Cape Town's white ghettos.
Cape Town's white ghettos.
Fifty years ago, South Africa's apartheid government moved sixty thousand families some sixty kilometres from their historic Cape Town neighbourhood - known as District Six - to a sand-blown wilderness called Mitchell's Plain. The illustration shows one of the families and the sign above them was one of many planted on the land they were forced to vacate. As protesting priests lay down on the ground, all the housing was bulldozed,
Why did the Afrikaners re-locate entire communities? Visiting the Cape in 1947 at the invitation of the government, Lord Montgomery of Alamein, a vocal supporter of apartheid (he once wrote that 'the African is a complete savage and is quite incapable of developing the country himself') suggested that the living quarters of non-whites - as they were then termed - should be separated from white communities. Additionally, a 'ring of steel' should be thrown around the neighbourhoods of those that might threaten the security of the state. This way, he is said to have told the Nationalists, it would be easier to control the movements of non-whites and, if necessary, encircle their homes with military might should they make trouble.
This history was on my mind last month when I visited the District Six museum in Cape Town and then drove through lovely suburbs like Constantia, Lakeside, and Somerset West. The non-whites had been forced out of the city fifty years ago but today many whites have chosen to move out to fashionable, multi-million Rand ghettos.
Why would I call them ghettos? Wikipedia defines a ghetto as 'part of a city which members of a minority group live, especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure'. So at the end of a working day, white South Africans race home in their BMWs to their domestic prisons. Their houses are set behind one, sometimes two, security gates.
In the apartheid era, non-whites had to carry a 'pass' to go anywhere. Not any more because today, it is the white people who have to carry a 'car pass' to get them in and out of their gated communities.
And how strange that the ghettos of Mitchell's Plain were built to keep the non-whites in, whereas the white ghettos of today's suburbs are built to keep the non-whites out. It should be understood, of course, that non-whites are free to live in the white enclaves - if they can afford to do so. But the majority of Africans and mixed races continue to live in the crime-ravaged shanty towns of unfulfilled promises, ferried to and from work, crushed together in death-defying cabs.
What irony. Karl Marx said it: 'History repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce'.
BCJ
Amagansett, NY.
March 2016.
Why would I call them ghettos? Wikipedia defines a ghetto as 'part of a city which members of a minority group live, especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure'. So at the end of a working day, white South Africans race home in their BMWs to their domestic prisons. Their houses are set behind one, sometimes two, security gates.
In the apartheid era, non-whites had to carry a 'pass' to go anywhere. Not any more because today, it is the white people who have to carry a 'car pass' to get them in and out of their gated communities.
And how strange that the ghettos of Mitchell's Plain were built to keep the non-whites in, whereas the white ghettos of today's suburbs are built to keep the non-whites out. It should be understood, of course, that non-whites are free to live in the white enclaves - if they can afford to do so. But the majority of Africans and mixed races continue to live in the crime-ravaged shanty towns of unfulfilled promises, ferried to and from work, crushed together in death-defying cabs.
What irony. Karl Marx said it: 'History repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce'.
BCJ
Amagansett, NY.
March 2016.
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