Neoclassical Mpumalanga
Some quirks of South African urbanism
I was back in South Africa this month, enjoying the wilderness in the north-east of the country, an area I haven’t visited for many years. Here along the border with Mozambique is the Kruger National Park, a conservation area roughly the size of Wales, and designated as such for more than a century. But that does not mean there are no people in this part of South Africa. Driving north from Mbombela, the town formerly called Nelspruit, I became aware of a vast band of settlement on the frontier of the park, stretching for over 100 kilometres. Over the next week or so, I became fascinated with this unfamiliar, quasi-urban landscape, which defied my attempts to categorise or understand it.
What should we call this settlement? Looking at it on Google Maps, I expected it to have a name. But this, I realised, was because I am used to looking at the world in satellite view; or rather, I am used to looking at Europe in this way. A large area of continuous settlement normally corresponds to a town or city with a name. But this is not a town or city. You could think of it as a conurbation or sprawl – a merging together of formerly distinct urban areas – but this implies too much homogeneity. The area in question encompasses long-established towns, places that were historically tribal “homelands” – semi-independent territories created by the apartheid government – and places that are now administered as tribal land. These different elements do not even share a single system of land ownership.
This “settlement” was, in fact, many things overlapping and mingling together: small urban centres, roadside ribbon developments, shopping malls, clusters of businesses, shanty towns and other informal building patterns, as well as stretches of a peculiarly African suburbia.
That last element – the suburban element – was most striking to me. While some neighbourhoods in this area were poor and lacking basic infrastructure, others had a distinctly middle-class flavour. These wealthier neighbourhoods showed their status in various ways, but most conspicuously – as you can see in the Street View images above – through the use neoclassical columns. Virtually every house above a certain size had at least one column, as did many businesses, often serving a purely decorative role, complete with traditional capitals boasting ornate scrolls or agapanthus leaves. We saw several shops dealing specifically in such columns. These classical allusions have not come from nowhere: traditional colonial architecture in South Africa, as in other places, has a prominent Palladian aspect, and columns are especially common due to the demand for shade. You can find a good deal of classical pastiche in more modern buildings too, like the Cape Town headquarters of the telecoms company Vodacom, whose corporate logo is rather absurdly mounted on an enormous pediment. Still, I confess I wasn’t expecting to find quite so many Corinthian orders in Mpumalanga.
The indeterminacy of this place – its refusal to appear as something I could recognise and name – is a good reminder that in Africa, as in many other parts of the world, modernity has and will continue to have its own character. The ways we govern and settle land are often deeply rooted in the history of a place, and invariably shape life there. Britain’s planning system, which can be traced back to late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century campaigns against urban sprawl, is now a factor in everything from the unaffordability of homes to commuting rhythms and the charms of the countryside. South Africa faces very different issues, such as the spread of informal settlements and the acrimonious problem of who can rightfully claim the land.
Then again, there are always unexpected parallels to be found between different settings. The Sussex town where I live has a good number of Georgian buildings, and yesterday, as I walked along 500 yards of the high street, I counted more than ten which are adorned with neoclassical columns. Though time has given it a certain grandeur, this British fashion for columns, porticos and related flourishes was often, in stylistic terms, no less superficial and arbitrary than what I saw in South Africa. The architect Augustus Pugin recognised as much in the early Victorian era, when he denounced the craze for neoclassical window-dressing. It seems that certain visual elements of design, almost like architectural memes, are somehow innately suited to being borrowed and incorporated into different contexts across time and space.
Quirky, as you say, and really interesting. There is such a powerful tradition of trying to understand "the modern," the global, etc., that it is easy to forget how localities vary within the global contemporary. A useful reminder, thanks. As an aside, I've been to South Africa, but not there, would like to go.