“A piece of the past has found its’ [sic] way to the future” in all-white majuscule is the first thing one sees on the website for Southdowns Residential Estate. What the website’s creators hope to convey by the slogan is clear from the images that intermittently change in the background behind it : mielie [1] fields overhung by irrigation systems ; bales of hay ; a bucolic earthen path meandering through trees and alongside fields. Curiously, for a residential estate, dwellings appear in only three of the five images, and even then only far in the background, or at the image edge. This essay examines the extent to which these agrarian fantasies elide more complex relationships between agriculture and mining industrialization, contributing in turn to contemporary settler colonial property claims.
Southdowns Estate is located in Centurion, between the cities of Pretoria and Johannesburg, since 2000 part of the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality. In 1964, various townships and farms were consolidated into a municipality which in 1967 was named Verwoerdburg in honor of Hendrik Verwoerd, the former prime minister and architect of apartheid, who had been assassinated the previous year. Home to the South African military establishment, Centurion was largely white, Afrikaans, and conservative. Despite resistance from some locals, Verwoerdburg officially shed its connection to the worst instigators of apartheid to become Centurion in 1997. The name was taken from a cricket stadium built there in 1986. For the stadium owners, the classical connotations made “Centurion” a fairly politically neutral name while referencing a military history, as well as a moniker for a cricketer who scores a century. Centurion adopted a new coat of arms with a similarly inoffensively classical motto : Crea futurum tuum (Latin : “Create your future”) (Jenkins 2007, pp. 148–150).
Elmarie, [2] my tour guide through Southdowns, told me that her husband lived in the area when it was still Verwoerdburg. She was indifferent to the name Centurion, but seemed mildly annoyed at the new name for the municipality : “I don’t understand where they came up with the name Tshwane.” The name Tshwane is of unclear Sesotho origin, and reactionary white South Africans and some Black South Africans from other linguistic backgrounds contested the change (Jenkins 2007, pp. 158–162). The provenance of the name “Southdowns” is also unclear but recalls the South Downs on the southern coast of England known in part for its agricultural history.
The aesthetics of the residential estate reflect an agricultural history, if one that is uniquely Transvaal rather than English. All homes must be built in the Old Transvaal style, a vernacular architecture common on farms in the region and characterized by pitched roofs of corrugated metal and wrap-around verandas. Homeowners, however, do not maintain strict fidelity to such conventions. As we drove around the estate, Elmarie was keen to point out features of homes that had pushed the brief in pursuit of luxury : turrets, folding glass doors running the lengths of walls, concrete archways, swimming pools, and porticos. Many of the homes were more extravagant than the previous landowners’ : “They’ve out-farmed the farmers !” It was unclear to me what this meant. On the one hand, Elmarie seemed to be saying residents had turned the working farmhouse into a luxury home. But on the other, she also pointed out through the windows of her SUV the weathervanes, ornamental borehole windmills, pieces of farming equipment, and animal figures that decorated people’s homes. These suggested an embrace, if overwrought, of farm aesthetics precisely as the land was repurposed for residential use. Elmarie proudly told me that many of the homes incorporate locally quarried rock, as people wanted to feel connected to the land.
The estate is an extension of the Irene Dairy Farm. According to a Draft Environmental Scoping Report for the Southdowns Development Proposal, [3] the Irene Realisation Company created the residential development to supplement the dairy and farm, which were unlikely to remain viable without minimizing or cross-subsidizing operational costs. Well over a century old, the farm found itself surrounded by new development, which made “traditional and extensive” farming more and more difficult due to stock theft, annual veld fires, increased trespassing, stray dogs, vehicle traffic, and higher municipal rates—hence the development of the “city farm” where “green pastures and natural open spaces will be used for biodiversity and grazing purposes,” maintaining the character of the area while adapting to the needs of city planners and the dairy farm.
It is difficult to say how emblematic of changes in land use the Southdowns case is. The development of gated estates has been heterogeneous, a result of poor urban planning, [4] fly-by-night developers, and the ad hoc nature of new development. Some owners of smallholdings have sold to larger developers ; other families have ventured into development themselves. Some have chosen to market histories of agricultural land use, including equestrian activities, while others have incorporated game farms or gone in entirely different directions such as golf courses or gestures at European country living. In the Western Cape winelands, [5] some vineyards have begun incorporating residential development, at times indulging the fantasies of would-be gentleman farmers and permitting them to make their own wine from small vineyards on their respective properties. Further away from major metropoles, farms have been turned into facilities for those who don’t need proximity to the city, like retirees (cf. Spocter 2016).
As much as Southdowns residents loved “an open farm feel, and farm community,” they did sometimes complain about cattle grazing on plants in their gardens, or defecating in inconvenient places. When I visited in 2018, the population of the estate was still overwhelmingly white—in Elmarie’s estimation, a 65–35 Afrikaans–English split. I asked her why, despite increasing diversity in Centurion more generally, other South Africans weren’t moving here. She chalked it up to the “psychology of the pre-apartheid era” of which the architecture reminded Black South Africans.
Before leaving the estate, I took a short walk into one of the areas Elmarie said was still “’n bietjie wild” (Afrikaans : “a little wild”) in the hope of perhaps seeing a cow or two. The paved path—part of which was indeed dotted with dung—led me to a children’s play area encircled in a low stone wall (perhaps also of local extraction). It was late morning on a school day, and no children were present. In the distance, I did see cows grazing. The only other people there were three Black laborers : one blowing leaves, another sitting on a swing with his lawnmower next to him, and the third walking away from me into the veld.
Southdowns’ northern boundary is defined by Nellmapius Drive. It is not the first road to be named after the entrepreneur who established the Irene Dairy Farm. Alois Hugo Nellmapius was a Hungarian Jewish civil engineer who came to southern Africa seeking adventure and fortune in 1873, after reading about the discovery of gold at Pilgrim’s Rest.
Although an uitlander (foreigner, outsider, particularly non-Dutch Europeans in the Transvaal), Nellmapius went on to develop a strong relationship with Paul Kruger and other prominent figures of the South African Republic (Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, ZAR), pioneering concessionaire entrepreneurship in the ZAR and acting as an intermediary between the ZAR on the one hand and other uitlander entrepreneurs and colonial governments on the other. Nellmapius secured concessions from both the ZAR and the Portuguese government to build Nellmapius Road—later renamed Jock of the Bushveld Road—to facilitate the transport of goods between Delagoa Bay (now Maputo Bay) in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) and the goldfields, reducing the ZAR’s reliance on British ports and the cost of essentials for those working the goldfields. Though the Sekhukhune Wars and other challenges kept the new transport route from being more profitable, the road marked the first of a number of Nellmapius’s state-enabled enterprises.
Apart from transportation, concessions in which Nellmapius would be involved included mining, munitions manufacturing, jam production, iron smelting, and liquor distillation. For two reasons, the alcohol distillation was emblematic of Nellmapius’s contribution to the making of the area. First, Nellmapius was responsible for convincing his close friend Paul Kruger of the value of industrialization to benefit the agricultural sector. Paul Kruger, his own Calvinist conservatism opposed to alcohol, opened the Hatherly Distillery, which he named “De Eerste Fabrieken in de Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek Beperkt” (“The First Factory in the ZAR Ltd.”) and described as “De Volks-Hoop” (“The People’s Hope”) for the employment opportunities and uses for agricultural surplus that it would provide. An urban public transportation concession Nellmapius negotiated used draft animals and fodder from farmers long after other technologies made beasts of burden obsolete.
Second, agricultural surplus channeled into liquor contributed to the proletarianization of the migrant mineworkers who made the fortunes of the Randlords, consolidating for a time the interests of diverse classes, including the uitlander industrialists (in mining and other sectors) who had flocked to the city, petty bourgeois liquor purveyors, and the Calvinist Transvaal agriculturalist burghers (citizens). The product was not for white consumption ; it was of such poor quality that for a time any poor-quality liquor was known as “Nellmapius” or “Mapius.” But it guaranteed a market for agricultural surplus, and by integrating migrant workers as consumers contributed to the creation of a more easily managed and wage-reliant proletariat. Although concerns about public unrest, social disorder, absenteeism, and the changing demands of deep-level mining would mean that the various class positions shifted in relation to alcohol, it is nonetheless fair to say that the kinds of cheap alcohol Nellmapius created were crucial to the making of the Witwatersrand.
It was a dream of Nellmapius’s to establish a farm in his new adopted home, and when he found willing sellers in the Erasmus family—among the first Voortrekker families to settle the area—he seized the opportunity, naming the tract of land along the Hennops River “Irene” after his daughter, herself named after the Greek goddess of peace. On the farm, he experimented on a grand scale with fruit trees, grain, cattle grazing, and the conservation of indigenous animals. After Nellmapius’s death in 1893, the farm was sold to the van der Byl family in a liquidation effort to settle his estate. They run it to this day. Irene Dairy Farm may be the most salient and enduring testament to Nellmapius’s legacy, but it might suggest that his contribution to the Transvaal’s economy was primarily agrarian. Yet Nellmapius contributed in other, arguably more important, ways, not only by conducting business and brokering deals, but also by supporting the profitability of Boer agriculture, enabling the ZAR to quell native resistance, and intoxicating workers to the point of proletarianization. [6]
I have argued elsewhere (Raidoo 2020) that bucolic architectural aesthetics follow a pattern already established in the literature of South African settler colonialism (Coetzee 1988) : they exalt white activity to the exclusion of Black presence and labor. The stories settlers tell themselves about themselves in estates like Southdowns are, as Raymond Williams put it, “a myth functioning as a memory” (Williams 1973, p. 43). The kind of “country life” depicted in Southdowns did not exist separate from urban industrial centers. Rather than urban excess having encroached on agriculture, city and country—industrial and pastoral—had a functional relationship in which the use of agricultural surplus provided not only the raw materials for industrial production but also the tools for making a proletariat for extractive mining industries. The “city farm” is then perhaps not really a novel form. The selective retelling of white agriculture makes Southdowns marketable through a kind of pastoral “heritage,” which people like Elmarie appear to be aware is not a life to which non-white South Africans aspire. It may be, as the website says, that Southdowns “is the perfect location for professionals who enjoy the farm living but need the fast pace of the city,” but many of Irene’s earlier white inhabitants were already plenty cosmopolitan, albeit in their own ways.
If Southdowns is “a piece of the past” revivified for the future, one should ask which piece it is, and which pieces have been left in the past, especially as post-productivist pressures have forced the conversion of agricultural land to residential uses in order to make the former viable.
Bibliography
- Coetzee, J. M. 1988. White Writing : On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, New Haven : Yale University Press.
- Jenkins, Elwyn. 2007. Falling into Place : The Story of Modern South African Place Names, Claremont : David Philip.
- Kaye, Helga. 1978. The Tycoon & The President : The Life and Times of Alois Hugo Nellmapius, 1847–1893, Johannesburg : Macmillan South Africa.
- Raidoo, Renugan. 2020. “The Unruly in the Anodyne : Nature in Gated Communities”, in N. Falkof and C. van Staden (eds.), Anxious Joburg : The Inner Lives of a Global South City, Johannesburg : Wits University Press, pp. 132–151.
- Spocter, Manfred. 2016. “Non-Metropolitan Gated Retirement Communities in the Western Cape”, Urban Forum, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 211–228. DOI : 10.1007/s12132-016-9275-y.
- Van Onselen, Charles. 2001. New Babylon, New Nineveh : Everyday Life on the Witwatersrand 1886–1914, Johannesburg : Jonathan Ball.
- Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City, London : Chatto & Windus.
