Spirn writes that: "The language of landscape is our native language ... Humans touched, saw, heard, smelled, tasted, lived in, and shaped landscapes before the species had words to describe what it did. Landscapes were the first human texts, read before the invention of other signs and symbols ... The Language of landscape can be spoken, written, read, and imagined" (Pg 15). I found this passage to be particularly powerful, the thought that we as humans have been able to influence and leave our mark on a landscape ever since our beginning. What is more interesting is the notion that we have been able to do this even before we actually had a fully evolved descriptive language. What this led me to thinking is that every landscape that has had humans living on it therefore has a story to be told, and at least part of this story can be read by some form of study or examination of the landscape.
This leads me neatly on to my next point, as brought about by Beningfield's writing. She states that Nelson Mandela said during his inauguration speech on 10 May 1994: "To my compatriots, I have no hesitation in saying that each one of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the Bushveld" (Pg 1). It is this inextricable linking of people with the landscape, and particularly the soil, that makes the suffering and oppression that is represented by the land all the more important. Furthermore, what Mandela effectively says is that we are the landscape that we inhabit.
Beningfield then talks about the Constitutional Court of South Africa in the foreword of her book and how it makes her feel: "It is something much deeper, I respond to my own question, more intimate, more related to how I imagine myself as a human being and as a South African. The answer, I continue, is that when I walk up to my Chambers I feel at a deeply subliminal level different to the way I feel in almost any other part of the country. I don't feel I am a white man in a white area, or a white man in a black area. At last, I say, I am just a person going to work in a zone of South Africa that is both historically and imaginatively free" (Pg x). I was actually fortunate enough to have been to the Court house this summer during my travels, while researching the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its workings. The court building is absolutely magnificent in a very unorthodox way, it is a combination of an incredibly modern building, an old Boer fort and the apartheid era prison. Not only is the actual building interesting but so is the landscape around it; it is situated atop a hill with a fairly commanding view of the surrounding area. The constitutional Court house also happens to be located near Hillbrow, which is a fairly poor area of Johannesburg and thus it is surrounded by a number of low-cost high rise apartment buildings. Beningfield describes the area around the court: "Hillbrow, perhaps the most diversely African area on the continent; or from the spaciously tree-and gardened homes of the Northern Suburbs, not a poor person in sight; or from the huge cluster of concrete civic buildings of Bureaucratic Braamfontein" (Pg x). It is these multitude of different landscapes that represent South Africa, and the Constitutional Court, which is located in the middle of them all, represents the coming together of the new South Africa.
What also really interests me about this site is the history which it has seen, and the resulting 'scars' that have been left on the landscape. Yet every one of these scars is an important part of South Africa and its development to the liberal, democracy which it has become today. In other words, it is the current landscape of South Africa, which has so many throwback to its bygone troubled past (for example the old prison that held both Ghandi and Mandela) that has led to the formation of this "Rainbow Nation."
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| The Constitutional Court of South Africa, Braamfontein. www.lloydslaw.co.za/ www.constructionweekonline.com |
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