The Business of Belonging: Volkskapitalisme, Modernity and the Imaginary of National Belonging in the Decorative Programmes of Selected Commercial Buildings in Cape Town, South Africa, 1930–1940

Abstract

This article considers the decorative programmes of 1930s commercial buildings in Cape Town in order to investigate the ways in which these programmes construct notions of national identity for their perceived publics. I contrast the decorative programme of the headquarters of the Afrikaner insurance company SANTAM and SANLAM (the first large-scale corporation to demonstrate the power of volkskapitalisme) with that of the new corporate headquarters of the Commercial Union Assurance Company, a British-owned firm that has had a presence in Cape Town since 1863. The differences in effect of the decorative programmes of these two buildings – exact contemporaries; both built for insurance companies and both surprising and self-consciously ‘modern’ in their effect – serves to illuminate the ideological posturing of volkskapitalisme and its construction of a ‘modern African’ identity within the imperialist heartland of Cape Town. These debates are brought into sharp relief by the third example discussed in this chapter, the Old Mutual Building (1940), the decorative programme of which effectively conflates these concerns with modernity and nationalism in order to construct a hybrid ‘South Africanism’ that neatly elides Boer and Brit imaginings.