We built the N2 wall long before trust gave way to concrete

Every weekday, tens of thousands of people drive the stretch of the N2 between Cape Town International Airport and the city. Regular users have a name for it. They call it the hell run.

They call it that because of what happens when a car slows down. A rock comes off a bridge. A windscreen turns white. In the seconds that follow, a stopped car becomes a target. Karin van Aardt, a retired teacher, was killed on that road while travelling with her husband. She is one name among many.

So when the City says it will spend R114-million to wall off that stretch – three metres high, about nine kilometres long – it is not hard to understand why. The plan is more than concrete: better lighting, controlled crossings, more cameras, forty additional officers. The mayor calls it holistic. The people who drive the hell run call it overdue.

I am not going to tell them they are wrong to want it. But I want to ask a question the wall cannot answer. Why do we need it at all?

Every society runs on two kinds of infrastructure. One is visible – roads, substations, clinics, schools. The other is invisible – trust, shared responsibility, the working assumption that a stranger owes you something and that you owe him the same. Engineers measure the first kind well. The second is harder to see, and we tend to notice it only once it is gone.

Its absence has a particular shape. When the invisible infrastructure fails, the visible kind is made to carry loads it was never built for. Walls stand in for trust. Guards stand in for neighbours. Electric fences stand in for the old certainty that someone on your street would notice a stranger at your gate. We have been quietly substituting steel for one another for 30 years, and the N2 wall is only the most honest example yet.

The wall was already there

It is not, in that sense, the beginning of anything. The wall was already there. We simply hadn’t poured it.

I grew up in kwaNkabini, in rural KwaZulu-Natal, in a place that had almost none of the first kind of infrastructure and a great deal of the second. There was no wall around the homestead worth the name, and none was needed. Any adult could correct any child, and did. A grown man who caught you misbehaving three kilometres from your own gate dealt with you there, and your grandmother heard of it before you got home. We were watched. Being watched, it turns out, is a form of being loved – and a form of being safe.

We had a wall too. It was made of eyes, and it never once kept anyone out – only watched over everyone inside.

That was the whole security system: no cement, no current, no armed response, only the certainty of being known. A society needs walls in precise proportion to the number of people who no longer feel seen by it, or beholden to it.

Someone will say that a city cannot be run like a village, and they are right. You cannot know three million people, and no one is asking you to. The village is not a blueprint. It is a proof – that safety can be made of recognition rather than separation.

In a city, that recognition is carried not by kinship, but by institutions. The school that holds the child. The clinic that keeps his file. The officer who walks one street long enough to be known on it. Institutions are how a society sees the people it will never personally meet – and the wall goes up exactly where they have stopped seeing.

Eyes on the street

The safest streets have never been the most walled. They are the most watched – what planners in another country named eyes on the street. KwaNkabini knew it first.

And notice what the suburb has already built. The boom, the electric fence, the armed-response sign: these are not the opposite of the village. They are the village rebuilt by people who could afford to buy back the feeling of being known. We never escaped kwaNkabini. We priced it, and walled out everyone who could not meet the price. The N2 wall is the same old longing, poured this time in public concrete.

There is a harder thing to say, and in Cape Town it cannot be avoided. A wall that divides a highway from the settlements beside it does not arrive in South Africa as a neutral object. It comes carrying a history. For most of a century we built walls exactly like this one – by law, by forced removal, by buffer strip – precisely to keep the poor and the black on the far side of the road from the city. Critics are already using the word segregation. They are not being hysterical. They are remembering.

But here is what the critics and the City both miss. The apartheid wall was a wall of law. This one is a wall of failure. The first was built by a state that trusted itself far too much. The second is being built by a society that has stopped trusting itself at all. That is worse, not better – because a law can be repealed in an afternoon, while a collapse of trust takes a generation to rebuild.

I know the reply to all of this. It is the only reply that truly matters, and it is furious. People are dying on that road now. My mother takes that route. Spare me the sermon about social fabric and build the wall. That is not a weak argument. It is the strongest one there is, and anyone who waves it away has never been afraid on the N2.

So let me be exact. Build the wall, if the engineers say it saves lives. Even the acting police minister – who backs far more than a wall – has put it on the parliamentary record that infrastructure of this kind cannot replace policing and cannot touch organised crime. A wall buys time, and time is not nothing. A stopped heart cares nothing for root causes.

Just a tourniquet

But a wall is a tourniquet, and a country cannot live its whole life wearing a tourniquet. If we build this one and call the problem solved, we will be back in 15 years debating a higher one – because the thing that produced the first wall will have gone on producing.

The other infrastructure is built more slowly than concrete, and it cannot be put out to tender. It is built at dinner tables and in classrooms, in congregations and on sports fields, in workplaces and functioning families, on streets where adults still recognise children who are not their own. It is the work of decades and it has no ribbon to cut.

Which is exactly why a government facing an election will always choose the wall. You can stand in front of a wall. You cannot photograph the robbery that never happened because, two decades earlier, a child grew up believing he belonged to something.

So build it. But know what you are looking at when you pass it.

You are not looking at the source of our safety. You are looking at the receipt for its loss.

The most urgent thing this country has to build is not three metres high and nine kilometres long. It is the patient, un-tenderable work of becoming a place where people are known again – the kind of wall kwaNkabini had, made of eyes, that keeps no one out.

We laid the foundations of the other wall long before the concrete. We can stop pouring. DM