Creating a temenos,positing ‘South Africanism’: material memory,landscape practice and the circulation of identity at Delville Wood

Abstract

Like other Dominion First World War memorials, the South African National Memorial at Delville Wood was a landscape in which nostalgic anti-modernism was tempered by the desire to posit a new kind of identity. Using the iconographic ‘invented memory’ of New Imperialism, it was designed to project a bifocal ‘colonial nationalism’ at a time when white identity and South African citizenship were at their most fluid. Delville Wood has both failed and transcended this goal. Over the last eight decades, while becoming one of the most popular destinations on the Western Front tourist circuit today, the site has mediated the ongoing evolution of South African nationhood as an imaginative dialogue between ‘Europe’ and ‘Africa’. Comparing Delville Wood to other Dominion memorials, the paper proposes that the site’s durable but mutable resonance has been sustained by echoes of decisions taken in the 1920s about landscape materiality and making which are sequentially revealed by the visitor’s journey to and through the site today. As a result, Delville Wood functions as a ‘memory theatre’, in which the topological trajectory continues to link auratic¹ ‘locale’ and the modern spatial semiotic of ‘free uninterrupted flow’.