Gerard Moerdijk was born in 1890 on a farm near Nylstroom in the Transvaal to Dutch immigrant parents and was interned as a child in a British concentration camp during the Anglo-Boer War. He trained at the Architectural Association in London and studied further in France and Italy, becoming the first South African Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects. His practice was mostly ecclesiastical — more than eighty churches for the Dutch Reformed Church across South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe — alongside civic commissions such as the Johannesburg railway station, the Reserve Bank at Bloemfontein and the Merensky Library at the University of Pretoria. His largest and most consequential work, the Voortrekker Monument outside Pretoria, occupied him for over a decade and became, on its 1949 opening, the central shrine of Afrikaner nationalist memory. He died in Nylstroom in 1958.
