The article below is an excerpt from the book Falling Monuments, Reluctant Ruins: The Persistence of the Past in the Architecture of Apartheid edited by Hilton Judin. Thank you to Wits University Press for sharing it with us. Click here for more information about the book.
Book Cover
The Art Deco building standing on the corner of Market and Commissioner streets, two busy thoroughfares in Krugersdorp’s CBD, was erected by the firm Kallenbach, Kennedy & Furner, an influential architectural firm in early Johannesburg. Jubilee House, as the building was once known, originally consisted of a two storey Victorian structure built in 1898. But in 1940, this was completely overhauled and remade into the Art Deco building that still stands today. This had been the wish of its owner, M. M. Dadoo, a Muslim immigrant from Kholvad who had arrived in South Africa in the 1890s, and the father of the Communist Party and Indian Congress leader Dr Yusuf Mohamed Dadoo, born in 1909, at a time when Krugersdorp was a booming mining town.
Article published in The Star, 1940
In the early twentieth century, M...
