South Africa: Cape Town’s Wall Will Not Keep Us Safe – – It Will Keep Us Apart

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

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.

By Daily Maverick.