Masques, Monuments and Masons: The 1910 Pageant of the Union of South Africa

Establishing the Field

[Imperial] history is a fabric woven of self-reinforcing illusions. But above all, one illusion sustains it. This is the illusion of the theatre, and, more exactly, the unquestioned convention of the all-seeing spectator.

—Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay¹

In May 1910, South Africa celebrated the unification of two former Boer republics and two former British colonies, and the creation of a South African nation state. The celebrations led up to a national pageant staged in October of that year. The aim of this presentation was to propagate the concept of Union by urging “reconciliation” (in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902) between what were then considered two distinct “races” of English-speaking and Dutch-speaking South Africans. Furthermore these constitutive gestures marked the establishment of the Union of South Africa as a self-governing dominion within the British Empire—in other words a political and cultural configuration that was both national and imperial.

The cultural practices whereby the identities of nation-states and the authority of empires are “invented” or reinforced have been widely discussed over the past fifteen years, from the now classic texts of Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Terence Ranger in the early 1980s, to Homi K. Bhabha’s Nation and Narration (1990), Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993), and Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather (1995). ² Most recently in South Africa pioneering work has been done on the cultural activities that made up the 1952 Jan van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival, which argues that this commemorative celebration was designed to propagandize the apartheid state and the Afrikaner Nationalist Party that had come to power in 1948. ³ At the present moment, there is a burgeoning industry of research about the construction of identity in the post-1994 “new” South Africa. The field covers a wide range of interests including iconography, landscape and history, gender studies, museology, and theories of spatiality and performance.

Figure 1.

The 1910 Pageant of the Union of South Africa: Advertising Posters and Post Cards. Published with permission from the South African Library.

As Hobsbawm and Ranger have shown, newly created nation-states invent source-histories, myths, or genealogies for themselves in ways that enhance their particular identities. ⁴ At the moment of Union, the taste- and policy-makers of the new state were concerned to write an ameliorative and conciliatory history to justify the present moment. This ameliorative history would be located within the greater narrative of British imperial conquest, and within dominant myths of western Christian and evolutionary progress of the “races” of the world toward an Anglo-Saxon ideal. The question of “race” was at the time primarily understood as relations between the two dominant white groups: the English- and the Dutch-speaking settlers. Various “ethnic types” of South African blacks were in fact included in the 1910 Union Pageant as representatives of “primitive” and “pre-historical” South Africa; they were strictly graded within the typological and social-evolutionary discourses of the period, from “Bushmen” through “Hottentots” to “Basutos” and “Zulus.” They were, however, treated as outsiders to the actual moment of constitutional inauguration. The “Bushmen” and “Hottentots” were represented as historical peoples who were allegedly superseded, while the “Basutos” and “Zulus” were regarded as contemporary others with whom the state could negotiate. The Cape Moslem community, or “Cape Malays” as they were known, were grudgingly granted one historical episode in the pageant, depicting the arrival in the Cape of their spiritual leader in 1694. ⁵ Beyond this, the independent political and economic interests of black, “coloured,” and “Asian” South Africans were largely ignored. ⁶

The leadership in the pro-union cultural initiatives was mainly English-speaking and imperial. This leadership regarded the campaign for Union as directly analogous to a British imperial campaign for “closer union” between the colonies and dominions of the empire. The iconography, the rhetoric, and the tactics employed in propagating Union in South Africa matched, in many respects, that of the propagandists of an...