In South Africa, New Exclusion Barriers Go Up

Each morning, when the maids and gardeners arrive for work at Hurlingham Manor, they have to get past the security gates.

Outside the well-to-do suburb, uniformed guards stop them and ask who they are, who employs them, the addresses of their employers. The guards record the information in a ledger before swinging the gates open by hand. If they find that a black pedestrian doesn’t have a job in the suburb, one guard said, they’re under instructions to deny the person entry.

The suburb’s homeowners association put the gates up to fight crime -- straight across several public roads. In recent years, trying to barricade themselves against a relentless wave of carjackings, armed robberies and rapes, communities like this one have gated off an estimated 500 public roads in Johannesburg.

New road barriers pop up all the time. They can make driving resemble navigating a maze. They also raise legal questions that have a special resonance in a country that only a decade ago shed the repressive legal system of apartheid. South Africa’s new bill of rights states not only that, “Everyone has the right to freedom of movement,” but also that, “Every citizen has the right to enter, to remain in and to reside anywhere in, the Republic.”

Those rights weren’t always guaranteed. For four decades under apartheid’s strict segregationist policies, the movements of black people were severely restricted. Blacks were told where they could live and work. They were required to carry passbooks.

Now, like other cities around South Africa, Johannesburg is trying to formulate a policy on “boomed suburbs” -- so called because of their traffic gates, known as booms. The city briefly allowed some suburbs to close roads, but currently all such closures are illegal, officials say. A city panel studied the issue and held hearings. Amanda Nair, the city’s executive director for development, planning, transportation and environment, chaired the panel and said a policy will be announced soon.

“It’s quite an emotional issue,” Nair said. “Politically, it’s extremely sensitive. We’ll just have to pronounce on the issue as a city and see what the fallout is. And fallout there certainly will be.

“Nobody has the right to restrict access to a public place. But we hear anecdotal evidence that it’s happening on a daily basis.”

Indeed, the fragility of this country’s new freedoms is all too plain here, where the haves have so much and the have-nots are the vast majority. Critics of the booms said poor workers have little recourse when rich suburbanites deny them their rights.

“They’re undermining the transformation of this country. They’re sowing seeds of racial disharmony,” said Nick Karvelas, chairman of a group called the Open City Forum. “The homeowners try to wrap it up in all sorts of ribbons and bows, but in the end it all boils down to boosting property values and to exclusion.”

ID Plan Shelved

In Hurlingham Manor, for instance, residents recently made plans to issue ID cards that domestic workers would show when they arrived at the suburb’s gates. The plan was abandoned only after news reports called it a return of the passbook system.

Karvelas said he calls residents of boomed suburbs “laager activists,” a reference to an era when Afrikaner settlers positioned their wagons in a laager, or circle, to protect themselves against Africans.

When Hurlingham Manor residents decided to close the suburb off, they came, like the residents of many other suburbs, to Steve Margo, the self-proclaimed king of the suburban road closure.

“I think I’m basically responsible for assisting the community in putting up 100 road closures,” Margo said proudly one recent afternoon as he sat in the office of the Sandton Precinct, a nonprofit community organization he founded in 1994.

Margo said communities pay anywhere from a few thousand dollars to more than $10,000 to enclose their boundaries. Monthly fees to guard a gate can be high too, he said, especially when not all residents contribute.

“As far as bringing back apartheid days is concerned, that’s a lot of hogwash,” he said. “The closing off of suburbs cannot be avoided, because of crime.”

Stepping into his copper-colored Land Rover at a shop outside Hurlingham Manor, Tobest Chui, a black resident of the suburb, agreed.

“Apartheid, those times are gone -- not again, no more,” said Chui, a shoe importer. But, he said: “The crime rate is too much. So you have to separate people from the community where you live.”

When it comes to crime, suburban residents’ concerns are hardly frivolous. The Johannesburg area consistently leads the nation in almost all crime categories, according to statistics from the South African Police Service. In 2000, the Johannesburg area reported 18,362 crimes per 100,000 people, compared with a nationwide average of 5,635. South Africa as a whole is one of the most crime-ridden countries in the world.

As a result, many people are terrified. In 1994, a survey found that nearly three-quarters of South Africans felt safe. In 2000, that share had dropped to less than half -- and to only about a third in Gauteng province, where Johannesburg is.

Margo maintains that the crime problem has been exacerbated by the fact that many police officers left the service after apartheid ended.

“In the old government, although I didn’t approve of it really, there were always enough policemen, always enough police cars,” he said. “With this new government, things began to go backward.”

Margo’s view that the police force did better in the old days is one most black South Africans don’t share. Under apartheid, police officers rarely paid any attention to crime in black areas. They were busy enforcing apartheid regulations. Part of the strain on the current system comes from the fact that police now try to safeguard all the people. Crime, most experts say, is worse in poor black areas than it is in the suburbs.

On a driving tour of some of the boomed communities he’s helped create, Margo said the gates reduce crime by 70% to 90%.

In some of the suburbs, external gates had been supplemented with internal ones, used to block off individual streets. One of these public streets was blocked by an automatic gate, with entry controlled by an intercom system.

Boomed suburbs, Margo said, also help the country by creating jobs. Among those that benefit: the companies who make the gates and booms, as well as those that manufacture the security lights, the wooden guardhouses next to the gates and the chemical toilets inside the guardhouses.

The key to the system’s success, said Margo, is good guards -- “who can read and write, who can speak to people, who can use their common sense.”

At Hurlingham Manor, one such guard, who said he would be fired if the homeowners found out he had talked with a reporter, said his common sense tells him that the suburb’s restrictions are wrong. When he was hired, he said, he was told by his security company that it is illegal to stop people on public streets. But the homeowners gave him their own instructions, telling him to stop all pedestrians as well as all cars without special suburb-issued decals. He said he was told not to let in pedestrians who didn’t live or work in the suburb, even if they just wanted to cut through the public streets on their way home.

Constitution Cited

Some residents of Hurlingham Manor who don’t support the closure argue about being stopped, he said. One, a lawyer, brings up the constitution.

“I tell him: ‘I know the constitution says I’m not supposed to stop people. But I’m not working according to the rules of the South African Constitution. I’m working according to the rules of the Hurlingham Manor committee members,’ ” the guard said.

The guard makes slightly more than $200 a month working five 12-hour days a week, and he’d like a better job, he said. But the security industry is one of the country’s only booming job categories. The Sowetan newspaper, whose readership is largely black, runs dozens of ads for security guards in its classified section.

“People like me, right now this is the only job in South Africa that we have available,” the guard said. “So I do my job.”