ABSTRACT
In Pretoria in the early 1980s, the apartheid régime erected a giant bronze head of Prime Minister “Hans” Strijdom, immediate predecessor to Hendrik Verwoerd (1958) and-together with Verwoerd and the first Nationalist Prime Minister, D. F. Malan (1948)—one of the three founders of the apartheid republic. The giant head, next to the Brasilia-style opera house and a Manhattanese banking tower-the first skyscraper of the executive capital-faced a fountain surmounted by a flight of bronze horses, the Horses of the Sun. This grand mise-en-scène, somewhat out of place next to a then derelict district of shops and dusty arcades, flanked by a cheap department store, and sited at the crossing of two avenues of no particular character, was meant to honor a father, a founding figure. In the days of apartheid, downtown Pretoria, deserted at night by her vast population of white civil servants and her even vaster population of transient black workers, could never identify with the gloomy head, left to gaze sourly onto an expanse of granite. The staging was grandiose but otiose. This was not a place of foundation or of public deliberation. It was Spartan, closed in on itself and deaf to the world, decidedly not Athenian.
