The extract above is taken from the Australian cultural theorist McKenzie Wark’s wonderfully playful essay, ‘Telegram from Nowhere’.1 Among many other things, it addresses issues of distance, globalisation and the speed and form of contemporary communications. Clearly, one man’s here is another’s there; one man’s summer is another’s winter; one man’s night is another’s day, and so on.2
I invoke Wark because the question of ‘here’ versus ‘there’ (or ‘here and there’, if you prefer) isn’t simply a matter of geography when it comes to the knotty question of gender, especially not in Africa, or in South Africa specifically. It is also, and more deeply than one imagines, a question of position. Feminist writers bell hooks and Audre Lorde have long pointed out that the experiences and histories of black and white working-class women in the United States are insurmountably different, and that mainstream (read: second wave) feminism often neglected these differences, perpetuating the very exclusion they sought to redress. One of fourth wave feminism’s major challenges to previous feminist discourses is its willingness to confront ‘difference’ in multiple ways, which makes this book particularly meaningful for those of us in the South African context. As Elasaid Munro writes:
Although I’m not native (pun intended) to South Africa, having been interested for nearly 30 years in the power of identity politics/constructs to influence, shape, and even distort the architectural imagination, it’s a little ironic to have wound up in a place where suddenly they all converge: race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, culture, creed. Johannesburg’s mayor, Mpho Parks Tau, recently reminded me that ‘Jo’burg’ is a city of ‘difference by design’.4 Here, the discourses of inequality begin and end with race and class, which in South Africa have historically meant the same thing. Intersectionality, in this place, is not an add-on or a latent realisation. The stark truth is that white women and black women occupy radically different positions along the power spectrum, not just economically. Although the situation may be more nuanced now than it was some 30 years ago, race remains the dominant prism through which gender is viewed, constructed, and experienced.
At first glance, architecture seems an odd discipline to offer reflection to anyone interested in the complex question of identity. Issues of identity have historically been seen as marginal, even insignificant, in the face of more ‘grounded’ concerns such as technology, social responsibility, sustainability, and so on. Indeed, one of the most striking statements in A Gendered Profession’s call for chapters was, ‘For a profession that claims to be so concerned with the needs of society, the continuing gender imbalance in architectural education and practice is a dirty subject. Dirty, because it’s been stagnant for some 30 years’.5 To speak about identity (race, gender, culture or otherwise) in South African architectural discourse is odder still. Everyone knows about the shameful collusion of architecture and apartheid: a singularly twisted relationship between a discipline and the society it serves. It takes some nerve, or balls, to carve up an entire country: an experiment in socio-spatial engineering/planning on a scale that has not been seen since. In its aftermath, post-1994 (the first elections in which all South Africans participated), architecture and the built environment professions are struggling to overcome two sets of scars – the physical ones ‘out there’ in South Africa’s ever-segregated, ever-divided cities and towns, and the internal scars, deep within the psyche of the profession(s), harder to see and sense, and therefore to ‘treat’.
‘Transformation’ is the fashionable term given to the attempt to undo the collusion I’ve just mentioned. It’s the buzzword on everyone’s lips, covering a whole range of complex, difficult questions around power, identity, and canon. Yet few of us even know how to begin articulating, let alone transforming, the core issues at stake. In this chapter, I am interested in looking at the effects of a ‘double whammy’: race and gender, but in a rather different way. I’m interested in looking at gender through an overlooked and possibly little understood lens: culture. Rather than view gender and race as categories of inequality that can only be addressed statistically – i.e. greater numbers of women and blacks will de facto ‘transform’ the profession – I’m interested in looking at the ways in which gender and race might function as creative categories of exploration, particularly in the work of students.
A few statistics may be helpful. At the last census count, in 2011, South Africa’s population was approximately 52 million.6 Black South Africans make up 80% of the population. In 2016, the total number of registered architects in South Africa is 8,482, of whom 2,290 (27%) are black.7 This equates to approximately one architect per 6,000 people, black or white. Incidentally, the appropriate term in this context for a non-white architect is PDI: a Previously Disadvantaged Individual, which includes persons of ‘Coloured’ or Indian descent. The number of women practitioners (who, in this context, are also considered PDIs, although not necessarily in the strictest legal sense) is almost equal to the number of PDIs: 1,765 (20%).
Where race and gender intersect, however, the numbers drop dramatically. Of the 8,482 registered architects in South Africa, only 254 (3%) are black or PDI women. For white female architects, the picture is slightly different. Relative to the size of the industry, many of the country’s leading architects are women (Kate Otten, Sarah Calburn, Ora Joubert, Anya van der Merwe, Hannah le Roux, Trudi Groenewald, Deborah Preller, to name but a few). Anecdotally at least, affordable childcare and cheap domestic help are key contributing factors for (white) women seeking to manage professional and personal lives in tandem. In comparison, in the UK, with a population of 63 million, the ratio of architects to the general population is around one per 2,000, roughly three times as many. Less than 1% of all architects in the UK are black (black Britons make up 3% of the total population). More tellingly, according to the latest statistics from the Architects’ Journal’s 2015 Women in Architecture report,8 more than 50% of all architecture students are female, yet only 12% of chartered architects at partner level are women. The statistics boil down to this: it’s tough to be a black architect either in the UK or in South Africa. It’s marginally more common to be a woman architect in both places, but it’s probably toughest of all to be black and female.
One striking casualty of the oversimplification of race to the binaries of ‘black’ and ‘white’9 has been the relegation of culture to the side lines of enquiry, where it sits looking rather forlornly at those other more graspable, more powerful tropes of ‘difference’: race and class. Is there a culture of gender? Or, put more eloquently, does gender in this context have a specifically creative dimension from which the imagination might feed? What are the different and differing expressions of identity constructed around the feminine in Africa that might hold resonance for architects, male and female, black and white? It’s perhaps too early to say exactly what differences race, class and gender differentials make, particularly at the level of design. But these differences are there. It’s our task to work out how to see them.
‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’10
I wrestled for hours before settling on the title of this chapter. It strikes an insensitive note on so many fronts, not least because of the image it brings to mind: that of a teenage Britney Spears staring provocatively down the camera lens, hardly a poster child for any sort of equality, let alone gender.
Hit Me Baby One More Time is an attempt to look at the complex question of gender in Africa, and in South Africa specifically, in terms of the other positions of race and class that operate in Africa to such debilitating effect.
It is divided into two parts: Works and Words. Works takes the format of a group interview between two young women, Lucille Jacobs and Onthatile Makgalemela, who were both students of mine in the first year of a rather risky experiment: bringing the unit system way of teaching to Africa. The interview was recorded by a single camera (man)11 and is available on Vimeo (URL supplied in references).12 We discuss their final year projects, both of which addressed the complex question of gender in direct – if not always wholly successful – ways.
Words, on the other hand, attempts to situate their work in the broader cultural and political context of contemporary South African architectural education. For decades, the dominant pedagogical framework has been scientific: indeed, one of the key ‘outcomes’ of the South African Council for the Architectural Profession (SACAP) guidelines for accreditation is described thus:
I would argue that the use of the term ‘scientific’ is problematic, particularly in light of South Africa’s historical experiment with apartheid, the ‘science of race’, which wrought such spatial havoc on its citizens. The conclusion draws on the premise stated at the beginning of the chapter – that gender and race are rich, complex and imaginative sources from which to draw new imaginings, spatialities, and potentially new understandings of architecture. It argues for a different approach within education to allow a more nuanced, more profound transformation to emerge. South Africa is possibly one of the most interesting places to examine tropes of difference, partly out of historical necessity, but also out of contemporary need.
Part 1: Works
International field trips for students, in the context of South African architectural education, are relatively rare but in March 2015, Unit 3 at the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, secured funding to travel to Zanzibar, a three-and-a-half hour flight from Johannesburg via Dar es Salaam, to immerse ourselves in what is possibly the most hybrid place on earth.13 The choice of destination was not accidental. As we stated in our introduction to the Unit:
Lucille and Onthatile chose to look specifically at gender in the context of a gender-segregated society, but in very different ways. Lucille’s project, entitled The Control Room 24/7/365 investigates migration and immigration through a specific group of women: drug ‘mules’, who are often young women who leave their home country carrying drugs on their person, lured by the promise of jobs and wealth overseas, who are caught by the authorities and detained. Zanzibar has become a shadowy detention point for these women who often spend years in limbo, unable to return, yet without anywhere to go. The proposed project is an allegorical investigation into issues of gender, femininity, control and release.
Onthatile’s project, The Gender Institute, looks at gender on a very different scale, exploring the varying degree to which women in Islamic societies are deemed ‘free’, and the varying interpretations of ‘freedom’. In Zanzibar, heavily influenced by ‘outsiders’ and multiple cultures for centuries, a looser form of Islam dominates, where the rub between religion and the state; between public and private; between differing customs and values, has long been subject to negotiation. The proposal looks at the idea of the creole for its inspiration.
Part 2: Words
Oddly enough, given its historical struggles with identity, South Africa is an unusual place to attempt the sort of experimental and speculative work that might one day lead us to different conclusions about the relevance of identity to architectural culture. At least in the context of education, the bent is conservative, Eurocentric, heritage-obsessed, and often patronisingly ‘socially relevant’, though it’s hard to unpack what that actually means. Setting up Africa’s only postgraduate school of architecture (GSA) afforded us the opportunity to test new ways of teaching, structuring the curriculum, and – possibly most interesting of all – new relationships between students and tutors that saw both as active participants in an ongoing transformative pedagogical experiment. In 2015, we introduced the unit system method of teaching (which we rather cheekily named Unit System Africa), first pioneered by Alvin Boyarsky at the Architectural Association in the 1970s. The now familiar model of competitive, year-long specialist ‘studios’ centred around a range of perspectives has, for the first time, I would argue, provided the necessary space to facilitate diverse conversations, including those around race, gender and identity, which may yet bear exceptional fruit. In particular, the emphasis on diverse working methods – whether drawings, models, films, webdocs – as a means of exploration rather than explanation has opened up the possibility of using architectural education as a site of speculation and not simply (as if anything here is ever simple) as a means of problem solving. To my surprise, the shift in emphasis from finding a solution to appreciating the role of process in design education – slow, fluid, and often non-linear – has provided the safe space of speculation and conversation I mentioned. In particular, it has opened the door for black and female students to participate more fully in the formation of a new language with which to articulate their ambitions and concerns.
To explain what I mean more fully by that, let me step sideways for a moment and speak not of architecture, but of writing. When the word ‘novel’ entered the languages of Europe, via Don Quixote (considered to be the first European novel), it had only the vaguest of meanings. It meant, as its name suggests, something new: a form of writing that was formless; that had no rules; that made up its own rules as it went along. It captured and represented the collision of a number of different forces: urbanisation, the spread of printing, and the availability of cheap paper, and it began the tradition of an intimate reading experience that has endured to this day. For cultures without the written word, like the majority of African cultures, that relationship between intimacy (the solitary act of reading or drawing) and performance (those aspects of oral storytelling and communal building) is one that we grapple with today. In the context of African schools, like it or not, staff and students must necessarily act simultaneously as interpreters and investigators, explaining a world that is often invisible to Western-trained ‘eyes’ both to themselves and others, yet at the same time exploring it in all its depth. It’s a difficult, complex task, and one that the speculative space of unit system teaching unexpectedly supports.
Using the drawing (or model, film, or text) in a new and speculative way seems to offer African students a way out. For me it represents a real triumph of will, not in the context of global speculation about architecture and architectural education, but in the context of Africa, which has never ‘deserved’ to be speculative. But it is precisely in the speculative, deeply explorative space of design research – or design as research – that the transformation of canon, experience, and the discipline at large seems most likely to occur. As can be seen (or heard) in the conversations with Onthatile and Lucille and in their drawings, the desire to explore a new relationship with architectural investigation is urgently felt. The South African writer Nadine Gordimer writes: ‘The nature of art in South Africa today is primarily determined by the conflict of material interests in South African society’.15 She could be speaking of architecture, literature, even music. Living in South Africa, it is difficult to ignore the historical impact of that conflict, but it is equally difficult not to see its transformational potential. In some senses, issues of gender may have ‘piggy backed’ the more overpowering tropes of race and class, but the urgency of finding new ways of seeing and shaping our cities, public spaces, and private dwellings has forced an opening in the discourses that cannot be closed. Every artist (and I use the word here in its broadest sense) has to struggle through Neruda’s ‘labyrinths of his chosen medium of expression’.16 In this sense, the young architects I teach are no different: they struggle with and through a language (architecture) that can powerfully reinforce hidden signs and assumptions of racial and cultural superiority, undermining the very task of transformation they have set out to achieve.
And so finally, to the trickiest trope of all: culture. The precise meaning of the word ‘culture’ is notoriously difficult to define. It is sometimes described as the sum total of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and includes all forms of cultural production, as well as the institutions that support, patronise, and disseminate it. ‘Development’ discourses generally privilege other indicators: economic, social, human rights, and so on, and fail to recognise the crucial role culture plays in underpinning, developing (no pun intended) and sustaining such efforts. The challenges facing African cities – or cities in the ‘developing’ world at large – are myriad and well documented: I would argue for a different engagement with culture: one that is creative, speculative and patient.