Walling communities along the N2 is consistent with the European history of internment

I was invited to buka puasa (open the Ramadan fast) with family and friends in Cape Town last weekend. I declined, quietly … I live in a village about 60km from the city, and I have become scared of travelling into Cape Town on the N2.

This is not some phobia. A few years ago, a rock was thrown through my car window and shattered my jaw, ripped out teeth and the labial frenum, split my bottom lip and left me concussed. Whenever I drive past the spot where I was attacked, I instinctively raise my elbow and forearm to cover my face.

A year or so after that attack, I made the near-fatal error of turning south off the N2 towards the Makassar Kramat. I was attacked … The car was almost totally wrecked when I ran off the road. Today, my mandible is held in place with a metal piece … I spill drinks, frequently bite my tongue … and I have nightmares. I avoid driving into the city.

There is, now, talk of building a wall along (parts of) the N2. It’s a bad idea. It’s a horrible idea. It has enormous historical and symbolic significance.

It harkens back, also, to the way Europeans (those people who sent colonialists and settlers on “civilising missions” around the world) have vilified and demonised people, like the Romani – since at least 1500 (on the Iberian Peninsula), and over the next 500 years, culminating in the cruelty of the Nazis in the early 20th century.

Over these 500 years, thousands of Roma were killed or “allowed to die”, (a reference made by the late, great historian, Eric Hobsbawm) at a “Gypsy Camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Nazi era. See the record of the Porrajmos genocide.

Erecting walls, actual walls, remains in practice today to keep the Romani away from the “white people”. (See The New York Times’ reference to “white people” below.) For instance, in Slovakia, Romani continue to be sequestered behind walls. (See also here and here.)

The New York Times reported about one such wall, in Slovakia, in 2010:

“The gray barrier evokes the West Bank or Cold War Berlin: a 500-foot-long, 7-foot-high concrete wall that separates a Roma ghetto from the neatly manicured homes of gadzo, or white people, on the other side.

“ ‘Why didn’t they use the money to help improve our homes instead of building a wall? ”’ asked Alena Kalejova, [aged] 22.

That question holds the key. It is what we asked about the forced removals from District Six, Sophiatown and Fietas.

It’s a question I posed to former Western Cape premier Hernus Kriel many years ago. If he thought District Six was a mess, a slum, why not clean it up, invest in physical and social infrastructure? Forced removals were precisely about making cities safe for white people. It was what the Group Areas Act was about. It was, also, always part of the European organisation of towns and cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Within a few decades of their arrival at the Cape, European settlers built walls (fences and hedges) to keep indigenous people out and enslaved people “in their place”. In the US, internment camps were established to Native Americans away from white settlers.

Native people were “outsiders”, “outcasts”, “foreigners”, or dismissed as “refugees” as they moved across their lands in search of better lives, while the rampages of settlers were rendered permissible on the basis, often, of divine missions.

As we witness Cape Town becoming a haven for “nomads” and “expats”, it’s worth reflecting on this dichotomy; from Singapore to Dubai and Cape Town, Europeans are “expats”, and dark-skinned people from Asia and Africa are “migrant workers”.

A type of internment

In Cape Town, black people, people native to the land, face a type of internment along the N2 – walled in to make the roads safe for passers-by. This is not to traduce the collective impact of isolated incidents along the N2. I have the scars.

We should, however, not encircle and wall communities, as if to suggest that, well, that’s just the way those communities are, so let’s sequester them and get them out of sight. Building a wall is as much about the people it inters as it is about what type of society we want to live in.

In the same vein, building an on-ramp to provide people in wheelchairs access to buildings is as much about individual use as it is about what type of society we want to create.

The same applies, also, to matters of social justice, equity and equality; it also has to do with how we want to eradicate injustice, roll back historical inequalities and iniquities (that vast array of privileges and forms of capital accumulated over three centuries – by various means of coercion and consent) and move towards establishing a more equal society.

Sure, I would feel safer driving along the N2, but there are many more important things in life than individual privilege.

Unless, of course, you believe that you are special and unique, and that individual freedom is more important than communal safety, security, prosperity and justice; that you live in a mythical world where individual freedom and choice are unshackled from the world around you.

Governance and politics are necessarily a balance between individual rights and social cohesion and prosperity – not just during times of crisis. You can’t be a good Christian or Muslim only on the sabbath or during Lent or Ramadan.

In South Africa, everyone in a kaftan (or in a Toyota Fortuner, a Range Rover or a Hilux, for that matter) basks in the sacerdotal glow of ubuntu – except when it comes to accountability and when it comes to, actually, securing the other because the other is what makes the self.

In a just society, you cannot place some people behind walls. You just can’t. Sure, walled cities have been around since Jericho in 8,000 BCE, but the people in the communities along the N2 are not planning on building walls to protect them from outsiders. The proposed wall along the N2 is to keep communities out, away, and out of sight to make passers-by feel good.

As Alena Kalejova said (as reported in The New York Times report above): “Why does the state not invest in the community to improve social and material conditions instead of building a wall?” And, at what point does the City of Cape Town, or the provincial government, establish gates in walls, in lieu of a dompas, to control the movement of people? DM

Ismail Lagardien is a writer, columnist and political economist with extensive exposure and experience in global political economic affairs. He was educated at the London School of Economics and holds a PhD in International Political Economy.