwards with fresh-out- of-the-box suburbs like Centurion.
Naming a posh new enclave after a Roman commander chosen to lead one hundred men into battle struck me as an odd choice for a capital city trying to shed its reputation as the spiritual home of apartheid. I mean, if you go to all the trouble of building a lake as the suburb’s centrepiece, surely Greenbanks, Waterview or even Lapland might have been more appropriate.
However, the gladiatorial mores of locals was underlined just before the turn-off to Centurion – where the world champion one-day cricket team was to kick off its defence of the title – with a billboard that read “Die Aussies Die”. And a warm welcome to you too.
I obviously wasn’t the only one who believed this simply wasn’t cricket because the billboard was removed some weeks later amid justifications from a tanty-tossing art director who believed it was nothing more than an innocent jibe in the context of good-natured sporting rivalry.
Pretoria has always had an air of quiet prosperity about it. The streets are wide, neat and lined with stately jacarandas that wrap a lilac pashmina around the city’s shoulders every spring. Through my childhood and teen years it was decried as a larger regional centre which was to urban sophistication what rhinestones are to denim. Those who had ventured there for business trips entertained us with stories such as the time so-and-so ordered a cappuccino and was told, “Sorry, we’ve run out. Do you mind if I serve it in a mug?” There were also myriad hilarities regarding English-speakers from Johannesburg trying to make it through working lunches with Afrikaners from Pretoria. My favourite involved a cousin who had sailed through one such meal impressing his clients with his bilingual capabilities. Things went downhill rapidly, however, when he meant to order aarbaie (strawberries) for dessert but instead requested ambaie (piles).
I checked into my hotel in the Hatfield district then took a stroll. As I walked I discovered that the city had undergone a radical metamorphosis. Home to three universities, as well as the University of South Africa, the world’s largest correspondence institution, Pretoria feels like a casting call for Dawson’s Creek.
Hatfield’s streets were lined with pubs, cafes, clubs and restaurants between which flitted packs of three-sheets engineering faculty lads and cliques of mocha-skinned nymphs wearing gravity-defying hipsters and “yes but not with you” expressions.
Then there were the Afrikaners. How could a race with such ugly ideas produce such beautiful women? I followed a group of these celestial creatures into a square bounded by four pubs whose patrons were all watching South Africa take on the West Indies in the opening match of the World Cup. Regardless of whether they were in the German, Irish or ultraviolet-suffused Cheeky Monkey bar, punters had draped themselves in flags and cheered every boundary while their bored girlfriends silently wished the overs away.
Nursing an amber, I occupied a stool in the corner of the Red Wolf bar and was immediately struck by the relaxed nature of the city’s inhabitants. Unlike their counterparts in Johannesburg who clutched their bags to their chests like fullbacks taking a Gary Owen, the women in Pretoria were entirely comfortable leaving their totes on pub tables while ordering a drink at the bar.
As the game progressed, the home team’s fortunes sank. With defeat looming, you could cut the testosterone with a knife. It soared even higher when a few stultified girlfriends decided they’d had enough of this shared experience and wanted to call it a night.
There are two things I cannot look away from: one is traffic accidents and the other is a couple arguing in public. Invasive? Perhaps. Intriguing? Certainly. I was entertained by unresolved issues being raised from relationship limbo on three fronts. It was a veritable cavalcade of confrontation as phrases that began with “You never …”, “Well, you always …” and “How was I supposed to know?” ricocheted around me like emotional ammunition.
Suitably entertained, I made my way to a steakhouse where I spent the meal trying to figure out whether the cowhide motif was horribly inappropriate or merely brutally honest.
Energised by Pretoria’s vibrancy and the party-till-you-puke philosophy of the locals in this area, I pooh-poohed the idea of returning to the hotel and took to the streets for a stroll, my hands thrust deep in my pockets as I am wont to do in moments of simple contentment.
I chanced upon a gloriously glitzy pool hall where I played the kind of immaculate stick you do when alone in a foreign country after several stubbies. The table beside mine was being used by a pair of local women in their early twenties who struck up a conversation by asking if I was practising for a tournament. Spoken for though I am, it was the most flattering opening line I’d ever received. I asked them if my perception that Pretoria was far more laid-back than its stressed southern neighbour was accurate.
“Sure,” replied a freckle-flecked blonde of tousled allure named Marli. Pausing to mentally translate from her first language of Afrikaans into English for my benefit, she continued, “But we still have a high crime rate here. My car has been broken into so many times that now I just leave the electrical cords exposed under the steering wheel so thieves think someone else has got there first and couldn’t start the thing.” Call me crazy, but there’s something pretty cute about a woman who can hotwire her own car.
I woke up the next morning with a companion I hadn’t counted on: a hangover that carpeted my tongue with shag pile and made my skull feel as if it was being tattooed from the inside. This was exacerbated by the fact that it had barely gone 6 am and I had been roused by a piano accordion. With a mouth foul in more ways than one, I peered out of the window to see a solitary jive merchant alternating between singing and whistling as he cajoled a melody from the cumbersome instrument. Unlike the Bavarian Brunnhildes one usually sees playing the piano accordion with graceful wrist movements, caressing fingers and the kind of anguished expression that suggests either infinite melancholy, polka-induced psychosis or chronic constipation, this musician brought a different energy to the instrument.
He played it more like a percussion instrument, pumping bellows with the urgent rhythm of a conjugal visit. The combination of his voice, the accordion’s joyful wheeze and his uncle-dancing-at-a-wedding shuffle stopped a commuter exiting the station. Then another. And another. The music went from being infectious to sparking a full-blown epidemic of exuberance as a twenty-strong crowd of toe-tappers gathered in minutes. Just as quickly, however, they dissipated amid glances at wristwatches and the arrival of buses. No hat had been placed on the floor as a shrapnel receptacle and not a cent had been solicited. It had been music for the pleasure of its sharing and I couldn’t have asked for a better start to the day.
Nursing a stream of cappuccinos in the hotel restaurant, I mused on the idea that the drink had been named after the Capuchin monks who came up with the idea of diluting black coffee with warm milk. As caffeine and my blood stream renewed their happy acquaintance, my mind began idly to contemplate various other useful articles that had been named after the folk who had presumably inspired or invented them. You had your Stanley knife, your Phillips head, and my personal favourite, your Lazy Susan.
It was peak hour by the time I joined the traffic and crawled through the stately suburb of Arcadia, which boasts a hundred embassies in a five-kilometre radius. Heading away from the CBD, my route took me past a series of gushing fountains fed by the natural springs that prompted the city’s forefathers to settle here.
My destination was the Voortrekker Monument. Commanding views across the city, the monument is a granite cube as high as the statue of Christ over Rio, forty metres wide and forty metres long. Designed by Gerard Moerdijk, it was reputedly ins
pired by the ruins of an African civilisation in what is present day Zimbabwe. Which is an odd twist for a structure that for both devotees and critics was apartheid’s holy tabernacle.
Its original raison d’êtremental was to commemorate the Great Trek, a flight to freedom undertaken by thousands of Afrikaners who left the Cape in the 1830s. Under various leaders along different routes, the Voortrekkers, as they were known, shared a common motivation: the desire to be free of British rule and the abolitionist philosophies that were gaining political clout in London.
This seminal migration was to form the cornerstone of Afrikaner identity and shared numerous parallels with the settlement of the American West which took place at roughly the same time.
It was a journey Homer would have written off as improbable. Over the course of six years, 15,000 Afrikaners dragged their wagons, families and dreams of autonomy over mountains that shattered axles like toothpicks, interminable deserts and swamps swarming with malarial mosquitos gagging to go Dutch. These calamities were compounded by battles with hostile tribes prepared to kill to protect their ancestral lands. With Bibles in one hand and muskets in the other, the Voortrekkers inflicted and suffered horrific casualties.
The monument commemorates their sacrifices and ethos. It is ringed by a fence made of black steel spears which represents the ocean of assegai-wielding warriors the Voortrekkers had to navigate. Beyond this lies an encircling wall carved with sixty-four ox wagons replicating the laagers into which the settler would manoeuvre their convoy in preparation for battle. Every corner of the building is redolent with symbolism. The busts of slain leaders squint out over the countryside they died to call home. Above the entrance a menacing granite buffalo head – the most dangerous wild animal in the land – dares would-be assailants to have a go if they reckon they’re hard enough.
I struck up a conversation with a guide named Conrad, whose tour group had descended on the souvenir shop with the giddy lack of discrimination that comes with being armed with pound sterling in Africa.
A proud Afrikaner, Conrad said, “When I was growing up, this place was like a church to us”.
Inside, it is more mausoleum than cathedral. One of the walls is taken up entirely by mosaic windows of a shade presumably intended to have been golden but which instead bestows upon the few sombre visitors an unflattering jaundice. The remaining walls are occupied by the world’s largest marble friezes depicting a series of crucial moments during the Great Trek. Because the craftsfolk and facilities for creating a work of this size were not available in South Africa when the monument was constructed, sketches were made and dispatched to Italy. As a result, your average Zulu depicted in the frieze possesses a nose so Roman it might as well be diagonally parked across a laneway pavement in the shadow of St Peters.
The most brutal and detailed of these friezes commemorates the Battle of Blood River where 10,000 Zulus were routed by Boer leader Andries Pretorius, after whom the city was named, and his band of 470 commandos. The story goes on that Pretorians vowed to God that if they were victorious by His hard, the day would be forever commemorated.
Nowhere is the import of this battle and the implications victory carried for the Afrikaners more dramatically displayed than on a granite tomb that forms the museum’s altar. Located a floor below the entrance and best viewed through a balustraded oval hole cut into the marble floor, it is made of black granite into which is chiselled the words “Ons Vir Jou Suid Afrika” (We For You South Africa). The entire monument structure is crafted around this cenotaph and every year at 12pm on December 16 (the day of the battle of Blood River) a ray of sunlight passes over the inscription confirming Afrikaaners’ divinely mandated rights to the land.
For reasons best known to themselves, the initial administrators were so concerned that black visitors would throng this monument to their subjugation that they instituted a policy whereby visitors of colour would only be permitted on the premises on Tuesdays. From the 1950s, however, they were banned altogether. It was a policy that stood firm for half a century and the dozen black teenagers who were dragging themselves around the place on the day I visited seemed somewhat underwhelmed by it all.
I was beginning to feel the same way and decided to top up my personality with a cappuccino and koeksister. Despite the fact that it appeared on the menu, the definitive constituents of the former were a mystery to the cafe staff who topped a cup of Nescafé instant with two tablespoons of cold double cream. However, they were clearly at home with the latter. A twist of deep-fried pastry injected with, soaked in and sweating golden syrup, koeksisters are one the Afrikaners’ gifts to humanity.
Gazing across the 341 hectares of grassland surrounding the monument, I tried to picture them filled with the crowd of 250,000 (ten times the population of Pretoria at the time) that gathered here with traditional costumes, songs, wagons and attitudes to celebrate the centenary of the Great Trek in 1938.
The assembly gave crucial weight to the burgeoning Afrikaner nationalism that would eventually sweep the architects of apartheid to power a decade later. Many of those present at the foot of the monument in 1938 had been forced off the land a decade earlier by the worst drought since settlement, only to be slugged by the unemployment and degradation that accompanied the Great Depression.
Staunchly Afrikaans political parties and cultural organisations seized on the discontent with promises to uplift what they termed “poor whites” by providing improved housing and social conditions. They also undermined trade unions by seizing on corruption amid their English-speaking hierarchy to illustrate that they would never have the interests of Afrikaner workers at heart. The English domination of business was portrayed in heartless, anti-Semitic terms with an alternative being provided in the form of compassionate new banks and financial institutions which were founded by Afrikaners for Afrikaners. The us-against-them line was hammered home by Afrikaner newspapers, and paramilitary organisations modelled on the Nazis clashed with government troops in the streets.
When World War II rolled around and South Africa fulfilled its Commonwealth obligations, even more Afrikaners turned their back on the government because they believed this was not their conflict. By the 1948 general election, the Purified National Party had added to the weight of Afrikaner nationalism with a propaganda campaign which played on fears that the nation’s cities were soon to be overrun by black migrants. The government was split on the issue and dillydallied like a game-show contestant trying to decide between the foot spa and the sheet set. What’s more, Jan Smuts was seen as an ageing prime minister more interested in playing the role of international statesmen and writing the preamble to the fledgling United Nations than addressing the suffering of his people.
On promises of rigid segregation and job protection for whites, the government that would administer apartheid for the better part of half a century snuck into power with a minority of the vote but a higher number of rural constituencies. And all from a picnic in a paddock.
Up close the Voortrekker Monument is so imposing that I didn’t adequately take in the view it afforded of the city until I was driving away. Ensconced in a jacaranda-canopied bowl bordered by gentle slopes, Pretoria’s other most notable architectural landmark threw seductive glances my way from a ridge on the other side of town. The Union Buildings were designed by Herbert Baker in 1910 as a trial run for New Delhi’s government buildings. As prototypes go, it isn’t half bad. Inspired by the Acropolis, it presides over the city from the acme of a magnificent tiered garden. Its facade is the hue of a hangover-strength latte, sapiently teamed with a burnished red Itali anate roof. A Renaissance extravaganza of fluid arches and shaded colonnades set behind Doric columns, it appears to be the happy beneficiary of an explosion in a nearby cupola factory. Stately, graceful and more entrancing the closer you get, it was everything a seat of government should be. Perhaps except transparent.
The complex spreads across the top of a lawn exploding in marigold pyrotechnics and converges on a central
lily pond flanked by fountains and potted palms against a backdrop of domes upon which the figures of Atlas and Mercury look towards the Voortrekker Monument. It’s an aspect that is unlikely to alter as building laws restrict the height of any new developments that may obscure the view. Apparently the omnipresent sight of the monument would remind the trekboers’ parliamentary descendents of the struggles of their forefathers and their divine mandate to rule the land. Ons Vir Jou Suid Afrika.
It was time to explore the city, so I dumped the car at the hotel and set out on foot. Church Square was once the CBD’s architectural showcase. Bounded by the French and German baroque Ou Raadsaal (Old Government House), the century-old Palace of Justice, the South African Supreme Court and the imposing Reserve Bank, the square was in sore need of a high-pressure hosing. In these buildings brutal injust ices were carried out in the name of the law and policies were drafted to deny the majority of the population the opportunity to earn a fair day’s wage. Judging by the decrepitude and neglect on display, it seemed the current government viewed the space as a tainted reminder of a bleak history. In the first of many instances in which my guidebook sank into ludicrous euphemism, it described the square as being “mellowed by a wide grassy expanse, where Pretorians may be found enjoying an afternoon nap”.
Mostly in their own vomit it turned out. Hustlers with suspicious trouser bulges eyed me from park benches as though they were calculating how much one of my kidneys would fetch on the black market. Metho-scented vagrants lay strewn across park benches and weed-choked beds. Fruit peels and food splotches decayed into pungent pavement collages and all that moved with any sense of purpose were the intermittent whirlwinds of litter.