‘SEE PRETORIA THROUGH NEW EYES’:

Modernism, memory, and the apartheid city

  • Rita Barnard Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania, USA. Extraordinary Professor, University of Stellenbosch.
Keywords: Pretoria, Strijdom Square, Sterland, Poynton Building, uncanny, Nelson Mandela, Derek Hook, Ato Quayson, Jacob Dlamini

Abstract

This essay starts out with a reflection on a 1996 advertisement for Pretoria, featuring twelve images of Nelson Mandela in different costumes, each representing a tourist site or leisure activity in the city. It goes on to argue, however, that the pleasurable ‘seeing Pretoria with new eyes’ the advertisement touts is not all that is required for a new interdisciplinary scholarly account of the city’s history: we need to consider the complexities, or even confusions at stake in apartheid-era Pretoria, a city that was—like apartheid itself—both aggressively modern and retrograde. As an instigation for further scholarship, the essay offers some reflections on Pretoria’s built environment and, drawing on the work of memory, suggests what it was like for a young person to navigate the disconcerting—almost uncanny—nature of the city in the years right before the Soweto uprising.

Published
2019-12-05
Issue
No 25 (2015): Image and Text
Section
Articles