Chapter Eight
Homecoming - an Incomplete Project?
The early 1990's

 

Home is the wanderer

Well, not quite. Beate’s and my return to South Africa came by detour, via Kitwe, Zambia. Eager to return to southern Africa, in the early 1990s, I had applied for the advertised deanship of the School of Environmental Studies at the Copperbelt University. The appointment was made and confirmed as a two-year period of tenure. But we were unable to leave Britain because our daughter, Jane, had become ill while attending her university in London. Leaving her while we travelled far south was out of the question. So, when more than a half-decade on, I received an unexpected invitation to attend the Copperbelt University as Visiting Professor, we were delighted. We were pleased now to be able to fulfil a past obligation and, at the same time, to assuage our mutual yearnings for the veld that had been fired by the prairie of mid-Western USA.

We flew from Heathrow to Lusaka and immediately by a small chartered aircraft to Ndola where we were fetched by a university mini-bus. That hour-long drive through the northern Zambian highlands is likely to be forever memorable: the plant-life, smell of the dust, rumbling clouds, glimpses of animals ... the people of that fecund land. Although our first, enormously enervating trip will long remain with us, the remainder of our brief, four month stay might, with advantage, be forgotten readily.

Socially and academically, the place was anything but our cup of tea.. We reeled under many factors: the arrogant ‘superiority’ of our white expatriate colleagues; their pathetic inadequacies as putative university teachers; the rotten, undisguised corruption that characterised university administrators, civil servants and bank officials plus, of course, the unmitigated poverty of most rural Zambians. We had been lied to about conditions in almost every aspect of life, efforts were made continually to deceive us, daily. Beate felt particularly oppressed: she was deeply angered by the off-hand, rude sexism which she encountered from many of my ‘academic’ colleagues; not least our smooth-tongued Vice-Chancellor and members of his coarsely paternalistic entourage.

Perhaps the least tolerable factor was the indifferent, casual, taken for granted dismissal of student interests by the teaching staff and administrators. They spoke and treated of students as savage, lazy, stupid, latent criminals, as burdens on their supposedly profound studies in the upper regions of science and the humanities. They were a dolorous, smugly contemptuous group; people whose company was to be avoided. My Image Two firmly, unquestioningly instated. Within three months, I was being warned by the students for whose tuition I was immediately responsible that trouble,”big trouble” was imminent. Their government grants were insufficient to feed them; by mid-term they were unable to afford more than two meals per week in the university dining-room. Cooking in students’ bed-sitting and communal rooms was prohibited by the administrators - why, even the helpful street traders at the university gates were driven off. The collage leadership seemed to be on a predetermined collision. It came.

A mass meeting of students called on the conspicuously absent authorities to hear and respect their pleas. Silence. Then a small group of students, about a dozen, smashed the overt focus of their grievances, the kitchens and dining areas. Some, five or six, went on to stone motor cars in the busy street outside the main gate. The Vice-Chancellor called a meeting of all students and academics, told us that we had betrayed the trust of his administrative colleagues and himself. As a consequence he announced the suspension of all courses and the closure of the entire university for a full calendar year. The meeting ended when students and staff were ordered off the campus.

About an half-hour later, as the students began leaving, they were viciously attacked by contingents of police and soldiers who had been waiting behind the buildings. The military personnel were especially malicious, exacting compensation, I was told, for the male students’ purported favour with youthful womanhood. Female and male students were, however, beaten indiscriminately. As I searched the queue at the guarded gate to wish my particular student colleagues goodbye, a young recruit pushed his bayonet into my stomach. He drew blood but was, thankfully, stopped by the timely intervention of a nearby officer. The brutality was as unremitting as it was unwarranted - an exercise in capricious cruelty, witnessed, as later reports confirmed, by the upper hierarchy of the institution, another pedagogic ‘leadership’ in action.

Beate was in Britain finishing a film for the BBC. In accordance with our earlier discussions, I decided to leave Zambia at once. In South Africa, the ANC was no longer banned, many of our ANC friends, Walter Sisulu included, were being released from prison: home was the obvious destination. For this southward journey, one needed a signed, officially stamped letter from a senior administrator; only that would enable me to pass through the numerous military check-points on the road. The Vice-Chancellor refused to give me such a document, saying that he wanted me to spend the coming twelve months training junior academics. Objections on the basis of my contract were ignored.

This was a time for direct action: I filched stamped letter-headed and plain paper from his secretary’s office while she was otherwise engaged, typed an explanation for a short-term return trip to Harare, Zimbabwe, signed it - officers at the check-points would, I presumed, not be familiar with the Vice-Chancellor’s signature. They were not, I was waved politely on - my ‘escape’ had been all too easy.

On entering South Africa through the customary procedures, I feared that my entry would be refused - I was, after all, a listed, named, banned person. That too was unnecessary timidity on my part. I passed through uneventfully. Suddenly affronted, I felt that I should have informed the relevant official that I was “dangerous”, had been announced, denounced, as such under the headline “South Africa’s 100 Most Dangerous Persons” in a newspaper article, circa 1961. What right had she to admit me?

Until Beate returned from Britain, home meant staying with generous, old friends in Johannesburg, remnants of our days in the 1950s and early 60s. There we found ourselves rapidly engulfed in post-retirement activity. Beate covered the release of another old friend, Nelson Mandela, for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Over subsequent years, she was, inter alia, to produce and/or direct documentary films on comrades such as our first President himself, his then wife Winnie Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Mac Maharaj and delving further back, the polymath Sol Plaatjie, a founding member of the ANC. She was part of a fascinating process of the time, correcting the apartheid-distorted history of the decades during which we had been most politically active. That continued until seven years later when our daughter, a television journalist based in Toronto, joined us as Beate’s professional partner. Jane, a single parent mother to be, was pregnant with Joshua, who emerged to command his grandmother’s and my life.

I was invited as Visiting Professor to the School of Architecture in the University of Natal, Durban campus. Having served there for a thoroughly enjoyable academic year, Beate and I returned to our newly acquired Johannesburg town-house from where I commuted to teach, and learn, partly full-time and partly not in my alma mater - a long established exemplar of Image Two at the University of the Witwatersrand.

We were home, gripped by the new, the old, the altered social and physical environments in which we found ourselves. We were enthralled by the disparate experiences that our friends and comrades had lived through during those three decades of enforced separation. We were, in the jargon of the period, “political returnees”, filled with pre-conceived, often frighteningly misinformed notions of what had occurred at home during our years of exile. We resolved that we would not be sucked into the gross racism that still permeated life in the Republic of South Africa. I recall re-connecting with my dear, irascible late comrade Marius Schoon and vowing with him that we would not again politely put up with the crude racism of our fellow white South Africans. We would interject forcefully, object vehemently, oppose actively. We regularly reported our admittedly limited successes to each other.

 

Everyday post-apartheid

Nonetheless the anything but ideal world pressed in on us; we could not remain as steadfast as we had wished. As before, we were cut off from our black friends by the distances between our and their homes which apartheid had ordained. As before, we and they struggled with the educational and like disparities that still scarred our relationships. As before, we lived separate lives; lives that defied our insistent, sustained efforts to overcome the patent social, historic, economic differences that stood between us. Once more, as a case in point, our attempts to live without domestic servants - to escape the tyranny of the master/servant relationship - eluded us. How, our comrades argued, could we condemn even more people to the unemployment that they had endured, were enduring? As the ‘good’ life of white South Africans continued, indeed thrived, we began slowly to collapse into the temptations of white privilege, with which, of course, we were all the while surrounded. Lived, as distinct from verbal dissent became difficult to uphold.

Willy-nilly we became members of the then overwhelmingly white cultural and sports organisations. We attended lily-white classical concerts, almost exclusively white cinema performances, theatres and art exhibitions. We joined overbearingly white gymnasia, health and racquets clubs. We sank, however unwillingly, into white, moneyed privilege. In unsatisfactory compensation, we doubled our political activities.

In those early, dawning days of 1990s right-wing, militant and militarist threats - some of which lingered into the 21st century - the most feasible path seemed the ANC, our one-time political home. Back in those enfolding arms, we were required, like all members, to work in our own areas by joining existing or helping to form new branches. Over a matter of months, we passed through three, each of which was marked by the oddities of South African racial society. We first attended the Lower Houghton branch in, we thought, probably the most affluent suburb of the country. Meetings took place in a superbly maintained garden where tea was served to the black and white members by a pair of pinafore-clad black maids. When the strong spring sun became oppressive, our hostess asked her ‘garden-boy’ to fetch a large sun-shade, to erect it as protection for the tea table and then, unasked, to disappear discretely. None present seemed to find this odd. That was the current, time-honoured way of life.

Our next branch, energetically founded by Beate, its future chairperson, was set in Sandton - quite unambiguously the most affluent of South African areas. There, as had been the case in Houghton, the majority of black members were local domestic servants who, notwithstanding one’s white colleagues’ and one’s own diligent efforts to be inclusive, remained silent even when addressed directly. Like it or not, we led, we initiated discussions, they followed. Almost three and a half centuries of white dominance could not be expunged by fiat. The next branch of which we became members was in Randburg, where we lived in a residential area known by that patently African name, Bordeaux; a place as far removed from wine production as one could imagine. Here the membership was largely black - dynamic, self-confident people of preponderantly working-class origin. Initiative was shared, discussions were mutually engaging. We participated as undifferentiated citizens.

In 1995 I was nominated by the Randburg branch to stand as the official ANC candidate in our first democratic, non-racist, local government elections. My ward, Bordeaux, was overwhelmingly white, the black voters being drawn from the numerically lesser population of domestic servants. Beate and I did a rough count of the names on the voters’ roll to find that approximately eighteen percent appeared to be black. They were the folk who attended my electioneering meetings and responded to our canvassing campaign. Insofar as they showed themselves, the whites did so as curious onlookers rather than participants. And that is what the results confirmed: some twenty percent of the votes came to the ANC, the remainder were spread among the other, primarily white parties. An hardly surprising but disappointing part of the country-wide trend for votes to be cast on the basis of colour and, though less obviously, on cultural and language differences.

So, back to daily life; to, for Beate, her absorbing film-making and, for me, part-time teaching at the Wits School of Architecture. There, I learnt, I was on sufferance. Full-time, middle aged academics were being induced to accept early retirement in order, it was suggested, to make way for younger, low-salaried recruits to academia. How, then, could one justify one’s own employment as a formally retired, ‘imported don’ approaching his mid-seventies? Appeals, in these circumstances, to the conventional privileges granted to Emeritus Professors or to the commonly-held value of long accumulated experience, seemed unacceptably self-serving. Passive retirement was, quite simply, not a choice. What to do?

 

Architectural journalism

Since 1992, I had been writing short, monthly pieces on architecture and urban design for my favourite weekly newspaper, Vrye Weekblat. That was under the inspired and, in my case, the inspiring editorship of Max du Preez. When his outstanding publication was driven to closure by the National Party’s, the then government’s, malevolent stratagems, I found other, temporary, homes for my efforts. Principally in The Saturday Star and the Mail and Guardian. Then the Arts Editor of a newly launched weekly, the Sunday Independent invited me to contribute regular, monthly, pieces to his Arts pages. I was delighted to do so, and to have remained that newspaper’s regular architectural correspondent for more than a decade. Throughout that period, I have continued my prior writings in the form of articles for professional journals such as Leading Architecture and Design and the journal of the South African Institute of Architects, Architecture SA. Further, I have maintained my career-long practice of publishing strictly academic writings by contributing work of that nature to journals based locally and overseas. Gratifyingly, I have had opportunities to keep myself occupied in retirement.

My newspaper pieces came and have come to mean much to me. They have enabled me regularly to encapsulate and thereby exorcise disappointment - on many occasions, outright disgust - with the built offences that pervade our urban environments. These and similar crude insults offend one’s sensibilities. And I suspect many, many others feel the same - as their phlegmatic disinterest might suggest. Our buildings are indifferent to us, small surprise then that we should become indifferent to them. So why bother? Why take monthly to my computer in a now more than decade-long series of exasperated newspaper articles; frustrations marginally relieved by stumbling across occasional architectural gems?

Well ... the most direct answer is that I love the discipline, have done so since enrolling some 58 years ago - after a brief spell of war service - in the Department of Architecture at Wits. For me, building design is compulsively engaging: it is rooted in the ever-demanding pragmatics of construction, in the less tangible realm of social symbolism and, simultaneously, in the exacting limits so implacably set by sociol-political/economic power. Each is as testing as it is challenging; each is a potential and actual domain of struggle for designers. Together, they call repeatedly on one’s energies, abilities, desires.

As student architects, my colleagues and I were schooled in the precepts and practices of modernism; of principles and procedures with which I have concurred throughout my subsequent career, whether as an architectural practitioner, an academic, a research worker or public commentator. A quarter century later, in about the mid-1970s, modernist architecture, as was the case in other fields of academic and professional activity, came under severe pressure. We were subjected to unswerving, fierce attack by post-modern theorists. Having, as an academic must, attended to their critical charges, I and others rejected them. Ironically - doubly so since irony is a major weapon in the post-modern armoury - that searching re-examination led, with minor amendments, to a committed re-affirmation. Rather than obsolete, I found my modernist principals to be increasingly relevant. They had been strengthened, reinforced, re-invigorated.

A word of warning, my newspaper pieces are unreservedly combative: I am and have long been an unreconstructed polemicist. I punch in earnest, do not seek to spare those with whom I disagree and expect the same from them. Indeed, invective is, for me, ever close at hand. An eventual turn in the fate of architecture in southern Africa is far too urgent a matter for genteel, drawing-room chatter. In this context, it seems advisable to highlight some of the key premises on which my often belligerent public writings are founded.

First, like this volume, they are not architectural treatises, discourses on ‘high theory’ in the discipline. My years of research and academic reportage were wholly absorbing. I was engrossed for almost four decades and, as testified by continuing publication in this area, I remained a devotee. I had, though, since formal retirement, come to feel that to be insufficient. Exchanging research findings and interpretations with fellow academics is gratifying but was no longer fully satisfying. I now wished also to engage with a wider, a predominately lay audience; to participate in informed public debate on the urban and architectural issues which so mark, so distort our emerging, newly-democratic society. That has been the purpose of those many newspaper pieces. It was and remains the thrust of my work: publicly to stimulate, to provoke and, desirably, to help inform.

Accordingly, the arguments presented in that body of writings have centred on attempts to forge architectures that are urgently appropriate to the new South Africa. They have been rooted in a long-held, overtly modernist commitment to architectures - as practices and products - that do not simply reflect the societies in which they are produced. Buildings are, I have insisted, not merely images of what is, of how we live presently. Quite the contrary, via its material presence as embodied human action, architecture can and does speak of what might be, of how we might live. Appropriate architectures for the newly established democratic South Africa must, then, help to shape, to educate people's desires; to enable them to ‘read’ what might be as being immanent in what is.

This, of course, is far from being solely a matter of form, of style. In the nineteenth century, engineers and architects were called on to accommodate new social relationships in the new building types they designed: factories, railway stations, hospitals, public libraries and the like. So, since the 1990s, South African designers have been summonsed to apply their knowledge and skills to the new spatial demands of their burgeoning democratic society.

In confronting these expectations, architects are pressed to work closely with the potential users of the buildings they design; with, that is, ‘the people,’ the communities whose needs their work is intended to serve. The new spatial forms which professionals propose are to embrace and to represent the participatory processes by which they must be produced. Democratic architecture is pre-eminently a public, a social activity; one whose products are but rarely confined to single individuals or even small groups.

From that somewhat abstract, but decidedly firm commitment, I pass to what are, surely, the bases of design practice. Architecture is, I believe, about order and relationship rather than surface appearance. It certainly need not invoke that hoary chestnut, ‘good taste.’ It is about space, light and organisation, not style, charm or whimsy. A work of architecture springs from the nature of its materials, the quality of its site, the methods of its production. The most exacting questions about a building that is recognisably architecture are how is it made? what gives it order? how does it respond to its context? what is the idea (or set of ideas) that lies behind its form, its image? What, in short, are its human purposes?

Architectural design, I was told early in my formal, and unquestioningly male-dominated education is “the imaginative manipulation of space for the convenience of man.” Amended to embrace all humanity, that modernist maxim has stuck with me through the vicissitudes and abrupt dislocations of life. Architectural designs, I have long come deeply to appreciate, are conceived, erected and used purposefully. Sound architecture is socially responsible and responsive.

In this context, my reference to modernism needs elaboration. There are, patently, at least two modern architectures. The first appears in scholarly books as works of inspiration, the outstanding buildings of modernism which few see, let alone live or work in. These are the avant garde buildings of the early twentieth century - mainly in Europe - when for the first time architects grappled with the issues surrounding mass populations, industrial production, technological innovation. This is an architecture of change, a time of revolution, crumbling empires, social hope ... of futures. This is the architecture of the founders of the Modern Movement, the dreams made concrete of a cultural elite. These are the buildings through which designers strained to express humane ideals.

What happened? In the ‘socialist’ East - rejection, expulsion, exile; social content ripped from form, deformed. In the ‘free’ West - incorporation: an architecture of defeat, of aesthetic form torn from social content, mis-formed. This, of course, is the second modern architecture, the all too familiar one in which many live and work. This is the segregated township, the suburb of individual, of social isolation - neighbourhood without community. This is rampant urban growth, unbridled speculative development; banks, office towers, finance houses ... shopping malls. This is the new factory, a fine-tooled envelope around a stripped, cheap interior - packaged exploitation in a landscaped industrial park.

This is Speculator-Modern, the architecture of the international market: inflated opulence for the few, pinched spaces, shoddy materials, botched work for the rest. It is a rotten architecture. But then, for most, it has been a pretty rotten world. And the post-modern response? Well ... architecture is about making the mess acceptable, popular. It is also about sharing in the profits - the treason of the clerics.

 

Critical regionalism - a core issue

Smooth-talking experts tell us that capitalism has changed - it has been ‘globalised’. Big money is shifted electronically to now squeeze or starve people in each and any corner of the world. But on the factory floor, down the mines, out on the farms, it feels the same: we still toil for profits enjoyed by others. So what’s new? The entertainment thrust at us, the information fed to us, the clothes we wear, the goods on sale, even the sorts of food we eat are more and more alike, everywhere. We are swept by similar fads, subject to the same manipulated fashions. That, we are reminded, is good for business, for mass production, for world-wide distribution and, of course, mass consumption.

Increasingly, buildings also change to look alike - houses, clinics, hospitals, schools, shops ... the lot. They often look and are the same, wherever they are built. Central Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban look a great deal like each other and like downtown Bangkok, Denver, Warsaw, Delhi, Sydney. Anywhere is drearily everywhere, everywhere is drearily nowhere. The same mirror-glass office blocks, concrete hotels, steel apartments; the same glitzy, flashy anywhere is everywhere. What was suburbia is filling with look-alike office parks, shopping malls, town-house developments, huge ‘intruder-proof’ walls; Rosebank, Randburg, Sandton become yet more downtown nowheres. Now, the Sunday Independent tells us, Soweto is going the same way. Why not? - that is the very promise of global capital.

Who cares? Progress is progress. What matters are profits - investment, speculation, always the quick turnover; making a mega-buck killing.

Many of us, perhaps a majority, do seem to care. We relish the richness of variety, the wealth of differences, the lessons of human dignity to be learnt from mutually respected distinctions. We love the hybrid, mongrel nature of lively, world-wide local identities. Cynics say we’re naive, we really believe that there can be unity in cultural diversity. Some architects are troubled by what is happening to their work. They are concerned about how this or that feature of other architectures is being lifted out of context to be plonked down in unsuitable circumstances; in conditions that are climatically, economically, socially inappropriate. In their efforts to resist, they attempt to identify what is genuinely local, what is loved and viable about the ways of life and the built worlds in which they live. They try to pin-point and study what is distinctive about the buildings that have helped shape their physical and cultural settings.

This is not easy. In most instances, traditional local architectures grew from relatively consistent patterns of living; climatic conditions did not vary markedly across the relevant local regions; building materials were usually drawn from local areas; methods of building were recognised locally and often passed directly from generation to generation. Most important, the values and ideas which buildings came to represent were acknowledged commonly. But today living patterns are in transition, climate can be controlled mechanically, materials for building can be imported from anywhere, building methods are coded and can be similarly used everywhere. Now commerce dominates the value, the very idea, of building.

In the face of this, local traditional architectures - like so much else we cherish as distinctive - are fragile, ever vulnerable.

As more and more people rebel against the brutal monuments of transnational, corporate capital - familiar to all as the International Style - so a shabby cover-up is foisted on us. We are presented with the same old boxes, but with tacky signs and symbols stuck on; apparently in the belief that if one shouts loud enough, no one will hear what is being said or notice what is being done. This ‘post-modern’ architecture has led to the unnerving phenomenon of our cities not only looking out of place, but out of time. The arbitrary pillaging of history, of cultures, in the search for bits to stick onto the facades of our buildings, has produced an urban environment in which we no longer know where we are or in what historical period we are expected to be living.

Efforts among architects to militate against this process have, in recent times, become associated with a set of ideas known as critical regionalism. First formulated by Tzonis and Lefaivre in the 1970s then developed and given wider circulation by Kenneth Frampton, critical regionalism offers ways of engaging critically with universal, global elements of our world and with particular local circumstances. For detailed analyses, see Alexander Tzonis, Towards a Non-Oppressive Environment: An Essay (1972) and/or Kenneth Frampton’s contribution ‘ Critical Regionalism: modern architecture and cultural identity’ in his book, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (1980).

These and other critical ideas begin by recognising that if we are to feel at home in our built world, then that world must express who we are. Architects must draw on the particular physical qualities of the places where we live - the light, the climate, the shape and feel of the land - as well as on the experiences, historical and current, of the people by and for whom buildings are produced. At the same time, critical regionalists recognise that most local, regional areas have been subjected to the ravages of capitalism, racism, imperialism. There is no utopia of the past, of the local, the vernacular.

Critical designers seek to reminds us of where we have been so that we are better able to go where we wish. In so doing, they do not simply push aside the products of an increasingly global economic system. On the contrary, they attempt to use contemporary materials and techniques by counter-posing the new with the old, the local with the universal, so that we may see each in a different light. This is an architecture of resistance to global meaninglessness, not a superficial synthesis. This is an approach to design which recognises, and invites us to recognise, that it is only by attempting to understand our past critically that we will be able to give shape to the future.

There are local practitioners who search for contemporary architectures that are locally rooted. They are few, their work is scattered and its regional qualities are not easily recognisable. Here in South Africa, the few from whom we are able to draw examples are predominantly white. The profession has and, for the present, remains confined to the middle-classes of that population group. The last attested figures of which I am aware (1993) indicate that of 2,480 registered architects, 12 (0.48%) were black, of 1,454 students architects, 56 (3.85%) were black, of the 144 graduates that year, three (2.08%) were black. That some among the dominant group have cared about struggling for regional expressions is a tribute to their sensitivity; especially as their colleague’s eyes have remained and do remain fixed on overseas stylisms, on using them to coin quick bucks.

Norman Eaton was amongst the most significant of these pioneers, especially in his1930s and 40s designs for comfortable middle-class homes in Pretoria. There he tried to capture a regional feeling by sensitive use of familiar vernacular materials and forms: by such adaptations to the hot sun as small windows, projecting sun-shades and roof eaves, by installing traditional Cape timber window-shutters, and by the sweeps of earth-coloured brick pavings he used externally. Around the same time, Douglass Cowin employed contemporary ideas of spatial design while attempting to accommodate the Johannesburg climate. Here, in a series of compact suburban houses, he used daringly constructed over-hanging eaves, cleverly placed screen walls and similar means to keep out unwelcome sun and cold prevailing winds. He tried, with considerable success, to suit the plans of his designs to the relaxed, informal, the servant-dependent lives of his middle-class clients.

These efforts have contemporary echoes. Springfield Terrace, with Table Mountain beyond, is a recent design by Roelof Uytenbogaardt and his colleagues. It is a distinctively local application of British terrace housing or the accommodating brownstone homes of Brooklyn, New York. Those adaptable town-houses of three or four floors have gone regional: solid masonry construction with hard-wearing local materials, wide projecting eaves and small windows on exposed sides for sun-protection, trees planted to shade entrance fronts that open directly onto the streets, and well-sized rear gardens for household use. Cars can be parked at front doors where they are readily visible, pedestrians can move safely along traffic-free shaded alleys that link the terraces. It’s a fine instance of regional adaptation.

This also applies to the public library that Uytenbogaardt designed for Hout Baai. There too a cool interior has been snatched from heavy rains and strong sunlight: more wide, low-slung eaves; more sturdy local materials; another set of informal internal spaces and alcoves, a gesture to relaxed southern African ways of life; more framed views onto nearby gardens and distant mountains; another imaginatively controlled use of construction, especially of the roof-trusses, to shape internal and external spaces.

Back to Gauteng, where Jo Noero has sought to adapt the new traditions of township, and even shack settlements to such socially urgent buildings as career centres and schools. His body of work includes attempts to marry the new, often makeshift means of construction and dynamic aesthetics of everyday buildings to readily available, local materials - like corrugated iron and plywood boarding. Noero has contributed to a vibrant, modern architecture that is part of current city life, a township jazz of architecture; one that could well mature as that music has done.

 

The tripod once more

In an earlier chapter of these memoirs, I referred to the term 'tripod' as a short-hand description of the three inter-twined 'legs' on which my life rested. That was a convenient depiction of far, far more complex sets of phenomena. The three bases comprised my marriage and immediate family, my primarily architectural work and my social-political commitments. This, I suggest, remains a useful notion, an apt ideogram.

The first consideration is summarised readily. Beate's and my relationship has deepened immeasurably: we share our most profound interests and activities; we continue, fortunately, to be physically and intellectualy capable, healthy; our feelings each for the other are no less lovingly passionate than they were initially. And all that is as immeasurably intensified by love for our two children and, of late, their delightful children. We are happy, though ever aware that, where they exist, for all too many in the wider world our personal affections and comforts are constantly endangered.

My work in the field of architectural writing is described in a previous section of the present chapter. That has afforded me unended satisfaction - I have met with a great many design colleagues, visited and studied the buildings on which they have worked and appreciated their insightful descriptions of the construction industry across the country. Although in a less focussed manner, I have continued my long career in university teaching at local schools of architecture; gladly to find that, here as elsewhere, contact with students can be stimulating, challenging, even rejuvenating. Gratifyingly, these architecturally-related activities have earned me two honorary doctorates from South African universities as well as the Medal of Distinction of the South African Institute of Architects (the SAIA). Where I have worked with colleagues as a design practitioner, we have only sought and accepted what might be termed 'morally-socially responsible' commissions; projects such as new or additions to schools, clinics, libraries and the like. These have also brought honorary awards - specifically, provincial recognition and two annual SAIA Awards of Merit.

Political life has, of course, continued to engross me, despite the unavoidable fact that the elation of Beate's and my return to South Africa in 1990 has turned sour over the ensuing years. This is centrally due to the ANC government's repeated, its patent - indeed self-admitted - failure to deliver on its promises vis-a-vis the lives of our overwhelmingly, our increasingly indigent population. That stretches across many areas: employment, health, education, legal equity and a deal more. It certainly does not exclude housing, a litmus test in so-called under- or undeveloped countries. Allow me, by way of illustration, to draw on two contrasting tendencies: officially endorsed 'low-cost' housing and the burgeoning homes of the burgeoning, well-heeled elite.

Thirty or so years ago Pete Seeger turned an evocative ditty into an international hit, "Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky. Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes all the same." Could he have envisaged the realities Of South African low-cost housing? The festering crises of South African housing seem inescapable. We the comfortably accommodated are reminded constantly of the deprivations others suffer. Those ‘others' need no cues: they live the everyday anguish, the affronts of inadequate shelter, often of outright homelessness.

Thankfully, our legislators and senators are not blind to these tragedies, or are they?. In March 1996 members of the relevant committees from each parliamentary chamber held public hearings on the Housing White Paper, then about a year old. Their report can still be consulted. Its candid appraisals of the lingering problems are as welcome as are its incisive recommendations. Both, the entangled realities and the proposals, are wide-ranging. They cover matters such as land, housing finance, urban sprawl and much else. All these warrant explicit attention, most however fall beyond the scope of this discussion. I shall focus on the issue depicted in the report as "the kind of product produced and the question of minimum standards."

Buoyed by the manifest promise of the new document, I gladly accepted a colleague's invitation to visit two projects in that vast housing area south of Johannesburg. We sought to test on the ground what we had read in the report. My euphoria was soon dispelled, replaced by dismay.

We drove first to Devland, off the Golden Highway. There are no nuggets among these sometimes pastel-shaded boxes: "There's a green one, and a pink one, and a blue one, and a yellow one ... and they all look just the same." I found this stark development dismal: no schools, churches, shops; no made-up roads, pavements, street-lights; no shrubs, trees, parks. Nothing but rock-strewn veld, hard-baked earth, dust (lots of that), clinging blackjacks ... and ticky-tacky. People, in this wall-to-wall bleakness, "get put in little boxes, all the same!" We circled the site searching for structures that might engage one's social and visual attention. There are none save the street hawkers' familiar plastic-sheeted shelters: splashes of colour, of life.

We stopped to walk, camera-laden, to a group of houses. Most were occupied, others were still under construction. Children eager to be caught by our cameras greeted us, as did the adults in and about the buildings. After explaining our presence as architects, we were invited with grave courtesy into two homes. There are, we learnt, four sizes: an all-purpose space plus `bathroom' (built-in toilet pan but no bath or wash-basin); two and three-roomed houses also with incomplete bathrooms; and the largest, two bedrooms, a lounge, kitchen recess and bathroom. All but the latter are constructed so that they can readily be extended. We were told that, depending on individual circumstances, the occupants had payed from R17 150 (including the then R15 000 subsidy) for the smallest to about R39 000 for the larger dwelling.

The houses stand on concrete surface beds. Each is built of single-leaf cement blocks; each is roofed with asbestos cement sheeting fixed to rafters that rest on a central tie-beam. The finishings are as elementary as the construction: no flooring materials, skirtings, ceilings or similar finesses. The smaller houses are almost 20 square metres in area, the larger about 63 square metres overall. Both are small. Filled with everyday furniture, the crabbed interiors are difficult to use effectively. We, indeed, were unable to photograph them adequately, to record their occupants' struggles to transform ticky-tacky into homes. The aesthetic is one of pared-down, reductive functionality. It represents a minimum level of spatial, constructional and finishing standards.

The houses, each on its small plot, are set in tightly-packed ranks that spread across the veld on a strictly rectangular pattern; not even a nod toward crescent, serpentine or circus design. Later I noticed a phrase on the sleeve of my battered Pete Seeger record "endless rows of identical houses ... if you want it cheap, take it like I make it - rectangular." In this unbending layout, one is struck by the discordant imagery, by the pervasive aesthetic of regimented domesticity.

Feeling decidedly flat, we left for the south-western edge of Soweto, to our next venue. Compared with what we had come from, this can be said to be up-market. The houses are disposed in conventional suburban blocks; each is on its own plot, the main rooms face the public thoroughfare. Where the other development is a systematised encampment, this is an ersatz suburb. Here too we saw none of the amenities - places of worship, community halls, shops, post offices and the like - that characterise suburban life elsewhere. This is yet another dormitory site; far removed from the city, from cultural and social meeting points and, above all, from opportunities for employment. It is, in this sense, yet another apartheid settlement.

The house into which we were invited contains three small, tiny bedrooms (space only for a double-bed and wardrobe in the largest of these), a bathroom, a kitchen recess/entrance and a dining/sitting room. An alcove in the latter extends marginally beyond the rectangular perimeter of the building. The owner told us that of the R85 000 overall payment due for the house, he meets about R1 600 each month. More than half of that is a subsidy from his employer. He is, he added, straining to maintain his contribution: every month he must pay a similar amount for fares to and from work and his eldest child's distant school. The consequences of South African spatial segregation live on.

In sum: we found minimally larger and better finished houses than those at Devland. We found fitted kitchens and bathrooms, floor tiles, ceilings, tile roofs; externally, there are fitfully planted patches of lawn and, we were told, three saplings per plot. Not least, there are the projecting alcoves with their doll-house roofs, banal efforts to relieve the ticky-tacky. This attempt to make little boxes into something other will, I suspect, be my most lasting memory of the development. It is a scrimpy, inept borrowing - in scale, form and purpose - from expansive inner-suburban houses; one of their many implanted ‘features', themselves often pretentious relics of baronial manor houses.

A few days later I called on friends in Dube, Soweto. They live in a Type NE 51/9 house, a product of the massive official building programmes that occurred during the apartheid 1950s and 60s. Intended for seven or eight people, it comprises two bedrooms, a living/sleeping space, a kitchen/dining area and a bathroom. All this is accommodated in an overall area of 56 square metres. The construction and the finishings are not unlike those at the two contemporary projects which my colleague and I had visited. More significantly, the persistent formula of a single house per plot is also evident here: no cluster, terrace, courtyard or other forms of low-rise-high-density housing; nothing learnt from the inventive seidlunge of central Europe or, in southern Africa, from the traditional models of grouped housing with shared open space.

Excepting the additional seven square metres, little seems to have changed over four decades. Are we, like Spike Milligan in his unforgettable Goon Show lament, "walking backwards to Christmas" - or, unseeingly, into the future?

Now where older and new wealth meet, amicably or not.

Though tucked away beyond south-west England, the Duchy of Cornwall is seldom far from wider notice. That is ensured by the presence of its eminently newsworthy Duke, the long-in-waiting future monarch Charles Windsor. His county has now, surely unwittingly, garnered additional attention. It has spawned an offspring near our own village of Irene, one-time home to the locally nurtured guru Jan Smuts. The Field Marshall’s memorial obelisk on a neighbouring kopje overlooks a swanky new residential development-in-the-making, Cornwall Hill Country Estate.

A colleague, an architect who shares my disquiet about the gaucheries that currently pass for much building design, introduced me to the site. He showed me what already exists and is presently under construction. Each is a boorish instance of the coarse, quick-fix architecture that sprawls across Johannesburg’s northern suburbs. They are only exceptional in their unfathomable depths of social and aesthetic insensitivity. Cornwall Hill is, then, but one of many. For me, its specific offence is that it despoils a stretch of veld I have known and loved since my schoolboy hiking and cycling explorations. Its churlishness reaches into cherished memories, there to arouse a dismay which focusses on the all too evident incongruity of the estate layout and relentless profligacy of its pretentious homes. As we passed these overwrought buildings, I tried in vain to rid my mind of dimly recalled lines from D H Lawrence’s bitter poem How beastly is the bourgeois. Beastly, Lawrence stressed, is as beastly does.

We drove first past the select private school that abuts the Cornwall Hill site on Nellmapius Drive, Irene. Pupils can, if they manage to breach the overbearing demand for enrollment, start in the lower grades and proceed through to their A-levels; many parents, apparently, seek preparation for ‘varsity entry abroad. This is, clearly, not a place for scions of the hoi polloi.

The buildings are indeterminate snapshots, faint echoes of vaguely late 19th century British grammar schools: red brick walls, occasional gables, lush gardens, immaculate sports fields. I was inescapably reminded of the self-evidently posh preparatory and upper echelon institutions of the comfy English home counties. Well ... almost. The local sky is too blue, the veld a dusty late-summer khaki, the parental motor-cars gaudy in their noisy opulence. Cornwall?

Then to more displaced images. We skirted a mock English garden pavilion - the security lodge - to reach an Estate Office of faintly Georgian ilk. There we found a pamphlet carrying the promotional enticement, “estate living with old values,” a set of “architectural guidelines” and a pictorial display. The latter comprises scenic views of ye olde country homes: flower-bedecked medieval houses; spruce 18th century harbour- and river-side row-houses; classically clad villas in verdant, expensively tended grounds ... and more of the imported same. All decidedly elsewhere, not on our shaggy highveld. The rambling guidelines are no less revealing. They proclaim concocted stylisms from a distant never-never Noddy land. Or, they emphasise images from “the Irene Village and adjacent farming community.” These we are expected to take at face value; concrete examples are not cited. The guidelines have, one notes, “been developed to protect and maintain the unique environmental and physical attributes of a historical site and river ... [they] are characterised by simplicity, geometric and non-symmetrical order, harmony and visual continuity ... set against a ... landscape of lawns, trees and stables.” A gentrified Cornwall?

That trumpeted “protection” has ripped history, along with trees and similar “physical attributes” - tough highveld grasses, shrubbery and rock outcrops - from what was a magnificent site. This, and more, has been replaced by sub-suburban “order:” alien saplings, trimmed shrubs and smaller plants, manicured lawns, modish gazebos, shimmering swimming pools, stables, equestrian exercise yards, substantial “staff accommodation” and, not least, a rash of outlandishly ostentatious “county seats.” All building on the site is governed by specified “design criteria.” They, we are told, are enforced by a quaintly named “Aesthetical Committee,” the members of which have, I imagine, endorsed the frequent departures from the document’s often ambiguously phrased strictures.

Once through the tight security ring, one is in a quite unremarkable Johannesburg housing layout. Single plots for individual dwellings are accessible from roadways that deny the contoured terrain. There are no terrace houses, clusters, squares, open commons; no parades of local shops, churches, community halls ... libraries. All is strictly private; certainly no provision for communal, for public life. There are, though, distinct Celtic references: street names that cite Land’s End, Camelford, St Ives and that enduring Cornish connection, Aloe Koppie.

Then the houses, the buildings of which one might, Cornish-fashion of course, say “my home is my castle.” Plenty of that, indeed one-hundred per cent. This is where Cornwall Hill comes into its chic, country estate own.

Here the underlying narcissism of conspicuous consumption is sovereign. An array of uninhibited, pompous, puffed-up facades - medleys of imported, randomly snatched architectural features - announce that the owners, via their architects, have worked hard at their material achievements. They have arrived, and are eager to exhibit that presence. We found a range of Gone-with-the-Wind, decidedly un-heavenly mansions. Was that, surely not, Rhett Butler loudly cornering a sleek Alfa Romeo? We stopped in awe of bogus Teutonic turrets and towers; abstracted, apparently, from their Rhineland origins. We gasped at tall, purportedly Tudor windows to grand stairways behind. Is that a Gothic Revival corner, Augustus Pugin at it again? Note those buttresses, that stretch of cottage-windows under the eaves - C F A Voysey still at work ... on Sesmyl Spruit?

While on site, one is repeatedly alerted to inept touches of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Philip Webb, W R Lethaby, Norman Shaw, Edwin Lutyens - I counted. The estate offers precise instruction on appropriating, on misappropriating these and other admired contributors to a specific vernacular; one more than a century, and several climates removed. Susceptible clients kindly steer clear.

So this is how the well-heeled respond to rampant poverty and its attendant ills - meagre welfare, educational and health services, xenophobia, under-employment, violent crime? If only in their minds’ eyes, they yearn for Provence, Tuscany, Cornwall; anywhere but here on the highveld.

 

Liberation - unfulfilled expectations

We - Beate and I amongst many, many others - returned home, to share great expectations with those who had remained to struggle here. We were to help build the “new South Africa”, a phrase that dropped from people’s lips with anticipatory optimism. That was greatly re-enforced after the first democratic general election in 1994, symbolised so joyfully by the ecstatic inauguration of President Nelson Mandela.

Despite the terrible poverty, backward educational practices, inhumanly inadequate social services and like disabilities which a succession of murderous apartheid governments had passed on to their new, democratically elected successors, much has been achieved. People, adults, school children, even toddlers, no longer live in constant fear of harassment, persecution or murder at the hands of the police, the military services or anyone in an official uniform, a purportedly authorised position. That alone is a liberation of enormous magnitude. And the ANC’s election slogan, “a better life for all”, has reached to increased home-building, though still mainly in segregated locations and often of dubious workmanship or materials; to programmes of widening supplies of services such as electricity and telephone outlet points; to much discussed, and disputed, efforts to improve the country’ appalling legacy of deliberately inadequate social security, public works, health, educational, transport and so many allied public services. In all these and other, analogous areas, the tasks have been inordinately demanding, the costs of confronting them by conventional fiscal means overwhelming if not outright prohibitive.

Yes, a start has been made, many starts, but much has been by-passed, neglected or postponed for that purported “better life for all” which remains a tantalising promise. Unemployment remains ensconced, deepened in industries like clothing and fluctuating wildly with similarly fluctuating international rates of currency exchange. So-called expert opinions are repeatedly at variance, often mutually contradictory, about matters such as the pandemic spread, the very existence of HIV/AIDS; about economic growth and stability, about economic ‘empowerment’ for black people, and more, a great, great deal more. President Thabo Mbeki himself disermingly summarised our plight in his broadcast message for New Year 2004:

That is, of course, official. A number of informed observers of South African affairs have - some reluctantly, regrettfully, painfully characterised these and similar presidential and/or other high-level statements as smacking too patently of expedient rhetoric, as purposeful milkings of distressingly impecunious, country-wide conditions. These commentators have too frequently been dismissed themselves; excoriated as resentful white racists who seek to discredit black rule or, worse, as black-skinned people whose colour conceals white, prejudiced enmity. Others, those who radically criticise the ANC’s and/or the government’s structural embrace of neo-liberal policies, those who argue for socially-rooted, libertarian policies, have been and are labelled “ultra leftists”. They are relegated to imagined, wildly impractical, left-wing, lunatic or mischievous groupings. Members of the public, political afficionados or otherwise, are encouraged, cajoled into viewing them as less than irritating ants on the majestic, the elephantine body of the ruling party.

Yet their criticisms stand, as, of course, do the conditions on which they are founded. No amount of racist, ultra leftist or other convenient denigration will conceal our markedly upsetting circumstances: the poverty and accompanying joblessness; the apparent tolerance of corruption, the attempts to downplay, even deny, the deadly realities of HIV/AIDS; the disastrous consequences of our purportedly urgent necessity to arm ourselves via a series of suspect arms deals. I will forego delving for more; that will further invite the already likely, the usually ritualistic charge of racial arrogance, of jaundiced prejudice, of white bigotry and similarly fatuous accusations. But rest assured, we grow - as has been increasingly evident since the brave gathering of the World Social Movement, Seattle,1999.

A word on the putative ultra leftists, the critics with whom I identify myself: in the main, they have comprised long-established, committed, passionate supporters of the anti-apartheid struggle. In some instances, their penetrating critiques have come from abroad; from for instance John Saul in Canada, from John Pilger in Britain. Most though, originate here at home - Dennis Brutus from the Cape, Fatima Meer, Ashwin Desai from coastal Kwa-Zulu Natal and, of course, Trevor Ngwana in Gauteng. All, like too many others to mention, have written analytically, empathetically about the devastatingly adverse effects on poor people of the processes of ‘globalisation’ that our government has advocated, and adopted. Two such critical analyses warrant urgent introductory attention: the concluding chapter of John Pilger’s volume, Hidden Agendas (1998) and, my unhesitating recommendation, Ashwin Desai’s We are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2002).

And for those who might be unaware of or who doubt the mean, exploitative results of neo-liberal globalisation - an ugly pair of terms for an ugly reality - I suggest editors Peter R Mitchell and John Schoeffel’s Understanding Power: the Indispensable Chomsky (2002) and John Pilger’s persuasively referenced, similarly authoritative but marginally less detailed The New Rulers of the World (also 2002).

 

Socialist libertarianism - a further glimpse

An anarchist or, to call on the more polite synonym, libertarian socialist standpoint has permeated this chapter, as has been the case in previous episodes of these reminiscences. Additional, advisedly brief, pointed details of what I associate with this notion seems necessary. In what follows, my summary comment is supplemented by cited passages from a recent, particularly insightful effort to synthesise post-Seattle 1998 thinking, ‘Anarchism, Or the Revolutionary Movement of the Twenty-first Century’ (which can be read online here) by David Graeber and Andrej Grudacic, January 6 2004.

First the targeted, and pivotal, political principles that are intended to guide left libertarian action: freely chosen, voluntary association with others; decentralised range, scope and extent of operations (small is good); mutual aid as well as self-help; ‘networked’ exchanges of information and guidance to egalitarian, mutually agreed decisions; no appeals to arguments or acts based on the opportunistic claim that ends justify means. Then, as a corollary, jettisoning the idea that, in Graeber and his co-author’s words, “the business of a revolutionary is to seize state power and then begin imposing one’s vision at the point of a gun” (a precept that is, for instance, basic to the Leninist principle of proletarian dictatorship). To the contrary, they claim that anarchist commitments have, “from the start been less about seizing state power than about exposing, de-legitimizing and dismantling mechanisms of rule while winning ever-larger spaces of autonomy and participatory management ... within the shell of the old.”

Deep-seated, sustainable change, one notes, will not come as a result of apocalyptic events, of histrionic, usually violent confrontations which lead to final, pre-delineated ends. Such changes are, rather, part of drawn out processes; they are part of long-term, historical continua. The great, the portentous revolution is not around the corner, we do not need - as we have so often been advised to do - to wait until “after the revolution.” That is a never-never-land postponement. William Morris’ 19th century proposal remains far, far more apposite. Paraphrased, he suggested that socialists relate immediately to others as they expect to do in their socialist futures, that they practice now so that will recognise the future when they get there - in more formal terms, that they adopt modes of organisation that consciously resemble the worlds they seek to bring about. In illustration, Graeber and Grudacic write, “Grim joyless revolutionaries who sacrifice all pleasure to the cause can only produce grim joyless societies.”

Even the most cursory contact with anarchist ideas and practices, reveals that those who hold them place great stress on notions of consensus. This should not, I urge, be taken to indicate a desire for or an attempted fostering of conformity. Quiet the opposite. The purpose is to encourage joint, searching analyses of possible courses of action or formulations of policy. The goal is to arrive at commonly agreed, core proposals; proposals that can win common support because they incorporate salient notions which those affected accept: “it is a process of compromise and synthesis, until one ends up with something everyone can live with.” That, of course suggests small rather than large groups of people, but as Graeber and Grudacic emphasise:

For my part, I echo the opening phrase of this extract. One could, indeed, “go on at length” about the underlying precepts of libertarian socialism before highlighting the actual, living practices of current anarchism - such as, for example, those of the autonomous Zapatista municipalities of Chiapas in Mexico. That, though, would be to stray yet further from the kernel of this book.