As to reimagine South Africa

Imagine our typical idyllic suburb. Wysteria lane on acid. Now add armed guards, electric fences and laser alarms, protecting you against masses of murderous youth which, according to the local media, are lurking just outside your newborn baby’s bedroom window. Welcome to the “safety villages” of Pretoria,SouthAfrica.

My mom lives in Pretoria so I go there for christmas.

It really feels like you've climbed into a time-machine when you actually see your khaki wearing boer shaking what his mama gave him, followed by a black guy in rags carrying a tonn of shopping and looking very prosecuted indeed.

Crime is a lucrative business, as it seems to be in a lot of places, but the exceptional thing about crime in Pretoria is that it is calculated and full of hate. The robotic woman on my mothers car GPS sometimes goes:

"DANGERZONE! DANGERZONE! CHANCE OF BEING ROBBED...60 PERCENT."

Lock doors and hide all food.


Youth gangs angs run wild, so the upper classes wall themselves in to safety villages, little towns with maximum security and an absurdly rich life.
The safety village is a bubble-world, full of artificial streets and rosebushes, where the citizens are supposed to feel safe.

But why is it that behind a wall, an electric fence, a laser alarm downstairs, bars on the windows and four doors between me and the livingroom I still can't sleep?

Because when you’re in a place that is built not despite but because of brutal crime, you are constantly reminded that you are in grave, grave danger.

Crime itself becomes the very foundations of the place: the lifestyle is built around avoiding crime. Which means that, ironically enough, if you take away brutal crime and this whole little society falls apart.


How do you live with no trust?

Never mind the rich, what is violent crime doing to the b-..poorer communities, where there are no electric fences?


In a seemingly unbreakable circle of violence-triggers-hate-triggers-violence, where does one intervene for lasting change?



I was fascinated by the idea that people spend there entire lives like this and talked to some neighbors and other people, which resulted in an article published in a lame teen section of a Norwegian newspaper (unfortunatly in Norwegian but I'll try put up an english version as well):
Norwegian published version
English version