Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on contemporary photography and historical collated archives of selected buildings in apartheid native reserves to propose a novel category of monument for consideration in academic scholarship

Paper long abstract:

South African native reserves (also known as homelands or bantustans) served as the heart of the apartheid system. Established as early as 1913, the homelands sought to segregate black from white South Africans by subsidising the construction of decentralized architectural and bureaucratic support structures. At the fall of apartheid in 1994, the homelands were incorporated back into the country and their subsidies were withdrawn, leaving behind rural areas now characterized by severe poverty. In many ways then, the legacies of apartheid, in these areas, continue.

The research question at the heart of this paper understands that the buildings in the homelands expressed aspects of the ideology of high apartheid; that political change has ensued, apartheid has been dismantled, as has the homeland system, with concomitant ideological changes. The investigation seeks to analyse this shift in meaning by drawing on a contemporary photographic archive of the architectural structures and a collated digital archive of documents relevant to the history of the buildings.

Current scholarship recognizes two key forms of monument: conventional and counter- (or anti-) monuments. The research fieldwork indicates the possibility of a third, as yet unexplored form, which I have termed the inadvertent monument. By developing new tropes of commemoration, these buildings, through an altogether passive attribution, may be considered as inadvertent monuments. The crux of the theoretical component of the paper will formulate substantive and rhetorical definitions for this new type of monument to the folly of apartheid's ideology of oppression.