called Yass-Canberra as the future capital site. The planning went out for international competition in 1911, which was won by an American architect of the Prairie School, Walter Burley Griffin. It was a great design of monumental axes and spatial proportions, but made with an explicitly democratic layout in mind. There was a ‘land axis’, from Capitol Hill and the government district across a built lake made from a dammed-up river, to the city and a hill behind it, and a crossing ‘water axis’. The main building of the government district was to be the Parliament, flanked by residences of the governor-general and (on its right side) the prime minister, with ministries below. At the top of the hill was not to be a building of political power but a ‘Capitol’ of the people, ‘for popular reception and ceremonial, or for housing archives and commemorating Australian achievements’.20 The residential part of the city was laid out according to garden-city ideas.
Like L’Enfant’s great plan for Washington, Griffin’s suffered for decades from the pettiness and parsimony of politicians – and from the Depression of the 1930s. In the 1950s interest was revived, and the planners found that the Griffin plan could not be improved, but needed implementation.21 With its ample use of natural space and its low-rise, unpretentious architecture, Canberra has managed to be at the same time monumental and popular. Its 1988 Parliament building has become a democratic icon, partly built into Parliament Hill, with a sloping grass lawn on its back on which citizens could walk and play (at least before 2001), with a low-slung front of modernist columns, dominated by a huge national flagpole.22
Canberra also features, most prominently, one of the strangest monuments in the world. The land axis from the flagpole and Parliament across the lake continues into the ANZAC Parade, a ceremonial military parade ground (laid out in 1965) ending in a huge part-Egyptian funeral War Memorial (of 1941), later embellished by commemorations of later imperial wars in which Australia voluntarily participated, like the Vietnam War.
It is not the World War I memorial that is so extraordinary, but the ANZAC myth and its iconographic domination of Canberra. ‘ANZAC’ refers to the Australia New Zealand Army Corps, which volunteered to fight for the British Empire in World War I. Its main exploit was a disastrous attack on the Ottoman Empire, two oceans and a continent away, at Gallipoli in 1915. On grounds beyond reason, this military adventure and bloody defeat has become a ‘baptism of fire’ of Australian and New Zealand national manhood, annually commemorated on 25 April.*
Pretoria had been the capital of the Boer Republic of Transvaal, which the British Empire had finally subdued after a gruesome war. In 1910 it was to become the main capital of the British-Boer Union of South Africa, but sharing functions with British Cape Town almost 1,500 kilometres away, as the site of Parliament and Bloemfontein, the capital of the other Boer Republic, the Orange Free State, allocated the Supreme Court. Pretoria, named after a Boer commander and conqueror, kept its Boer insignia, the republican Raadzaal, becoming a provincial assembly, in the Kerkplein with equestrian statues of Pretorius Senior, the founder, and Junior, a Boer president, with the Boer president Kruger standing in another central square.
The new White settler union got its own monumental executive, on a hill on the outskirts of the city. Herbert Baker, one of the Empire’s leading architects, designed a huge, Roman-inspired building, of two wings with dome-capped towers, connected by a semi-circular colonnade, symbolizing the union of the two settler nations, and with a classical amphitheatre in front of its centre, for political rhetoric.† After World War II, Pretoria got its second landmark monument, the Voortrekker (Pioneers) Monument commemorating the Boer exodus in the 1830s from what they perceived as the too ‘negro-friendly’ British-ruled Cape Colony, and a local Boer victory over the Zulus. It is a huge (40 metres tall, wide and deep) granite building with references to Egyptian temples as well as the Halicarnassus Mausoleum, surrounded by fifty-four ox-wagons in stone, and containing a Heroes’ Hall and a Cenotaph Hall.
Pretoria was a White Afrikaner city, although by 1950, 132,000 ‘Europeans’ were served by 25,000 native domestic servants.23 In 1994, however, the racist settler state crumbled and South Africa mutated into a democratic ex-colonial state, an epochal popular moment to which we shall return below.
Iberian Secessions
The ethno-cultural context and the political process of Latin American nation-states seceding from their Hispanic and Lusitanian motherlands are quite varied. However, in contrast to the states of the British secession, their new nation-state capitals are all former imperial centres. This reflects a different pattern of settlement, more directly empire-organized – like, later, British India and French West and Central Africa. Adventurers, of course, abounded: from the original Spanish South American conquistadors to their explorers of North America and the Brazilian bandeirantes going west, but religious dissenters, racist purists (like the Boers) and convicts were marginal and/or discrete.
Iberian colonization was urban-based. The first thing the conquistadors did after conquering a territory was to found a city. The cities of Hispanic America were laid out according to the rules of the imperial Leyes de Indias of 1573, in a grid pattern with four straight streets radiating from a central Plaza Mayor. After the plaza, the main buildings should start with the church or monastery – close to but preferably not directly in the plaza, rather by an access of its own – and then the royal house of power, according to the city’s rank in the imperial hierarchy, and the cabildo (municipal council). The sites around the main plaza should not be left to private individuals but preserved for the state and the Church, though merchants’ houses and stalls could be allowed. They were often used for a bishop’s palace and sometimes for an office of the Inquisition. The founder’s mansion had a right to be around and other principal settlers could be allocated central plots, but for the rest, settlers’ sites were allocated by lot. The Plaza Mayor, also known as Plaza de Armas (as a parade ground), was usually the central market, with rows of shops and stalls; nearby there should be military barracks, a hospital and a prison.24
Brazilian urbanism was originally less centrally regulated, and Rio de Janeiro, although of sixteenth-century vintage, had been the colonial capital for only half a century when the Napoleonic Wars in Europe instigated the national issue in Ibero-America.
However, while there was an important urban continuity, national independence in Hispanic America was established through very convoluted politics and only after protracted, devastating wars. The process started with the fall of the imperial monarchy at home, through a forced abdication of the Bourbon king and a Bonapartist usurpation of the throne. But Napoleon’s reach never crossed the Atlantic, except for the Caribbean islands. From the Americas the events must have appeared confusing as well as disturbing.
In August of 1808 a pack of issues of the Gaceta de Madrid arrived in Quito, telling, at the same time, of the uprising at Aranjuez, Spain, through which the prime minister of King Carlos IV had been fired and his son Fernando VII ascended to the throne; the son’s abdication in favour of his father; the latter’s transfer of the Crown to Joseph Bonaparte; the French occupation; and the Spanish insurrection against it.*
Legitimate imperial rule was suspended. In this situation the municipal councils, the cabildos of the major cities, came to the fore. National independence was not yet in the mainstream. Cabildo power ranged from electing a new viceroy in Mexico to ‘revolutionary councils’ (juntas) claiming temporary governmental power in the name of the legitimate king.† Hispanic America thereby became implicated in the convoluted vicissitudes of Spanish politics for the next twenty years. Anti- and post-Napoleonic Spanish politics added another conflictual dimension: liberalism or absolutism?
The first moves toward independence in Hispanic America began in 1808, upon news of the lapse of a legitimate monarchy. The final decisive battle against the Spanish imperial army took place in Ayacucho, Peru, sixteen years later. Callao, the port city of vice-regal Lima, surrendered only in January 1826. In Mexico the wars of independence started in 1810, under the leadership of
