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

facilitates a form of memory practice that imbues a site with significance in the collective memory
where none previously existed.
Symbolism and built form
The form of this memorial situates itself in a tradition of disdainful European memorial practice in
Africa that disregards indigenous memorial practices in favour of an imported visual language. Gerard
Moerdyk, the architect, was very conscious of the symbolic potential of its form and size and sought to
align the Voortrekker Monument with other great monuments: the Taj Mahal, and the Egyptian
pyramids. He did so in order to situate both his own work and the Afrikaner race alongside the great
civilising forces in the world. 117 The deliberate connection between the Voortrekker Monument and
famous monuments of the past reveals the conscious way that Moerdyk considered the spatial
potential of the monument. The triadic relationship between form, site and international context
expresses a Heideggerian attitude to the relationship between dwelling and architecture. Heidegger
draws an explicit connection between the placement of buildings, their relationship to the earth, and
their status as architectural constructs. He utilises the example of Greek temples to demonstrate the
significant connection between site and built form, implying that the architecture was almost produced
from the ground itself. 118 This state of being forms the basis for the nationalistic arguments that follow
(and for which Heidegger has been greatly criticised). He presents a notion of identity rooted in the
soil, the very essence of which facilitated Afrikaner modes of constructing national belonging. The
assertion that occupation of land is the basis for ownership - a notion upon which colonialism was
based - continues to be highly problematic. Jane Jacobs articulates the complexity of such an
assertion in a contemporary context, building upon Edward Said’s notion of ‘geography that struggles’.
She says,
These spatial struggles are not simply about control of territory articulated through the
clear binaries of colonialist constructs. They are formed out of the cohabitation of
variously empowered people and the meanings they ascribed to localities and places.
They are constituted from the way in which the global and the local always already
inhabit one another. They are the products of the disparate and contradictory
geographies of identification produced under modernity. These struggles produce
promiscuous geographies of dwelling in place in which the categories of Self and Other,
here and there, past and present constantly solicit one another. 119
117 Gerard Moerdyk, Op cit, p.47.
118 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993.).
119 Jane Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p.5.
40