Cape Town's R180m wall: when a city loses its soul

THERE are moments in the life of a city when a single decision tells you everything about who holds power, whose fears matter, and whose humanity is negotiable.

- FAIEZ JACOBS

GUATEMALAN municipal firefighter Hector Chacon, dressed as Santa Claus, abseils from a bridge to deliver presents to children in Guatemala City.

(AFP)

The proposed R180 million wall along the N2 is one of those moments.

Let us speak honestly and painfully clearly. This wall is not just concrete and steel. It is a symbol. And symbols matter more than Mayor HillLewis likes to admit. They lodge in the memory of a people. They tell future generations what we were willing to normalise.

This wall tells poor people: you are the threat. It tells motorists and tourists: we will protect you from "them". It tells the world: Cape Town has chosen separation over solidarity. Shameful and sad, for this is our lived reality.

For a city that still bleeds from the wounds of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid geography, this is not merely insensitive. It is morally obscene.

History is littered with walls built in the name of "security". None of them aged well. None of them solved the problem they claimed to address.

The Berlin Wall was built to "protect" a state from instability. What it really did was imprison a people, divide families, and harden injustice into architecture. When it fell, the world did not mourn the loss of concrete. It celebrated the return of human dignity.

The Trump border wall was sold as crime control. In truth, it was a monument to fear, racism, and political theatre. It did not heal America. It scarred it.

And long before modern politics, there is the ancient story of the Walls of Jericho, walls that symbolised arrogance, exclusion, and domination. They did not fall because of better engineering, but because people refused to accept that walls were the natural order of things. Why do we think Cape Town will be the exception?