Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ways that architecture in Pretoria intersected with the apartheid state’s policy of separate development. It argues that architects from the University of Pretoria acted as trustees of a local Ndebele community, supporting the states’ policies by creating a rural-urban binary.

Paper long abstract:

This paper sets out to explore how vernacular and modern architecture in greater Pretoria, South Africa, intersected with the apartheid state's attempts to guide black South Africans towards "progress" and "development." It examines how, on the eve of apartheid (1943), the University of Pretoria's (UP) architecture department developed a relationship with a local Ndebele community by documenting their forms of vernacular architecture. As this relationship developed, architects from the university, as well as its recent graduates, received lucrative commissions to turn Pretoria into the "modern" capital of the newly-elected apartheid state. On the one hand, architects ensured the "progress" of the city while on the other, maintained the idea of the Ndebele as inherently rural and in danger of losing their culture, and by extension, their unique architectural expression. In addition, university architects aligned themselves with the apartheid state's vision of separate development, in which the Ndebele - and black South Africans in general - would be organized into distinct ethnic groups and would live self-reliantly and separately from whites. Under the trusteeship of whites, they would reach their own level of "development" in their own ethnically designated territories. Drawing on the history and historiography of modern and vernacular architecture in and around Pretoria, this paper argues that UP's architecture department engaged in a relationship of trusteeship with the Ndebele by not only aligning themselves with the policy of separate development, but also creating and sustaining a binary in which the Ndebele would always remain rural.