Making Memory Space: Recollection and Reconciliation in Post ...

the complexity of attempting to re-characterise the innate meaning of monuments, and the difficulty of
accommodating a diverse audience is born out through discussion of the Voortrekker Monument,
which stands as seminal object of Afrikaner nationalism and entitlement.
The Voortrekker Monument
Figure 2 - Stoicism in the monument. One of four corner
sculptures depicting the ‘Great leaders of the trek’: Piet Retief,
Andreas Pretorius, Hendrik Potgieter and an unknown leader
representing all the others
The Voortrekker Monument is the product of the
desire of the Afrikaner population to construct a
physical manifestation of their entitlement to the
land of South Africa, intended as verification of
their supremacy both as a race and a spiritual
people aligned with God. 109 This impulse, the
desire to ‘generate political legitimisation through
the symbolic possession of urban spaces’, has
been consistent in the Western world from
antiquity onwards. 110 According to Sigfreid
Giedion, such constructs display an ‘eternal need
of people to create symbols for their activities and
for their fate or destiny, for their religious beliefs
and for their social convictions.’ 111 The
Voortrekker Monument conforms to just such as assertion. Great care was taken with its design,
placement and execution to ensure that it assumed its intended significance. Each aspect of the
memorial, its site, structure, materiality and form, was infused with a deliberate significance to highlight
Afrikaner ascendancy over Southern Africa (Figure. 2).
Monumental Narratives
The Voortrekker Monument was built in the late 1930s and foreshadows a style popular among other
buildings constructed during the Apartheid era. 112 The Monument was constructed to commemorate
the Great Trek: a historical event whereby Afrikaner pioneers left the Cape of Good Hope to establish
a new settlement in the area of the former Transvaal (now Gauteng). The Trek was intended as an act
of resistance against British Colonialism, and as a result, the monument is considered anti-British as
well as anti-African. 113 Attempts to refashion the memorial’s meaning are made doubly complex by its
relationship to the colonising forces of the British whilst representing the colonising force of the
109
Annie E. Coombes, Op cit, p.28.
110
Peter Carrier, Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany since 1989 (New York and
Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), p.17.
111
Sigfried Giedion, ‘The Need for a New Monumentality’, in Architecture and You and Me, (Cambridge and Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1958), p.28.
112
Roger Fisher, ‘The native heart: The architecture of the University of Pretoria campus’, in Hilton Judin and Ivan Vladislavic,
Blank________ Architecture, Apartheid and After (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1998), p.226.
113
Sampie Terreblanche, A History of Inequality in South Africa 1652-2002 (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002),
p.219.
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