Cape Peninsula's neo-apartheid: What the baboon crisis reveals about power, exclusion and ethical failure

A few weeks ago, residents from Rooiels, Pringle Bay and Betty’s Bay, together with conservationists from across the Western Cape, came out with placards to challenge the escalation of aggressive baboon management strategies under DA-run municipalities. These approaches, widely regarded as ineffective, rest on an unacceptable premise: that the eradication or permanent removal of baboons constitutes a legitimate solution. Framed as wildlife management, this stance reflects a deeper ethical failure – one rooted in logics of exclusion, control and disposability.

South Africa likes to tell itself a comforting story about ending apartheid: that it is now a closed chapter, a moral aberration decisively rejected in 1994. Yet apartheid was not only a political system; it was also an ethical framework – one that normalised exclusion, hierarchy and disposability. Those logics did not vanish. They mutated. Today, they have resurfaced in unexpected places, including how we govern our relationship with non-human life.

The ongoing crisis surrounding Cape Peninsula baboons is a case in point. Framed narrowly as a “human-wildlife conflict”, it is in fact a mirror held up to our unresolved moral inheritance. The language, assumptions and policy options being advanced echo apartheid’s architecture of control: spatial segregation, forced removal, containment and, when those fail, elimination.

This is not rhetorical excess. It is an ethical diagnosis.

A false choice, revisited

Decision-makers have repeatedly presented the public with a stark binary: either baboons must be permanently confined, or they must be killed. This framing has been widely criticised as a false dichotomy, one that deliberately excludes the possibility of meaningful coexistence. But the deeper problem is not merely scientific or logistical – it is moral.

Apartheid thrived on false choices. Black South Africans were told that forced removals were necessary for “order”, that pass laws were essential for “safety”, that homelands were a benevolent compromise rather than an act of dispossession. In each case, alternatives existed. They were simply excluded because they challenged entrenched power.

The same pattern now repeats itself in conservation discourse. Baboons, whose ancestral ranges predate colonial settlement by millennia, are treated as invaders in landscapes transformed almost entirely for human benefit. Their presence in urban areas – driven by habitat loss, food attractants and infrastructural expansion – is reframed as a problem intrinsic to them, not to us.

When the only options offered are cages or death, we are not witnessing pragmatic governance. We are witnessing moral foreclosure.

Who belongs?

Apartheid was fundamentally about belonging: who counted as fully human, who belonged in certain spaces, whose lives were considered expendable in service of “greater goods”. Today, baboons are denied moral belonging in precisely the same way.

They are routinely described as “problem animals”, “nuisances” or “threats”, language that strips individuals of identity and reduces entire social groups to management units. This mirrors the bureaucratic abstraction that once reduced people to population groups, labour units or security risks.

What is consistently ignored is that baboons are highly social, intelligent beings with deep familial bonds, cultural learning and long memories. Removing individuals – whether through lethal control or permanent captivity – does not merely affect those animals. It fractures entire troops, destabilising social cohesion and often increasing conflict rather than resolving it.

An ethic based solely on minimising human inconvenience cannot account for this complexity. Nor can it claim moral legitimacy.

The limits of welfare-only ethics

Much of the official discourse gestures towards animal welfare, promising “humane” outcomes even when killing or captivity is proposed. But welfare alone is an inadequate ethical foundation.

Apartheid, too, justified itself in paternalistic terms. It claimed to provide “separate development”, “orderly governance” and even material benefits – while denying fundamental rights, agency and dignity. Similarly, welfare-based arguments that accept confinement or killing as inevitable fail to question the underlying injustice of exclusion itself.

What is required instead is a shift towards what might be called a flourishing-based ethic – one that asks not merely whether animals suffer, but whether they are allowed to live meaningful lives within their social and ecological contexts.

For baboons, flourishing entails freedom of movement, stable social structures, access to natural foraging opportunities and the ability to adapt without being criminalised for doing so. None of these is compatible with mass incarceration or systematic killing.

Spatial control and the apartheid imagination

One of apartheid’s defining features was spatial engineering: the carving up of land to enforce racial hierarchies. Urban space was meticulously regulated to determine who could live, work or even pass through particular areas.

The Cape Peninsula baboon debate is saturated with this same spatial logic. Electric fencing, buffer zones, exclusion corridors and proposed containment facilities all operate on the assumption that humans are the rightful occupants of valuable land, while baboons must be confined to ever-shrinking remnants.

Yet this ignores historical reality. The Cape’s landscapes were open and available to all beings. They were then reshaped first through colonial agriculture and later through suburban expansion, often at enormous ecological cost. Baboons did not encroach into cities; cities expanded into baboon territories.

To treat baboons as trespassers is to rewrite history in the service of convenience.

Neo-apartheid as an ethical framework

Neo-apartheid, as I use the term, does not suggest a direct equivalence between human suffering under apartheid and animal treatment today. Rather, it identifies a shared moral structure: the normalisation of exclusion through bureaucratic rationality, the prioritisation of dominant interests, and the framing of marginalised beings as problems to be managed rather than participants to be accommodated.

This framework is especially visible in how dissent is handled. Community members, scientists and activists who advocate for coexistence are often dismissed as “emotional”, “idealistic” or “anti-development” – labels strikingly similar to those once used to delegitimise anti-apartheid resistance.

Power decides which voices count, and ethics follows power.

The cost of ethical failure

The tragedy is that alternatives exist. Improved waste management, urban design that reduces attractants, education and genuine investment in coexistence strategies have all shown promise. What is lacking is not evidence, but ethical courage.

By refusing to expand our moral imagination beyond human exceptionalism, we risk entrenching a society that continues to solve conflict through domination. This has consequences far beyond baboons. Climate breakdown, biodiversity collapse and escalating social inequality all stem from the same failure to recognise interdependence.

Apartheid taught us, at immense cost, that systems built on exclusion ultimately collapse under their own injustice. The question is whether we are willing to learn that lesson across species boundaries – or whether we will repeat it in new forms.

Choosing a different future

The Cape Peninsula baboon crisis is not just about wildlife management. It is a test of who we are becoming.

If we accept cages or killing as reasonable solutions to coexistence challenges, we affirm a moral order that values convenience over justice and control over compassion. If, however, we choose to confront the deeper ethical roots of conflict – acknowledging historical responsibility, recognising non-human belonging and committing to shared flourishing – we begin dismantling neo-apartheid at its foundations. DM

The City of Cape Town was given an opportunity to respond to this article. Their response can be read here.

Dr Adam Cruise is an investigative environmental journalist, travel writer and academic. He has contributed to a number of international publications, including National Geographic and The Guardian, covering diverse topics from the plight of elephants, rhinos and lions in Africa to coral reef rejuvenation in Indonesia. Cruise is a doctor of philosophy, specialising in animal and environmental ethics, and is the editor of the online Journal of African Elephants.