Cape Dutch Tongaat: A Case Study in ‘Heritage’*

Abstract

At the time of South African Union in 1910, lobby groups worked for the recognition of typically South African cultural heritage, which would shape identity for the new nation-state. Alongside the work of Afrikaner and colonial nationalists, the initiatives of English-speaking lobby groups, funded by mining magnates, were influenced by the concerns of the English National Trust, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and the vernacular architecture revival. The primary focus was Cape baroque architecture, which defined the national idiom for the first five decades of the twentieth century. In 1936 the Cape artist Robert Gwelo Goodman was invited to apply this idiom to the reconstruction of the Tongaat sugar estate and upgrading of sugar workers' housing. This began an ongoing tradition in Tongaat, Natal, whereby Eurocentric aesthetics were applied in a comprehensive plan for the improvement of working and living conditions, race relations, and morality. The Tongaat experiment is described in terms of its application of Cape patrician aesthetics to a distinctly different landscape governed by an equally patrician and influential lobby of ‘sugar barons’. These material initiatives were underpinned by an ideological understanding of the meaning of heritage, which (during the period of the ‘new imperialism’ and of the emergence of the commonwealth and dominions) was linked with ideas of national destiny, political philosophy, spiritual discourse, social Darwinism and legal practice. The article deals with a case study but also seeks to open a broader study of the dense range of implications that were once entailed by the term ‘heritage’.