Cape Town’s wall will not keep us safe — it will keep us apart

Cape Town is building a wall, and we are being told, as we always are, that it is for “safety and security”. But safety for whom?

Walls have never been neutral. Walls are not innocent. Walls do not simply appear when governments care about communities; they appear when governments want to contain them.

This wall has nothing to do with protecting people. It has everything to do with hiding them. A wall is a statement. A physical declaration that says: what happens on the other side does not matter to us. That whatever pain, whatever violence, whatever poverty continues beyond this barrier is not a crisis, it is simply a “black people problem”.

In South Africa, that is an old, familiar script.

Apartheid did not only live in laws. It lived in design. In planning. In the deliberate separation of life from life. It lived in the way the city was built to keep some people close to opportunity and others close to the battle to survive.

So when Cape Town builds a wall today, we must ask: what exactly is being secured? Because it is not Nyanga. It is not the families who wake up every morning already living with the weight of state neglect. It is not the children who deserve parks instead of policing. It is not the mothers who deserve streetlights instead of shadows.

No.

What is being secured is the comfort of those who do not want to see.

The wall is not a solution, it is an erasure. Because a wall not only divides space. It divides humanity.

Once a wall is built, it literally keeps the light out. It changes the atmosphere of a home. It changes how the street feels. It changes how a child understands where they live. How dark will those houses become? And who thrives in darkness? Not communities. Not families.

Darkness is where violence hides. Darkness is where neglect becomes normal. Darkness is where the state can look away and pretend it is not responsible.

A wall becomes permission.

Permission for the government to say: do what you must. Suffer quietly. Handle it yourselves. Because whatever happens behind that wall is no longer visible, and invisibility is one of the cruellest forms of oppression.

If the City of Cape Town cared about safety, it would not build barriers. It would build opportunity. It would build schools, not separations. It would build clinics, not concentration camps. It would build jobs, not walls. It would build streetlights, community centres, trauma support, youth programmes; the real architecture of safety.

Instead, it builds something that tells an entire community: you are a problem to be managed, not people to be protected, and because it is black people who will live in the shadow of that wall, as black people have always lived in the shadow of policy, the outrage is expected to fade.

Because who cares, right? That is the lie this wall depends on.

This is not safety. This is segregation dressed up as urban planning. This is a government continuing to demonstrate that some lives are worth visibility, and others are worth containment. This wall is not being built to stop violence. It is being built to stop accountability. And we should be terrified of what it means when a city decides the answer to inequality is not justice … but separation.

Because once you accept a wall, you accept the idea that some people belong behind one. South Africa has already lived that nightmare. DM

Kopano Mashike is a Cape Town-based writer, actor, and activist. A journalism dropout with real newsroom experience, she tells stories that sit at the intersection of art and truth. Her work is rooted in questions of home, dignity, and the lives of people too often pushed to the margins.