Late at night, driving into Cape Town through Woodstock on the N2, the scale of the Nationalist dream lies before you. Where once there had been the sea, now stand wide boulevards, skyscrapers and some fine brutalist architecture in which the soul of a regime and an architectural style met in a weird harmony.

The apartheid regime was careful to communicate its “successes”. The complex that makes up the Artscape opera house, civic centre and railway terminus must have felt like the arrival of unimaginable modernity for those who were allowed to use it...

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