The Voortrekker monument – built in the forties by the nationalist government to commemorate the Great Trek of the Afrikaners who had set out from the Cape to settle in this harsh heartland and found the racist South African state – is perhaps the most nauseating and overwhelming depiction of white colonial domination over black indigenous subjects ever made.  A long set of stone steps lead to a rounded courtyard planted with South Africa flora and surrounded by a circular wall on which sixty-four wooden wagons are carved in granite to recreate the laagers (wagon circles) trekkers had used to defend against attacking tribes.  In the center of the courtyard stands a massive rectangle jutting into the pure blue sky, two sets of stairs at sharp right angles on either side lead up to a high entrance, four colonizing colossuses with big hats and big guns stand sentry on the four corners like jackal-headed gods before an Egyptian tomb.  But, then, in the center, between the sets of stairs, dwarfed by the massive men, framed from a distance as you look through the entrance of the wagon wall, is a woman.  A bonneted mother in bronze, tall and strong, her arms wrapped around the two children at her skirts gazes, head held high, onto the Veldt plains in the distance.  Like Rome’s she-wolf she stands protecting her own, nursing the twin founders of the racist South African state.  Who is this settler woman and why did they place her here, at front and center, of this colonial memorial?
            Inside twenty-seven bas-relief panels depicting the Great Trek wind around the monuments interior four walls like a tragic comic strip.  Austere top hats, straight-pressed pants, waistcoat and whip amid bonnet and dowdy skirts gather in the opening scenes, leave the Eastern Cape, embark into the open, form laagers to fend-off warring tribes, lured and killed with false treaties, vengeance on Blood River, land secured, trekkers settle and God smiles down on the stubborn and merciless as sunlight shines down through roof slits forty meters above.  If the linear realism of the figures on the dark stone leave any doubt, the inscriptions below the panels don’t.  There’s one panel, in particular.  The men have hunched backs, disheveled clothing, heads hang in despair, their leaders murdered and another battle to fight.  But the women by their sides “spur them on to persevere.”  Seems an oddly constructed sentence, like the translation from the Afrikaans is off the mark.  I was surprised that so many of these scenes had women – cleaning and re-loading muskets, spurring men on, pillars in times of crisis and bereavement. The mother and children stand as central figures in the shelter of a solid stone enclave protected on all sides by giants with guns; an homage to female strength inscribed in racist stone.   There is always something behind the image, a human behind art, a truth behind fictions.  I left with no answers, only more questions, thinking of the cold stone, the Veldt views, and, most of all, of the boervrou in bronze.