The militarisation of suburban space

The men in military camouflage-patterned pants armed with assault rifles like those we have become
accustomed to seeing in shopping centres when large amounts of cash are taken from or placed
inside automated teller machines, are standing on a suburban street on a Friday morning in late
Spring. They are replacing men who used to guard the desk, armed only with a two-way radio, and
the modern equivalent of a cudgel, and maybe pepper spray. Their managers, two other men, one in
a jellabiya, the other wearing a yarmulke, are in conference, talking and gesturing at various parts
of the block of flats their company has been hired to protect. It is, in some senses, a homosocial fairy
tale of social integration.

Scenes like these ought to give us pause. They are abnormal, and the new normal of the times and
places we live in in South Africa. The symbols of our suburban incarceration are at odds with our
idea of ourselves as living in peaceful times, of being free. We are no longer at war with any of our
neighbouring states, a major achievement given South Africas apartheid era habits as the regions
violently psychopathic, thugnificent bully. The majority of us do not want to go back there, or so we
choose to believe. We are not officially engaged in a civil war. We are, by the look of things, living in
Dickensian good times.

But the barbed and blade wire strung along the tops of incredibly high boundary walls, the
electrified fences, the traffic booms and temporary road closures which have been in effect since the
end of the last century, the armed guards standing outside wooden and sheet-metal huts, are
permanent features of many suburbs in South Africa. Additionally, armed guards prowl the streets in
armoured vehicles, labelled tactical response or community patrol. They are keeping us safe, we tell
ourselves and our children, seated in our cars with the windows tinted and firmly shut, moving
between one locked garage and another, between home and shopping centre.

The accoutrements of prison complexes and concentration camps blend with suburban brutalism
(from bton brut) across most of South Africas bourgeois suburbs. The wealthier the inhabitants of
such suburbs think themselves and are assumed to be, the higher the walls, the more elaborate the
palisade and electrified fencing. Round the clock surveillance cameras at street corners are
supposed to give reassurances of security, while the also, ironically, signal the opposite. Mostly
these militaristic measures are explained as the consequences of ineffective public policing and an
increase in violent crime targeting the wealthy.

There have been multiple attempts to transform the kragdadige old apartheid South African Police
Force into community focused post-apartheid South African Police Services. Military ranks have
been withdrawn, reintroduced, and withdrawn again; the debate about demilitarising the police
services has also returned, like heartburn. Various post-millennial National Police Commissioners
have been mired in reputational and other troubles. In recent years, incidents that led to the deaths
of Andries Tatane and Mido Macia, and the conduct of the police at Marikana, among several other

incidents, speak to the challenge faced by those who manage the sector to shift from the violating
past patterns into effectively policing a Constitutionalist democratic state founded on respect for
inalienable human rights.

Statistics continue to show that the people most vulnerable to criminal violence are among the poor
in the country. The middle classes, however, and also in their role as gatekeepers of and
disseminators of information, construct themselves as the primary targets and victims of violent
crime. The war on poverty can too often seem and sound like a war on the poor. So, while the
majority of South Africans have to rely on public policing, the minority in the middle class
increasingly rely on private security companies to protect them.

Such privatised security arrangements can lead to the sort of conduct which echoes colonial and
apartheid habits. Homeless people find themselves removed from suburbs like Forest Town and
Saxonwold in Johannesburgs north by the private security firms that patrol there, and dumped
elsewhere, often in the inner city. Vagrancy by-laws are cited to defend the practice when the
Constitutionality is of these informal influx control practices are challenged. In small towns like
Grahamstown, experience has taught one, the conduct of private security guards can be much more
frightening, with suspects beaten up in the back of vans before they are taken to the police station.

South Africans now spend over R70 billion on private security arrangements. Some of this goes
towards the guard towers that have appeared in public parks, the booms and traffic cones that
effectively privatise public roads, and thus compromise inalienable guarantees in the Bill of Rights.

The overt militarisation of post-apartheid suburban spaces in a country neither at war with itself nor
under any foreign threat has become as normal as the smoke on the horizon viewed from apartheid
South Africas suburbs. If the children of apartheids white suburbs recall neat verges and potholefree streets rather than casspirs and rubber bullets, the children of South Africas narrowlyintegrated post-apartheid suburbs may in the future wonder what a satellite police station is, and
why history textbooks refer to the insecurity of person and property which was a major political
problem of times past.

It will be analogous to the way some white South Africans continue to misremember the cities of
their childhoods in the 1970s and 1980s as being denuded of Black bodies. Ideological investment
has this power to blind, and to delete from view. What the free children of post-apartheids suburbs
may have in common with the oppressed children of apartheids townships, is having grown up with
the ubiquity of armed men on the street, of razor wire always within view, and of security patrol who
profess to be there to guard you.

Ours are indeed, again, the best of times, and the worst of times, secure in comfort, and insecure

about its sustainability.