Voortrekker Monument: Afrikaner Memory, Architecture and a Contested Past

On a hilltop at the southern entrance to Pretoria stands a massive block of granite, roughly 40 metres high, ringed by a wall carved with 64 ox-wagons. The Voortrekker Monument was built to honour the Voortrekkers, the Dutch-speaking farmers who left the British-ruled Cape Colony from the 1830s and moved into the interior of southern Africa. It is one of the most striking buildings in the country and one of the most argued about. For many Afrikaners it remains a memorial to their ancestors’ courage; for many other South Africans it stands for the nationalism that built apartheid. Visiting it well means seeing it as both architecture and argument. On Day 8 of our Southern Africa Tour, the group travels from Johannesburg to Pretoria to visit the monument.

The Great Trek: what the monument commemorates

From the mid-1830s, thousands of Dutch-speaking frontier farmers, later known as the Voortrekkers, left the eastern Cape with their families, servants and livestock and headed north and east across the Orange River. Historians give different reasons for the move, and different sources weigh them differently: dissatisfaction with British rule and policy on the frontier, pressure on land, conflict with Xhosa communities in the eastern Cape, and the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, which affected the farmers’ labour. Estimates of the numbers who left vary too, from around 6,000 Boers with roughly as many Khoikhoi and Black servants, to more than 15,000. The term Great Trek itself was applied later, by nationalist historians.

The trekkers moved into lands already occupied by African kingdoms and communities, and the trek brought them into conflict with several of them. The episode that came to dominate Afrikaner memory took place in Natal in 1838. In February that year, the Voortrekker leader Piet Retief and around 70 of his men were killed at uMgungundlovu, the royal settlement of the Zulu king Dingane, and days later Zulu forces attacked Voortrekker camps, killing hundreds of people, many of them women and children. The circumstances, including whether Dingane had signed a land grant, remain debated; many historians doubt the grant existed.

Blood River, Ncome and 16 December

On 16 December 1838, a Voortrekker force of about 470 under Andries Pretorius, drawn up in a defensive circle of 64 wagons on the bank of the Ncome River, was attacked by a Zulu army estimated at between 10,000 and 20,000. More than 3,000 Zulu soldiers were killed; no Voortrekkers died and three were wounded. Before the battle, the Voortrekkers had made a vow to God that if they were victorious they would keep the day holy. Afrikaners came to call the place Blood River, after the river that ran red; in isiZulu it remains the Ncome.

The date has had many names. It became a public holiday called Dingaan’s Day in 1910, was renamed the Day of the Covenant, or Day of the Vow, in 1952, and in 1995, in the first years of democracy, it became the Day of Reconciliation. The change in name is itself a short history of how South Africa has tried to remember the same events in different ways.

Building the monument, 1937 to 1949

Paul Kruger first proposed a monument to the trekkers on 16 December 1888, but it took another half century to happen. The first sod was turned on 13 July 1937. On 16 December 1938, the centenary of Blood River, the cornerstone was laid by three descendants of Voortrekker leaders. That centenary, the Eeufees, was a turning point in its own right. A re-enactment trek of ox-wagons set off from Cape Town in August 1938 and converged on Monument Hill in December, drawing huge crowds along the way, and historians at Stellenbosch University describe it as a rallying point for the Afrikaner nationalism that helped bring the National Party to power ten years later.

The National Party won the 1948 election and began to build apartheid. On 16 December 1949, its leader, Prime Minister D. F. Malan, inaugurated the finished monument. It cost about £360,000, most of it paid by the government. Few monuments anywhere are so closely bound to a political moment.

Reading the architecture

The architect was Gerard Moerdijk, and the design has been compared with several models: the Völkerschlachtdenkmal in Leipzig, the dome of Les Invalides in Paris, and Egyptian temples, which Moerdijk had visited. Some writers note a zigzag motif taken from the stonework of Great Zimbabwe, though one historian of the monument, Anton van Vollenhoven, stresses that there is no proof of any deeper intent. Outside, statues of the leaders Piet Retief, Andries Pretorius and Hendrik Potgieter and an unknown leader stand at the corners, and at the entrance a bronze by Anton van Wouw shows a Voortrekker mother with her children. Carved black wildebeest on the monument are commonly read as representing the dangers of Africa, and the mother as the triumph of what the builders called civilisation; that reading tells you a great deal about the world view the monument was built to express.

Inside is the Hall of Heroes, lined with a marble frieze of 27 panels, 92 metres long, telling the story of the trek from 1835 to 1852. The panels were carved from Italian marble in a studio in Florence to designs by South African sculptors including Hennie Potgieter, Laurika Postma, Frikkie Kruger and Peter Kirchhoff. Below, in a lower hall, is a cenotaph inscribed Ons vir jou, Suid-Afrika, “We for thee, South Africa”, from the old national anthem. The building is designed so that at noon on 16 December a beam of sunlight falls through an opening in the dome onto those words.

The details reward a close look. The frieze is Quercetta marble, carved in the Florence studio of the sculptor Romano Romanelli at a cost of about £30,000, and eight of its panels were still unfinished when the monument was inaugurated in 1949. Light inside the building is filtered through yellow glass from Belgium, giving the halls a warm, subdued glow, and a flame has burned in a niche in the cenotaph hall since 1938.

A contested monument

The monument has always meant different things to different people, and the disagreement is part of what a visitor sees. Its supporters, many of them Afrikaners, regard it as a memorial to ancestors who endured great hardship, and as a building of real architectural and artistic ambition. Its critics see it differently. The art historians Elizabeth Rankin and Rolf Michael Schneider, in a 2020 study of the frieze, argue that the monument played an active role in the development of apartheid. Some groups have objected that the monument portrays Black people as barbarians, and that it tells one people’s story as though it were the whole of the country’s history.

Even so, the debate has mostly been about how the monument should be read, rather than whether it should stand. In 2014 the politician Mmusi Maimane, writing after a visit, argued that it should be experienced not only as a celebration of one people but alongside the suffering of others. In 2015, during the national debate over colonial statues, the monument’s heritage foundation offered to take in statues removed from elsewhere, while saying it would prefer them to stay where they were.

The monument is run today as a private not-for-profit organisation, receiving no state funding, and around 200,000 to 250,000 people visit each year. In July 2011 it was declared a National Heritage Site, the first from Afrikaner heritage to receive that status.

What has changed since 1994?

A great deal, around the monument rather than within it. In 2002 Nelson Mandela visited the monument at the invitation of its management, a widely noted gesture of reconciliation. The frieze and the cenotaph remain as they were, but the site now sits within a deliberately wider landscape of memory. On the next hill, Salvokop, the government built Freedom Park, a memorial to those who died in South Africa’s conflicts and in the struggle for freedom. On 16 December 2011, the Day of Reconciliation, a road linking the two sites, the Reconciliation Road, was opened. Far away in KwaZulu-Natal, on the east bank of the Ncome River, a museum was opened in 1999 to tell the story of the battle from the Zulu side, its buildings shaped like the horns of a Zulu battle formation.

Is there a lift, and how much climbing is involved?

Yes, there is a lift as well as stairs to the viewing gallery at the top, which looks out over Pretoria and the surrounding hills. Expect some steps between the different levels of the building, from the Hall of Heroes down to the cenotaph hall and the museum in the basement. The tour as a whole is rated Level 2 (Moderate), which means managing three to five hours of activity a day and walking up to eight kilometres on uneven ground.

Will we see the sunbeam fall on the cenotaph?

No. The beam of sunlight reaches the cenotaph only at noon on 16 December, when the sun is at the right angle, and the tour visits Pretoria in late August or early September. You can still see the opening in the dome and the inscription the light is aimed at, and picture the effect for yourself.

What else is on the monument site?

More than many visitors expect. The basement houses a museum of Voortrekker life, including a series of 15 tapestries of the trek, designed by the artist W. H. Coetzer, commissioned by an Afrikaner women’s organisation in 1952 and completed in 1960. The grounds include a Garden of Remembrance, Fort Schanskop, one of the forts built around Pretoria in 1897, and a nature reserve of more than three square kilometres. Whether there is time for the fort depends on the day’s schedule; your Tour Leader will advise.

Kruger House and the rest of the Pretoria day

The day also includes Kruger House, the modest home in central Pretoria where Paul Kruger lived from 1884 to 1900, while he was president of the South African Republic. Kruger left Pretoria in 1900 as British forces advanced during the South African War, went into exile in Europe, and died in Switzerland in 1904. His house, a museum since 1934, still has his state railway coach and the pair of stone lions given to him in 1896 by the mining magnate Barney Barnato. The group also has lunch in the city.

Pretoria itself carries the trek in its name. It was founded in 1855 by Marthinus Wessel Pretorius and named after his father, Andries Pretorius, the commander at Blood River. Today it is South Africa’s administrative capital, within the wider City of Tshwane metropolitan municipality.

The Voortrekker Monument on the Southern Africa route

The Pretoria day follows directly after the Johannesburg city tour, which includes Constitution Hill, where the Constitutional Court stands on the site of an old prison. The pairing is striking: two days, two very different ways of building a monument to a nation. One was designed to tell the story of a single people; the other to house a court that serves everyone. At the end of the journey, the group goes to Kliptown in Soweto, where the Freedom Charter was adopted in 1955, offering a third way of imagining the country.

For the longer history behind all three, our history of South Africa for travellers is a good place to start, and our overview of the Southern Africa cultural journey shows where the Pretoria day falls on the route.

Standing in the Hall of Heroes, it is worth taking time over the frieze, not only to follow the story it tells but to notice whose story it is and how the other people in it are shown. Then step outside and look across to the next hill, where Freedom Park tells a different one. Few places in South Africa make the arguments about its past so visible, or invite visitors so clearly to make up their own minds.