The National Museum of Southern Rhodesia: Cultivating Settler Colonial Primacy Through Architectural Form

Completed in 1963, Southern Rhodesia’s circular National Museum invoked and modernized the conical forms of a local precolonial archeological site, the charged object of conflicting Indigenous and settler legitimacy claims. This racially and culturally integrationist idealism countermined the nation’s quasi-apartheid conditions. But two years later, to defend those conditions, the country’s White-supremacist settler-minority government seceded from a reform-minded Metropole, the first British colony to do so since 1776, triggering international sanctions and a violent civil war. While causally unconnected to Rhodesia’s racist rebellion, the Museum building emerged from a common program of equivocation towards the Black Indigenous population: a promise of future, race-blind “partnership” that gestured at decolonization, but, via a strategy of postponement, perpetuated settler colonial interests. Channeling vernacular visuality in the form of circular architecture, the Museum’s ostensibly reparative, uni-racial invitation served to nativize itself within the national cultural imaginary, and concretize settler subjectivity’s intimate relationship to the land. This ambivalent visuality inflected the design program in practical ways: circularity guaranteed “circulation,” but effectively facilitated race- and class-based obstructions, providing a cover for the structural replication of a segregated society. Studied in historical context, Southern Rhodesia’s Museum isolates in microcosm some of the ubiquitous but opaque strategies of privilege-preservation that la paperson calls “settler colonial technologies,” giving shape to the equivocation of both settler aesthetics and politics, including in putatively progressive circles. Architectural form materializes those technologies, monumentalizing nationalist ideology and inscribing visuality directly onto the land, the primary target of colonial control.