White South Africans living in gated communities think of crime as a type of ethnic cleansing forcing them into semi-migration, a study on the subject showed on Tuesday.
The study was presented at an international symposium on gated communities or townhouses, held in Pretoria at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s convention centre.
”Crime is a form of ethnic cleansing” was one of the statements from newspaper excerpts discussed at the symposium on Tuesday.
The study, titled Fear and Loathing in Johannesburg: Constructing New Identities within Gated Communities, describes gated communities as having emerged in response to a sense of embattlement.
They are a response to a series of failures in local state capacity, the rule of law and a reduced sense of citizenship.
One of the study’s authors, Alex Wafer, a researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand, said the idea of crime as a form of ethnic cleansing was articulated some years ago by a resident of such a community in an open letter to the Sandton Chronicle, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the United Nations.
”Within the old and new white elite in Johannesburg has emerged a dream of living in a westernised, European environment,” said Dr Teresa Dirsuweit, the study’s other author.
Richard Ballard of the Development Studies School at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in another paper described white people’s strategy for finding comfort zones in post-apartheid South Africa as ”semi-gration”.
This is different from emigration in that people do not leave the country but rather give up their citizenship by closing themselves off in gated communities and living a lifestyle that is completely non-synchronous to that of the rest of South African society.
Assimilation of cultural groups
The assimilation of different cultural groups into the culture of white suburbs is another strategy described by Ballard.
”People from different backgrounds normally have to adjust and fit into the way of life in white suburbs. That is not integration because it does not work both ways,” Ballard said. ”True integration is a merging of two sets of values.”
However, some strategies for finding a comfort zone are not based on fear and anxiety about social mixing and social change, he said.
”The strategy of integration, where the white person adjusts their identity to fit in with the rest of South African society, is also used,” Ballard said.
In such a case the person would not strive for the westernised, European ideal but rather identify with South African cosmopolitanism.
In attendance at the symposium were panellists of diverse professions from more than 20 countries, who shared their experiences with local delegates.
Gated communities were described by one panellist from Britain as sharing some of the same features as medieval castles.
”The modern gated community is a kind of feudal castle and the walls are meant to keep out the peasants,” said David Parsons of the development and society faculty at Sheffield Hallam University.
”The gated-community single-class, almost single-tenure, estate has resulted,” Parsons said.
Reluctance by a developer to include affordable housing in Sheffield’s first gated community led to a hypothesis that the effect of a social mix would influence occupiers, Parson’s study revealed.
The symposium was to conclude on Thursday with a workshop discussing how and why national policy-makers should be involved in forming a national policy on gated communities. — Sapa