Planning for apartheid
Gavin Stamp
Durban The Caister Hotel does not seem like South Africa. In this half-timbered and modernistic building of between the wars, surrounded by sub-tropical vegetation, staffed by Indians and with a core of permanent retired English residents, I imagined I was in India — until disabused by the view of the modern towers of central Durban from my balcony. Durban, named after its first Governor, Sir Benjamin D'Urban, was founded in 1824. In 1843 Natal was declared a British colony and, as the Boers who had defeated the Zulus were disinclined to live again under the Union Jack and returned west, the province became the most English in South Africa. It is also the most Indian, owing to Durban's position on the Indian Ocean. By far the most lively part of the city is around Grey Street, where there are bazaars, small exotic shops and the Grey Street Mosque, which has the proud — if, on reflection, scarcely momentous — claim of being the largest in the Southern Hemisphere.
After 1860 large numbers of Indian labourers were imported into South Africa so that, by 1911, Asians outnumbered whites in Natal by 50 per cent (as they do today). This fact so alarmed the English that recruitment was ended and repatriation begun. In 1925 the Union government introduced the Areas Reservation Bill, which was founded on the bitterly resented notion that the Indians were an alien element: emigration was encouraged while the right of domicile of those Indians who conformed to a Western standard of living was recognised. This atrocious treatment of the Indians by the English explains the advent in South Africa of the lawyer, M. K. Gandhi, in 1906. (Not that the Boers were any better: to this day no Asian is allowed to reside in the Orange Free State and the Indians, although prosperous and enterprising, remain unfranchised.) Having survived a violent reception at Durban harbour and having been thrown off a train because of his colour, Gandhi established himself at a small farm at Phoenix nearby, before going into the Transvaal. His house and the building where he set up a printing press still survive: their existence is little known by Westerners and ignored by the Indians in India (who also conveniently forget that the Mahatma left not only family but also property behind him in South Africa).
This little wooden verandah house is a particularly poignant shrine in view of the almost total divorce between the two former jewels of Empire: South Africa and India. Asians can travel there easily, but not whites. Some architects in Durban who are writing a book on Indian temple architecture in South Africa find it difficult to obtain a visa to see the original prototypes in India. Indian temple architecture, strange as it may seem, abounds in Natal. The Durban suburb called Cato Manor is filled with peepul trees and Hindu gods; brick and plaster temples stand amidst trees in rolling countryside. It all seems enchanting, until it is realised that the temples only stand because they are sacred buildings; there are no houses, for they have all be cleared away.
Until the early Sixties Cato Manor was a thriving, densely populated, largely Indian quarter. Then a series of race riots, between black and Asian, made the authorities acquire the land by compulsory purchase. All the houses were destroyed and the Indians were rehoused in a new suburb, Chatsworth, ten miles out from the city centre. This year the courts have declared in favour of the Indians' historical and legal right to live in Cato Manor, but it is too late. The Grey Street area has, however, been at last categorised as Indian under the Group Areas Act, although zoning legislation still forbids Indians to live above their shops. For many years its indeterminate status under the rigid South African planning laws led to the neglect of the buildings and to the threat of the redevelopment which has spoiled much of central Durban.
Town planning on apartheid principles is one of the most unpleasant and absurd aspects of South Africa's policies — absurd because it can run counter to the economic forces which make cities grow and develop. English-speaking South Africans, in their smug liberal impotence, tend to blame all the racialist and coercive laws in South Africa on the Afrikaners, but their effects can be seen in citis like Durban and Johannesburg which are dominated by the English. In many respects, apartheid is in fact the legacy of the English. Many of the race laws were enacted long before the Nationalists came to power in 1948 and, in Natal, they can be traced back to the 1 850s when Theosophilus Shepstone began the policy of alloting areas of land for different tribes and races. Furthermore, until comparatively recently, the Boers have been predominantly a rural, farming people and the building, the planning and the spoiling of the cities has been largely the work of the English-speaking population. In urban terms, the legacy of the English has had two aspects: the acceptance of the high-rise redevelopment of city centres and the creation of racially homogeneous and distinct residential suburbs. The fascination of South African cities is that in them townplanning policies, which, mercifully, have been only partially applied in Britain, have achieved their full, and awful, realisation.
First: urban renewal. This has been encouraged by the vitality of the economy and by the rating structure, which assesses a property by the potential value of the site rather than by its current use. The consequences are not attractive. Pretoria, the old, humble capital of the Transvaal Republic, is now a city of towers. Johannesburg, with its network of urban motorways, is even more like America and is more raw and horrible than Birmingham, England. Often commercial pressures have been allied with the urban, Utopian ideals which derive principally from Le Corbusier and which were taught to South African architects in Britain and America. Cape Town must once have been one of the most beautiful cities in the world, nestling between Table Mountain and its fine natural harbour. Until the Sixties it was possible to see the pier and the sea at the end of Adderley Street. No longer: the `foreshore' has been filled in, planted with isolated modern buildings and, to add insult to injury, finished off with a motorway on stilts by the sea. All this was done with the advice of internationally distinguished town planners. Durban has also tried hard to ruin itself. In 1965 the late Lord Holford and Roy Kantorowich (now Professor of Town and Country Planning at Manchester) were invited out from Britain to prepare a development plan for central Durban. There was a certain natural justice in this as both men were born in South Africa; Holford, with his charm, good looks and opportunist adherence to Modern Movement ideals, had risen to fame and a peerage in Britain and gave us the St Paul's Precinct. Holford's Plan was published in 1968. It accepted the development of Durban on apartheid lines: . . growth in non-white demand for central area facilities is likely to be curtailed' ; it also encouraged the policy of building freeways, begun in 1957, and endorsed the decision to remove the central railway station — a convenient and attractive building for which the nascent preservation movement is now fighting. Holford was not much concerned with the body of research undertaken by his assistants; his real interest was in grandly arranging various 'tower clusters' about the city.
In the event, little of Holford's plan was implemented, but it encouraged the city in its policy of urban renewal. It also reinforced the ideal of suburban separation — ‘. . the trend towards dispersal of urban non-white residents into townships on the periphery of Durban is expected to continue' — which is the second legacy of European town planning and a more specifically English one. South Africans, like the English and Americans, tend to be suburban. At the end of the day they drive out to their distant houses and leave the city centres lifeless and empty. In South Africa as in Britain, planning has encouraged this process, by building roads and by insisting on the separation of residence from place of work. In Britain this 'zoning' is the product of the Garden City movement, which advocated exclusively residential, countrified suburbs and the creation of satellite towns; commerce and industry were to have their own separate zones. In South Africa, these ideas are still current and are given the added ingredient of race. In the cause of racial harmony, national planning laws insist that each race should live in its own distinct district, or township. The irony is that this may possibly only institutionalise what may be a natural process, for in Britain not only do suburbs acquire their own class character, but areas like Brixton and Southall have also become racially distinct and homogeneous.
In South Africa this planning and rehousing has been carried out under the Group Areas Act, passed in 1948, and often by the agency of the Department of Community Development, whose draconian powers might have been envied by the city planners of Liverpool and Newcastle and even by those of the London County Council when it decanted so many innocent East Enders to other parts of London after 1945. Inner city areas deemed slums or which have been designated as white are acquired by compulsory purchase, and the Indian, coloured or black inhabitants are moved to new, planned suburbs. The destruction of Cato Manor I have already described. The most notorious example is in Cape Town, where 'District 6', a lively part of the inner city with a largely Coloured population, was bulldozed in the Seventies. In Johannesburg, the old established Indian area of Page View, with its verandahed, solid houses, has now been largely destroyed and its Asian population obliged to live in Lenasia, 15 miles out, while a new 'Oriental Plaza', in the tawdry style of the Regent's Park Mosque, has been built near the city centre.
The most famous of these racially distinct areas is, of course, Soweto, where the first houses were built in 1931 for a 'South Western Bantu Township' some 10 miles out from central Johannesburg. Though it may strain the credulity even of Spectator readers, Soweto is not like Calcutta but is a 'satellite town' laid out on English Garden City principles. It is a vast suburb with an official population of about a million (the real population is probably double that) living in little houses, each with its own front door, each with its own garden. The streets are wide and there is plenty of open space (often used for inter-tribal fights). Apart from the fact that all the houses are bungalows, its low-density, municipal and forlorn character is very similar to estates of council houses in, say, Runcorn or Luton laid out in the Thirties and Forties. I was taken to Soweto (a pass must be obtained) by a radical white architect and a radical black lawyer; both assured me that Soweto was planned so that the police could easily put down riots — like Haussmann's Paris. I was obliged to observe that the patterns of radiating streets and paucity of access points from the main roads conform precisely with English New Town planning, as at Welwyn Garden City.
oweto is not pleasant. It is boring, isolated and artificial, but it is not a slum, such as can be seen elsewhere in Africa and in India, and it seems more humane than the high-rise tenements forced on the working classes by British and American local authorities. Indeed, the provision of single, low-rise dwellings with separate front doors is now considered ideal again in Britain, while white South Africans, with cars, do not consider Soweto to be much more distant than their own suburbs. The trouble with Soweto may be that it imposes a white middle-class domestic ideal on a black society, but such is the inevitable nature of a paternalist government which still manifests that ruthless, Victorian attitude to slums and slum clearance which also dominated Britain until very recently. Both the Afrikaner authorities (until 1973 Soweto was run by Johannesburg, now by the West Rand Administration Board) and the left-wing opposition agree that the housing af the blacks is the responsibility of the state, as it has been since the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 and, to quote the official guide to Soweto, 'Whilst the urbanising process of the Whites, Coloureds and Indians is virtually completed, the urbanisation of the Black man is just getting into its stride.' The present vast size of Soweto is a response to the appalling and violent black shanty-towns which grew up during the Second World War. These have been entirely removed and their inhabitants rehoused. Similarly, under the Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act of 1951, the shanty-town at Nyanga outside Cape Town was cleared last month, with all the official ineptitude and brutality of which the no-nonsense Afrikaner is almost proud and in which the opposition delights. But what else was the government to do? It cannot countenance the development of insanitary slums and is it the responsibility of government to house immigrant labourers? Even black nationalists admit that they would keep 'influx control' legislation if they ever come to power.
Paradoxically, radical white architects now argue that the authorities provide public housing of too high a standard, which is too expensive and which therefore caters for too few. Instead, much more primitive housing should be tolerated; although a disgrace by the standards of the English suburban ideal, it is commensurate with the income and culture of the migrant worker. Such housing is allowed under the 'Site and Service' system, first approved by Dr Verwoerd in 1953, which provides a basic infrastructure of roads, sanitation and watersupply and which allows blacks to construct their own houses from whatever is available. So, to the north-west of Durban at Kwa-Machu, lavatories and waterpipes have been provided by the Urban Foundation (a charity supported by such people as the Oppenheimers and by many architects); around them has grown up a vast city of little shacks, made of mud, old cartons, corrugated iron and empty milk cartons. If all the many thousand inhabitants can find work, the scheme seems intelligent and realistic. It is the sort of housing which now interests radical young architects, and it has the virtue of owing little to the traditions of both English and Afrikaner. However, it does nothing to dispel the fear of being overwhelmed which all white South Africans understandably feel, and which the bourgeois housing solution of Soweto was designed to temper: it is less likely to generate a black middle class.
Radical architects argue that South Africa is a 'third world' country and tend only to be interested in the problems of black housing. But South Africa is also a highly industrialised and urbanised society, and to be concerned only with 'Site and Service' schemes is to minimise the role of the architect and virtually to commit professional suicide. The influence of 20thcentury European planning on South Africa may have been largely unfortunate, but it would be sad and absurd to underestimate the value and quality of the architectural heritage of white South Africa, both English and Boer. And if Soweto was in England, it would now be studied and admired by the new breed of left7wing, socially-conscious architectural historians.
Previous page
