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Why a casino that looks like a Tuscan Village is one of South Africa's most democratic public spaces.
By Matt Steinglass
October 2002
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Johannesburg's Montecasino (top) is a Las Vegas-style theme casino and
shopping mall designed to resemble a village in Tuscany. The emulation
is extremely thorough: the mall's "streets" (below) are cast
from actual Italian cobblestones, and the high ceiling recreates a
late-afternoon sky.
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Courtesy Tsogo Sun Gaming and Entertainment
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I first heard about Montecasino at an otherwise boring expat dinner
party in Lomé, Togo, the small West African city where I live. My
source was a tall fiftyish South African named Ebeth--short for Elizabeth,
she explained, as Joburg is short for Johannesburg. Her husband was a geologist.
They were dedicated birdwatchers--in short, straight out of central casting.
I could picture her on a patio overlooking a vast lake, with a white-jacketed
servant keeping the hippos at bay.
"You must visit Joburg," Ebeth said, making it less an invitation
than a reproach. "They've just opened up a wonderful new shopping area.
It's full of cafés and little squares, all done just like Italy,
and they project an artificial sky onto the ceiling, so it's just as
though you were strolling through a Tuscan village in the evening."
This was not precisely what I'd expected, but it was considerably weirder
and perhaps more interesting. There is, after all, a long history of attempts
to recreate nostalgic European fantasy landscapes in Africa. Evelyn Waugh
wrote that on his trip to Kenya in 1931, everyone he encountered seemed
to be trying to recreate the vanishing lifestyle of the English country
squirearchy, with local tribesmen conscripted into the role of the peasantry.
Waugh, being Waugh, considered this to be a perfectly sensible lifestyle,
but he did note how absurd it was to be interrupted in the middle of high
tea on the lawn by a naked Kikuyu woman begging for medicine. And though
this type of absurdity may seem exotic, it should be rather familiar to
Americans. It's not that different from the milkmaid at Colonial Williamsburg
with the mall-girl accent. We think of irony and disjuncture as hallmarks
of the late twentieth century, but were they any less present in the nineteenth?
Take a classic Las Vegas idea like Montecasino--the Tuscan-themed shopping
mall and casino complex Ebeth had told me about--and plop it down in South
Africa. Doesn't it seem like a natural outgrowth of the Rhodesian settlers'
English manors, or for that matter the gabled Dutch farmhouses of the earlier
Cape settlers?
A few months later, at an urbanism conference in Lagos, I put this idea
to Lindsay Bremner, chair of the architecture department at Johannesburg's
University of the Witwatersrand. She didn't agree. "I don't think there's
much continuity between those earlier fantasies and Montecasino," she
said. Bremner placed Montecasino in a different and equally odd context.
It seems Montecasino is far from the only Tuscan-themed development in contemporary
Joburg. During the last decade, gated developments of "Tuscan villas"
have sprung up throughout the suburbs that stretch north of downtown. They
have names like Via Reggio and Villa Toscana. Their advertisements flood
the local real estate pages, enticing buyers with promises of "private
Florentine court gardens" and inviting them to "live la dolce
vita." Bremner sees these developments as a consoling fantasy for the
white middle class--an aesthetic escape from a racially split society racked
by social and political change and spectacular crime rates. The article
she presented in Lagos described how Italy had become the preferred metaphor
for contemporary South Africans to "pretend to be somewhere else,"
to inhabit "an illusion of the historical while freeing ourselves from
the burden of having to be agents in it."
This all made Johannesburg seem more and more interesting, and I finally
wound up paying it a visit. Bremner graciously volunteered to drive me around
and show me what she'd been talking about. "The first Italianate
homes I remember seeing were at real estate shows in 1990," Bremner
said as we sat at a stoplight in one of Joburg's older suburbs. "It
was just at the height of the political tension. Nobody knew what would
happen." Through the early 1990s, as negotiations over the country's
future dragged on, a near civil war raged between South Africa's black parties
and the white government, and between the rival black parties themselves.
After the transition to multiracial democracy in 1994, street toughs bred
on political violence turned to armed robbery, and crime rates skyrocketed.
The middle class fled the city center for gated communities, and businesses
abandoned downtown.
The effect on Johannesburg resembles the hollowing-out of many American
cities in the post-civil rights 1970s. Its Chicago-like center is now
a ghost town after dark, surveyed by thousands of police cameras. Many corporate
headquarters remain, but other buildings have been abandoned. In May, when
several floors of a derelict office tower caught fire, it
was discovered that hundreds of poor families had been living inside. They
had even been paying rent--presumably to gangs that had assumed control
of squatting rights.
Bremner took me to one of the edge-city commercial developments that have
taken over from the failing center. Built in the early 1990s, Sandton Square
is centered on a café-ringed piazza, complete with fountain, and
anchored by the Michelangelo Hotel, the most expensive in the city. The
styling on the buildings is familiar to anyone who survived the Trump years:
high Post-Modernism with Mediterranean accents--columns, porticos, the odd
tiled mosaic.
Meanwhile, in the residential suburbs, old English country houses are giving
way to Tuscan-villa town-house complexes ringed by steel gates and barbed
wire. At one called Verona we found the developer, the blond and voluble
Donna Lee, supervising the finishing touches. Lee appeared to be the
South African Tuscan-fantasy poster child. She declared both herself and
her husband "mad" about Italy, where they vacation frequently;
their cellar is stocked with Italian wines, their garage with her husband's
Ferrari. Each villa in Verona has its own name. Lee lives in Villa Bellissima;
other customers are relegated to Villa Piccolo.
Finally I got to see Montecasino. It is impressively large and weird--the
"theming," as they say in the entertainment-complex business,
more meticulous than at Las Vegas's Bellagio. The hilltop towers and crenellations
that greet passing motorists are startlingly convincing, especially in the
afternoon light of the high veld. Inside the mall a network of cobblestone
streets winds between rose and yellow villas. The corners of buildings are
abraded as though by the repeated butting of Italian street-cleaning machines;
the pavements are made from plaster casts of real Tuscan cobblestones. A
vintage Fiat, swathed in mock parking-violation notices, squats by a canal.
Overhead the ersatz sky glows aquamarine with a scattering of pinkish early
evening clouds.
But what is most striking at Montecasino is that the customers are not overwhelmingly
white. Disproportionately white, to be sure, but not overwhelmingly. They
may not have any of Lee's obsession with Italy as such, but black patrons
have an appreciation for the architecture. "It's a very special building,
very different, very beautiful," says Frans Mudzugu, an unemployed
28-year-old. "You can go anywhere and you will not find another
such building." Mudzugu and his friend Alson Mukwewi, also 28 and unemployed,
like to come to Montecasino in the afternoon; sometimes they gamble, sometimes
they just watch others play. They sit under the fake trees around the central
fountain, chatting in Xhosa with the dealers, and watching Qatari businessmen
and English tourists lose their money.
It is a scene as absurd as Waugh's tribeswoman at the tea party, but with
this difference: neither white nor black South Africans have anything to
do with Tuscany. None of them are the ones holding the tea party--they are
all the tribeswomen on the lawn. The history of South African architecture
is replete with transplanted European styles: the nineteenth-century British
Imperial eclecticism of Sir Herbert Baker, the 1930s fascist brutalism of
the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, Johannesburg's 1950s International
Style skyscrapers. But these architectures took themselves seriously; they
tried earnestly to impose European norms on South African spaces. Montecasino
imposes nothing on anyone. It is completely, exuberantly fake. And, as in
Las Vegas, it is this fakeness that ensures its egalitarian popularity.
Blacks and whites feel equally at home in this reassuringly bogus Tuscany.
The price of democracy, it would seem, is inauthenticity.
I wound up having breakfast at Montecasino's Palazzo Intercontinental Hotel
with Bremner and Montecasino architect Ed Batley, who know each other well.
The architect and the critic who considers Montecasino a reactionary political
fantasy were in accord on most issues. In particular, they agreed that there's
been a change in mood in South Africa of late. "People are feeling
comfortable with the interracial society now," Batley said. "There's
a positive vibe. No one talks about emigrating anymore. I can't remember
the last time people felt so proud to be South African." At the same
time the architectural trend is shifting away from the Post-Modernist Tuscan
revival and toward contemporary neo-Modernism. Batley finds this a
relief; he is a Modernist by inclination, and though proud of the work he
did on Montecasino, he'd rather be doing something more forward-looking.
"There is a turn away from escapism lately," Bremner agreed. "Now
we're aspiring to other heroes, the French and Dutch neo-Modernists. But
it's still partly an attempt to be European. Maybe it's not all that different."
She looked around at the hotel's décor. "Still, I find
the Modern aesthetic a lot more pleasant than this crap."
Matt Steinglass lives in Togo, where he is writing a book about African authenticity issues.
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