VOORTREKKER MONUMENT HERITAGE SITE

The Voortrekker Monument is also called: "the big lie on the hill", by those who see it primarily as an apartheid temple. For purist Afrikaners, it is a place of pilgrimage, their sacred totem pole.

From the outset, the traveller will be astonished by the architectural form of the building. A survey of tourists conducted by the Sunday Times illustrates the mysterious nature of this monument: for those questioned, it could be a giant toaster, an oversized TSF set or even a crematorium. Sacrilege... This is the Voortrekker Monument, the place of pilgrimage of the Afrikaners! The full extent, or rather the excessiveness, of this monument built by Gerard Moerdijk is revealed inside. To affirm even more their paradoxical "Africanness", the Afrikaners erected between 1937 and 1949 a granite monster on the model of the walls of Great Zimbabwe. The herringbone pattern of the Karenga people is faithfully reproduced on the façade of the Voortrekker Monument.

In front of the entrance, Anton Van Wouw depicted in bronze a woman with two children whom she protects. The trio is surmounted by wildebeest heads. Above the main door, a solitary buffalo watches over. On the four sides of the cube, a frieze in the shape of a laager of 54 carts: the Afrikaners are resisting. Inside, there is a bas-relief carved in Italy with the same marble used by Michelangelo. With its 92 m long and 2.30 m high, this bas-relief would be the largest marble frieze in the world. The entire history of the Great Trek unfolds here, including, of course, the famous episode of the Blood River, the infamous battle of 1838 between the Zulus and the Boers in the KwaZulu-Natal region, around the bed of the Blood River.

You can climb up to the balcony, from which you can enjoy a panoramic view of Pretoria. In the crypt, one should look at a granite cenotaph symbolically containing the remains of the heroes of the Great Trek, the migration of pioneer peoples from the Cape region to the interior of the country, and bearing the inscription: 'Ons vir jou, Suid-Afrika: All of us for you, South Africa. "Every year, at noon on 16 December - the day of the Battle of Blood River - the letters on the stone light up with a ray of sunlight, falling from the sky through a bevelled hole in the roof structure.