Voortrekker Monument Research Articles

Speaking Back to the Landscape Canon: Cultural Translation in Phumulani Ntuli’s Cloud Migration and the Liewe Land! Exhibition

ABSTRACTIn this article I argue that contemporary artists in post-and decolonial contexts are adopting deliberate approaches to respond to and revise canonical art, in what I interpret as acts of cultural translation. Seeing representational practices through this linguistic lens, with concomitant grammars and vocabularies, sheds light on how established conventions may now be challenged through translation—filtering and transforming them. I am particularly interested in the historical South African landscape canon and in how Phumulani Ntuli and several other artists employ different strategies to contest and reimagine the erasures and biases enacted in the canon in their work for the exhibition Liewe Land!. The exhibition was held at the Voortrekker Monument in 2021, and included various artists who all responded to printed reproductions of landscape paintings by historical South African artists. The strategies used by artists that I investigate here include: the reinscribing of people into portrayals of empty colonial landscape scenes, the subversion of pictorial unity and the naturalistic style solidified in the canon through western conventions, and lastly, the use of pre-colonial iconography, grammar, vocabulary and registers of representation that evoke historical relationships between land and people.

AN EXPLORATORY INVESTIGATION OF THE MOTIVATIONS OF VISITORS TO A NATIONAL HERITAGE SITE IN SOUTH AFRICA

Visitor motivations and behaviour are important aspects to consider for ensuring effective marketing and for providing satisfactory visitor experiences, as this could contribute to the sustainability of cultural heritage sites. The Voortrekker Monument and Heritage Site represents a significant part of South African history and attracts around 250 000 visitors per year. Some research on visitor motivations has been undertaken, but very little is known about the visitor motivations and behaviour associated with an urban cultural heritage site such as this attraction. This study seeks to investigate the motivations of visitors to the Voortrekker Monument and Heritage Site in order to determine the demand-side drivers for visitation. A hybrid survey method was used to collect data – both online (due to Covid-19 restrictions) and on site – by means of self-completion questionnaires. A total of 292 responses were received. An exploratory factor analysis reduced the data to four primary motivational factors, namely site features, education, hedonism, and convenience and novelty. This calls for further research and investigation, since the core offering of the site is cultural heritage, which does not seem to be the main motivator for visitation. Should cultural heritage sites in South Africa diversify their offerings too rigorously and not manage them sustainably, it could pose a threat to their authenticity and significance.

Propagating Afrikaner nationalism: The Voortrekker stamps as icons of an ideology, c.1933–1949

AbstractThis paper posits the importance of visual representations in cultivating a national consciousness among white Afrikaners in South Africa. It provides a case study of stamps issued to commemorate the centenary of the Great Trek in 1938 that sought to raise awareness of and funds for the Voortrekker Monument project. Although stamps are, ordinarily, symbols of banal nationalism, the Voortrekker stamps resonated strongly with the sentiments the Afrikaner volk (people). They reified an iconography of the Voortrekkers and the narrative of the Great Trek already embedded in a canon of texts, images and rituals. The paper provides a semiotic reading of the designs of the stamps and shows how they shaped the cultural imaginary of Afrikaners. Although the Voortrekker stamps were issued with the approval of the postal authorities, they were actually commissioned by the Sentrale Volksmonumentekomitee [Central People's Monuments Committee (SVK)], which had close ties to the National Party (NP) opposition. Although the project was largely state sponsored, the SVK insisted upon its autonomy. Thus the government sanctioned a project over which it exercised no jurisdiction. The United Party paid a price for accommodating sectional Afrikaner interests when it lost control of the state in 1948.

Review: Architecture, State Modernism and Cultural Nationalism in the Apartheid Capital

Review: <i>Architecture, State Modernism and Cultural Nationalism in the Apartheid Capital</i>

South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument and 1820 Settlers National Monument: Monuments to Cultural Violence

ABSTRACT This article compares two South African monument spaces, the well-known Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria and the lesser-known 1820 Settlers National Monument in Makandha (formerly Grahamstown). While ultimately both monuments enact cultural violence through the veneration of European settler groups, they do so in contrasting ways, which may make a difference in ultimately mitigating their cultural violence. While the Voortrekker Monument presents an explicit narrative of Afrikaner supremacy literally carved in marble, the 1820 Settlers National Monument features more abstract symbolism and its leaders have long shown willingness to alter and use the monument in ways that interrupt (at least somewhat) the adulation of settler culture. Comparison of the sites, though, show that the ambivalence of the 1820 Settlers Monument may not be enough to remove the cultural violence done by such monuments.

Art and Archaeology

My first title in fact comprises two independent books. Within a section dedicated to Graeco-Roman art and archaeology, the subject may come as something of a surprise: the case study is not ‘Greek’ or ‘Roman’, nor does it derive from the extended Mediterranean. Rather, From Memory to Marble analyses the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, inaugurated in 1949. Elizabeth Rankin and Rolf Michael Schneider have delivered a pair of volumes almost as monumental as the installation they describe, the first examining the context, origin, and legacy of the building's frieze, the second cataloguing its twenty-seven scenes. One of the many remarkable aspects of these two books is that both have been made available as free downloads. But what really stands out in the analysis is the ‘unconditional collaboration’ (5) between an art historian and a classical archaeologist: on the one hand, the project showcases how a broader art-historical training can enrich the traditional sorts of questions posed by classical archaeology, especially when it comes to issues of pictorial narrative; on the other, it demonstrates what classical archaeological formalism can offer to contemporary art history, and indeed larger debates about cultural history and contemporary identity politics. The result will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the legacy of classical ideas and imagery in South Africa.

The Monstrous Feminine: Minnette Vári's Chimera (White Edition) (2001) and the Voortrekker Monument

For her artwork Chimera (White Edition) (2001), Minnette Vári digitally recorded the panels of the Hall of Heroes found within the Voortrekker Monument and later edited the footage, inserting her own body within these scenes while performing as the mythological Chimera. In so doing, she constructs a hybrid monstrous figure which merges in part with the existing relief sculpture while simultaneously disrupting it. Through Chimera (White Edition) the artist draws a parallel between the Chimera of Greek mythology— the fire-breathing she-monster comprised of a lion's head, goat's body, and dragon's tail—and the monstrosity that is South Africa's political legacy. Moreover, the term “chimera” has come to describe anything which may be perceived as wildly imaginative or implausible. The work then also comments on the racial biases imbued within representations of the Great Trek on the walls of the Voortrekker Monument and the ideologised portrayal of this event as an ode to Afrikaner nationalism. In this article I discuss how, in parodying classical mythology and deploying self-representation, Vári critically addresses her gender and racial identity in a post-apartheid context. I examine whether her representations subvert traditionalist notions of South African femininity, particularly the volksmoeder (mother of the nation) model. I suggest it is a patriarchal construct which Chimera (White Edition) effectively unsettles by means of the monstrous feminine trope.

This is the Place Salt Lake City, Utah and the Voortrekker Monument Pretoria: monuments to settler constructions of history, race, and religion

ABSTRACT This essay compares South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument and the US’s This is the Place monument, both built to commemorate cross-country settler movements, for how the two contemporaneous monuments memorialize the nineteenth-century historical event in the service of the racial politics of the twentieth century. While the Voortrekker monument’s relief sculptures represent Black Africans as savages and intractable impediments to civilization, the This is the Place monument denies race as a factor in settlement, thus attempting to absolve settlers of the racially motivated violence that attended their colonization of the Great Basin. Perched on hilltops towering over their respective settler communities, both monuments similarly draw from the language of Beaux Arts classicism to venerate their subjects as civilizing heroes amid the chaos of Western colonialism and through comparison, we can see how both assert the colonizers’ race and religion as offering a divine sanction to their acts of conquest.

Enshrining Gender in Monuments to Settler Whiteness: South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument and the United States’ This Is the Place Monument

This essay examines two monuments: the Voortrekker Monument in South Africa and the American This is the Place Monument in Utah. Similar in terms of construction and historical purpose, both employ gender as an important tool to legitimize the settler society each commemorates. Each was part of a similar project of cultural recuperation in the 1930s−1940s that chose as their object of commemoration the overland migration in covered wagons of a group of white settlers that felt oppressed by other white settlers, and therefore sought a new homeland. In a precarious cultural moment, descendants of these two white settler societies—the Dutch Voortrekkers of South Africa and Euro-American Mormons (Latter-day Saints or LDS) of Utah—undertook massive commemoration projects to memorialize their ancestors’ 1830s−1840s migrations into the interior, holding Afrikaners and Mormons up as the most worthy settler groups among each nation’s white population. This essay will argue that a close reading of these monuments reveals how each white settler group employed gendered depictions that were inflected by class and race in their claims to be the true heart of their respective settler societies, despite perceiving themselves as oppressed minorities.

Museification of the Traumatic Past in South Africa: Competing Narratives

The article summarizes the results of a case study undertaken with the help of non-participant observation in January 2020 in South Africa. Three memorial sites have been observed: the Apartheid Museum, the Liliesleaf Farm Museum and the Voortrekker Monument. Data collection and analysis have allowed identifying the ideological and evaluative content of the expositions of museums that serve the purpose of commemorating the traumatic past of South Africa, and tracing their relationship with other commemorative narratives and the evolution of historical policy in the 20th -21st centuries. The authors draw parallels with some elements of Soviet domestic and, in particular, national policy, which, without declaring segregation goals directly, engendered similar consequences, and became evaluated as encouraging ethnic particularism in the post-Soviet period. The article concludes that in all cases in question, representations of collective trauma and armed struggle fulfill a legitimizing function, justifying the rights of ethnic and racial groups to the territory and nation building. In general, museum displays and memorials dedicated to apartheid and commemorating events related to state building represent South African society as deeply divided.

“From war to peace”: Military festival visitors’ quality-of-life

The Voortrekker Monument Military festival is one of several military festivals held in South Africa. This study sought to determine the travel motives and life domain effects on the quality-of-life of visitors. Data were gathered from 330 visitors on their travel motives, overall life domains, and quality-of-life. Structural Equation Modelling analysis indicated a positive linear relationship between the visitors’ travel motives, life domains (social-life, leisure-life, and self-life), life domains overall, and quality-of-life; all of which attained good reliabilities. The findings indicate that a visit to a military heritage festival has a positive effect on visitors’ quality-of-life. This research adds to literature in the social sciences, positive psychology, and quality-of-life.

The religious statement of the Voortrekker Monument as a site of Afrikaner memory: Origin, composition and reception

The religious statement made by the Voortrekker Monument is part and parcel of its meaning and symbolism. This aspect of its composition and intention has not yet been submitted to thorough theological-critical investigation and scrutiny. Stepping into the gap, this article traces the religious intention and intonation of the Monument. The first part of the article entails the history of the Moerdyk design, based on antique Egyptian religious architecture. Then a discussion of the way in which the architect blended his (Egyptian) design with the religious spirituality and nationalism of the Afrikaner is presented. The last section deals with the altar text in the heart of the building: ‘We for thee, South Africa’. This secular text constitutes the religious statement of the memorial. Care should therefore be taken to embed the symbolism and meaning of the building in the Christian faith or the so-called Calvinism of the Afrikaner. The engagement with the Monument’s religious statement revealed a sacrificed religion trapped in a still remarkable commemorative building.

Gerardus van der Leeuw at the Voortrekker Monument

Abstract Contributing to current initiatives to reassess European theorists of religion from a postcolonial perspective, this article locates Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890-1950) in South Africa at the inauguration of the Voortrekker Monument, problematizing his phenomenological concept of sacred place. On 16 December 1949 Van der Leeuw gave a speech at the inauguration of the Voortrekker Monument to convey the good wishes of the Dutch volk to the Afrikaner volk, celebrating with Afrikaner nationalists their victory over the Zulu king Dingaan more than a century earlier, and sharing the podium with D.F. Malan who had come to power in 1948 introducing more than 40 years of apartheid in South Africa. The speech is analyzed by relating it to reports that Van der Leeuw wrote on his first visit to South Africa of almost three months in 1947 and his second visit in 1949, as well as pertinent concepts, particularly sacred place, in his phenomenological analyses of religion. By comparing and contrasting Van der Leeuw’s concept of sacred place with David Chidester’s critical concept of sacred place, focusing on the Voortrekker Monument as case study, I will offer a critique of Van der Leeuw’s concept of sacred place from a postcolonial perspective and South African location.

GOD IN GRANITE? AESTHETIC-THEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE MONUMENTALISATION OF RELIGION

In this article an introductory look is taken at the phenomenon of the monumentalisation of religion, particularly in view of its imperial expressions. The history and religious meaning of the Voortrekker Monument, situated outside Pretoria in South Africa, is outlined briefly as a case in point, followed by a number of aesthetic-theological perspectives on the notion of the monumentalisation of religion, using the keywords as lenses. The article concludes with a reflection on an art work by Argentinian born artist/architect Tomas Saraceno, entitled: ‘On Space Time Foam’ .

South African Performance and Archives of Memory by Yvette Hutchison (review)

Reviewed by: South African Performance and Archives of Memory by Yvette Hutchison Gibson Alessandro Cima SOUTH AFRICAN PERFORMANCE AND ARCHIVES OF MEMORY. By Yvette Hutchison. Theatre: Theory–Practice–Performance series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013; pp. 256. Post-apartheid South Africans renegotiate their apartheid memories through performance and embodied repertoires (protest theatre, folksongs, dances, rituals), as well as through archives (testimonies, monuments, memorials, museum exhibits). This compelling argument underpins Yvette Hutchison’s South African Performance and Archives of Memory. Central to her thesis is nostalgia: physical and psychological exiles “returning to a country they have dreamed about, but do not necessarily recognise” (8). In order to support this idea, Hutchison cites Svetlana Boyim’s The Future of Nostalgia, which describes “a longing for home that no longer exists or has never existed . . . a sentiment of [End Page 639] loss and displacement . . . a romance with one’s own fantasy” (qtd. in Hutchison 8). According to Hutchison, this longing prompts the performative rewriting of dominant apartheid and post-apartheid discourses, such as “Afrikaner nationalism” (99), “the liberation struggle” (123), and “the rainbow nation” (133). Surveying the past twenty years of democracy in the country, she argues persuasively that South Africans foregrounded certain memories and discarded others. Her analysis proceeds methodologically through multidisciplinary readings of public events, such as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the South Africa–Mali Timbuktu Manuscript Project, and the 2010 World Cup—theatrical productions that supported or challenged the TRC, as well as memorial sites like Pretoria’s Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park. The virtue of Hutchison’s approach in her first two chapters is that she evaluates the TRC’s “script” (24) by drawing together Diana Taylor’s archive and repertoire and Catherine Cole’s understanding of the TRC as a site-specific performance. Her first chapter, “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Reconfiguring of the Past: Remembering and Forgetting,” views the TRC as “rehearsals of an ideal state of the nation” (36). The second chapter, “Dramatising the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: The Role of Theatre Practitioners in Exploring the Past,” details how the commission required theatre artists to shift from bearing witness to using verbatim testimony (54). In both chapters, Hutchison rightly questions the means by which TRC commissioners chose certain narratives and excluded others. She notes the absence of nonverbal cues, such as sighs and silences, as well as the effect of these embodied repertoires on the archive’s formation. By staging these omitted stories alongside certain narratives from the TRC, theatre artists both critiqued and continued the commission’s mandate. Like Cole, Hutchison passionately advocates for opening the TRC archive (the majority of which remains inaccessible) and allowing such “backstage” (27) moments as unheard victims’ statements and unsuccessful amnesty applications to inform the official narrative. Hutchison’s polyvocal intervention develops in chapter 3, “Staging a Nation: The Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park.” She contrasts the Voortrekker Monument, a symbol of Afrikaner nationalism, to the newly constructed Freedom Park on the opposite hill. The sites are connected both literally and metaphorically by a winding road. Although much has been written concerning these two sites, Hutchison’s innovative comparison parallels the 1910 Pageant of the Union of South Africa, which performed reconciliation between English and Dutch-speaking South Africans, and the TRC. Similarly, the 1938 Voortrekker Centenary restaged the famed “Great Trek,” bringing local repertoires of Afrikaner folksongs and dances into a national narrative of Afrikaner-ness. Hutchison holds this nostalgic “myth of a glorious past” as key to the Afrikaner nationalism that later undergirded apartheid (111). According to her, post-apartheid political actors drew on this nostalgia, emphasizing interdependency among South African identities and histories. She notes that Nelson Mandela compared his own liberation struggle to the Afrikaner resistance to English oppression; he imagined Freedom Park as a site of “symbolic reparations” (129). For Hutchison, the expansive Freedom Park site resists colonial and apartheid memorialization strategies by designating areas for remembrance, cleansing, healing, and decision-making. She acknowledges, however, the paradox of a space that invites all South Africans to consider their interconnectedness from a decidedly black South African perspective. Furthermore, the fractious debate over excluding South African Defence Force soldiers from the...

Repatriation of remains of the Ebo four from Angola

Repatriation of remains of the Ebo four from Angola Between 23 November 1975 and 25 November 1975 four South African soldiers died during the first phase of military involvement in Angola. The aim of this paper is to report on the repatriation of the remains of these individuals. Despite information from a number of individuals and several test pits, the grave of the fourth individual could not be found. The remains of the Ebo individuals were returned to South Africa and placed in the Wall of Remembrance at the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, thus bringing closure to families and friends.

Monuments as Spaces for Enhancing Social Justice and Sustainable Learning in History Teaching: A Case of the Voortrekker Monument

The study proceeds from the premise that meaningful history teaching requires that educators should be able to expose their learners to different types of historical sources and resources in order enhance their quality of teaching. One of the ways of doing this is the use of monuments as spaces to supplement and support what is done in the classroom. Since monuments are made by people who had a particular perspective about the past, it is very important for educators to use monuments to encourage an open, engaging and critical way of looking at the past. The focus in this study is on how the Voortrekker monument can be used as an educational resource to enhance social justice and sustainable learning in history teaching. This will provide some answers to the debate on how history teaching can be enhanced through the use of monuments. For the purpose of this study, a critical pedagogical lens will be used to analyse the purpose and the displays at the Voortrekker monument. The study highlights how certain societal stereotypes; discursive sources of power; dominance; inequality and bias are still promoted by what is depicted at this monument. Furthermore, the study argues for the use of critical pedagogy in explaining the Voortrekker monument as space for history teaching and learning. Lastly, the study demonstrates the need to re-organise such monuments in a more inclusive manner to enhance social justice and sustainable learning in history teaching. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n7p491

Commemorating and forgetting: challenges for the new South Africa

Contents Preface Introduction: Memory and Amnesia after Apartheid 1. The Power of Collective Memory 2. White Lies: Myth-Making and Social Memory in the Service of White Minority Rule 3. Facing Backward, Looking Forward: The Politics of Remembering and Forgetting 4. Collective Memory in Place: The Voortrekker Monument and the Hector Pieterson Memorial 5. Haunted Heritage: Visual Display at District Six and Robben Island 6. Makeshift Memorials: Marking Time with Vernacular Remembrance 7. Textual Memories: Autobiographical Writing at a Time of Uncertainty Epilogue: History and Heritage Acknowledgments Notes Index

Land, Race, and Citizenship: The Political Spaces of Monumentalism in South Africa

This essay discusses the nature of (old and new) national monuments in post-apartheid South Africa which even now, twenty years after the first free elections, remains a democracy in transition. The discourse of monumentalism in transitional political systems is marked by concrete political interests that, in the case of South Africa, are centered on questions of race and citizenship as well as on territorial claims. Monumentalism in South Africa is inextricably linked to the spatial organization of political community, before and after apartheid, and as such it runs parallel to developments in public law and constitutionalism. On the one hand, officially sanctioned forms of monumentalism, such as the Voortrekker Monument, the Taal Monument, or Pretoria’s Freedom Park, tend to camouflage the political and social tensions of post-apartheid South Africa. On the other hand, new forms of monumentalism create accidental and liminal spaces that expose the political paradoxes and historical ambiguities of the new South Africa as in the case of the spatial relationship between the Women’s Monument and the cooling towers of the power station, painted with ANC motifs, in the urban landscape of Bloemfontein.

The Monumental Reconstruction of Memory in South Africa: The Voortrekker Monument

This article addresses debates around the fate of antiquated symbols of colonial domination in postcolonial societies. The handling of apartheid material culture still generates controversy more than 15 years after the country’s first democratic elections. Built in 1949 to commemorate the Great Trek into the interior of the country, the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria has stood as the embodiment of Afrikaner nationalism and mythology. A number of factors prevented the demolition of the site, including the spirit of national reconciliation. In order to remain relevant and to secure state funding, staff members at the Voortrekker Monument have attempted to map onto the original exclusionary imagery a more inclusive narrative that hinges on the protection of ‘minority rights’ to cultural preservation. This case study sheds light on the way political transitions create openings for the interrogation of colonial monuments – whether they should be destroyed, revised or left untouched – and the development of a postcolonial memorial landscape.