Fences
Title
Fences
Description
There are fences everywhere. High fences with large gates, on businesses, houses of all sizes, apartment communities, and hotels. Some appear innocent enough, made of decorative wood. Other fences are more obvious in communicating their message: metal bars with decorative points at the top to impede jumping over. Many fences are explicitly unwelcoming, topped off with rows or curls of barbed wire or electrical wire. One fence in District Six was several feet high, made of brick, strung with eight rows of barbed wire, and topped with a layer of concrete full of jagged pieces of glass.
I have never been anywhere with so many constructed barriers. I expected this to some extent based on our pre-travel conversations about safety. We had seen neighborhoods lined with fences in videos, too, but that footage was twenty years old, and I was unsure how many remained. The gates linger, though, as both a reminder of apartheid and a reminder of how much fear remains in South Africa.
If I listen to what Cape Town residents say, I should be afraid. Muggings and robberies are apparently common, and young, foreign students are easy targets. The house where we are staying has is designed for protection with a gate to an outer courtyard, a solid steel door to an inner courtyard, a steel accordion gate on our front door, and locks on the front door and all the bedrooms.
But what if I lived here? I could give up walking around at night by myself, but I need to feel safe and secure in my home. The neighborhoods still seem largely segregated, and if I moved here I would likely end up with a gated house in a white neighborhood, a home that would scream fear and distrust and isolation. I would not be able to walk up to my neighbor’s porch or have them come to mine without buzzing them through a gate. Is that a price I would be willing to pay to keep my family safe? Would I buy into the rhetoric of protection and security—a rhetoric that arguably prevents healing and the building of relationships, a rhetoric that I know only reinforces segregation and the legacy of apartheid? What would happen if the fences came down? Could South Africans begin to trust one another?
I have never been anywhere with so many constructed barriers. I expected this to some extent based on our pre-travel conversations about safety. We had seen neighborhoods lined with fences in videos, too, but that footage was twenty years old, and I was unsure how many remained. The gates linger, though, as both a reminder of apartheid and a reminder of how much fear remains in South Africa.
If I listen to what Cape Town residents say, I should be afraid. Muggings and robberies are apparently common, and young, foreign students are easy targets. The house where we are staying has is designed for protection with a gate to an outer courtyard, a solid steel door to an inner courtyard, a steel accordion gate on our front door, and locks on the front door and all the bedrooms.
But what if I lived here? I could give up walking around at night by myself, but I need to feel safe and secure in my home. The neighborhoods still seem largely segregated, and if I moved here I would likely end up with a gated house in a white neighborhood, a home that would scream fear and distrust and isolation. I would not be able to walk up to my neighbor’s porch or have them come to mine without buzzing them through a gate. Is that a price I would be willing to pay to keep my family safe? Would I buy into the rhetoric of protection and security—a rhetoric that arguably prevents healing and the building of relationships, a rhetoric that I know only reinforces segregation and the legacy of apartheid? What would happen if the fences came down? Could South Africans begin to trust one another?
Creator
Jessie
Date
5-22-2013
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