Urbanism, Architecture, and the Use of Space

Architecture in the European sense began with the construction of Cape Town by the Dutch late in the seventeenth century. Monumental public buildings, houses of commerce, private dwellings, churches, and rural estates of that period reflect the ornamented but severe style of colonial Dutch architecture, which was influenced by traditions from the Dutch East Indies. Many of the Cape's most stately buildings were constructed with masonry hand carved by Muslim "Malay" artisans brought as slaves from Indonesia. After the British took over the Cape in 1806, buildings in the British colonial style modified the Cape Town architectural style. From colonial India, British merchants and administrators brought the curved metal ornamental roofs and slender lace work pillars that still typify the verandas of cottages in towns and cities throughout the nation. Houses of worship contribute an important architectural aspect even in the smallest towns. In addition to the soaring steeples and classic stonework of Afrikaans Dutch Reformed churches, Anglican churches, synagogues, mosques, and Hindu shrines provide variety to the religious architectural scene.

 The domestic architecture of the Khoi and Bantu speaking peoples was simple but strong and serviceable, in harmony with a migratory horticultural and pastoral economy. Precolonial multiple dwelling homesteads, which still exist in rural areas, tended to group lineage clusters or extended families in a semicircular grouping of round or oval one-room dwellings. The term "village" applies most accurately to the closer, multifamily settlements of the Sotho and Tswana peoples, ruled by a local chief, than to the widely scattered family homesteads of the Zulu, Swazi, and Xhosa. Both Sotho-Tswana and Nguni-speaking communities were centered spatially and socially around the dwelling and cattle enclosure of the subchief, which served as a court and assembly for the exercise of authority in local affairs.

Missionaries and the white civil authorities introduced simple European-style square houses along lined streets in "native locations" for Christianized black people, beginning the architectural history of racial segregation. That history culminated in the 1950s in the rearrangement of the landscape to separate Bantu African, Coloured, Indian, and white population groups from one another in "Group Areas." In 1936, the final boundaries of Bantu African reserves limited the rights of residence of those groups to rural homelands scattered over thirteen percent of the country. In the eighty-seven percent of the land proclaimed "White areas," whites lived in town centers and near suburbs, while black workers were housed in more distant "townships" to serve the white economy. The current government does not have the resources to transform this pattern, but economic freedom and opportunity may enable citizens to create a more integrated built environment. In the meantime, the old townships remain with their black population, augmented by miles of new shack settlements containing impoverished rural migrants hoping for a better life in the environmentally overstressed urban areas.