Gerard Moerdijk gave the Voortrekker Monument the plan of an Egyptian temple and the mass of a mausoleum: a windowless granite cube on a hilltop south of Pretoria, ringed by a laager of sixty-four stone ox-wagons, its walls carrying what is described as the world's largest marble frieze, twenty-seven panels telling the story of the Great Trek of 1835-1852. Building began in 1937 and the cornerstone was laid on 16 December 1938, the centenary of the Voortrekkers' victory at Blood River; the monument opened, on the same date, eleven years later in 1949. At its centre a cenotaph sits beneath a dome cut to let a shaft of sunlight cross the words 'Ons vir jou, Suid-Afrika' — 'We for thee, South Africa' — at noon each 16 December, the anniversary the monument was built to fix in the national calendar.
The monument fixes a religious myth at the centre of Afrikaner nationalism: that God granted the Voortrekkers their victory over a Zulu force at Blood River on 16 December 1838 in fulfilment of a vow sworn before the battle, a covenant the monument's planners moved to make "the exclusive servant of the Afrikaner and her or his religion" as construction proceeded through the 1930s. E.G. Jansen, chairman of the organising committee, presided over both the 1938 foundation-stone ceremony, held before crowds reported in the hundreds of thousands, and the 1949 opening — one year after the National Party won power and began building apartheid, a policy its leaders and clergy justified in explicitly covenantal, theological terms drawn from the same Vow. The Day of the Vow that the monument's architecture exists to mark was a public holiday under apartheid and was renamed the Day of Reconciliation in independent South Africa in 1994, retaining the 16 December date.
Wikidata Q963472 · Commons: File:Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, South Africa.jpg · Photo: SonyPro · Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0