A great silver pipe in the sky runs above the heads of the residents of Dainfern, a walled fortress-suburb in northern Johannesburg. Set among fields, nature trails and wooded suburbs, it is, inch-for-inch, probably the most costly, secure space in Africa. And one of the most successful.
The pipe carries sewage between the different communities that throng the veld outside Johannesburg.
Dainferners aren’t embarrassed about the pipe; it goes with the territory. And you can’t do much about aerial sewage — what you protect yourself against is crime and fear.
Jo’burg is the city of beautiful walls, where rich people fortify their houses, barricade their flats, electrify their fences, buy dogs and guns. Or they move into cluster-villages, gated, guarded and patrolled around the clock. They all sell freedom from fear, but Dainfern does it better and does it with style.
What segregates South Africans these days is security, and how much of it you can buy is what separates the saved from the servants. Dainfern is the answer to the Jo’burgers’ prayers — to live an unlocked life in a safe place where no bullets fly and hijackers fear to tread.
The day I went to Dainfern, sunshine lay like honey on Highgate Village, children played in Waltham Drive and the golfers trundled in electric carts over the fairway.
Hugo is Swiss and has lived here for years. He likes to tell visitors that the pipe in the sky is the track of the new high-speed train that will one day dissect Gauteng. Hugo calls this extravagantly expensive golfing stockade ”just a ghetto for whitey”, but then Hugo has a mordant streak of humour. All sorts are welcome in Dainfern — it’s cash, not colour, that counts.
Dainfern’s achievement has been to persuade those behind its walls that this isn’t a penitentiary, it is a paradise; it’s not a life-sentence, it’s a ”lifestyle”.
”No one who is not supposed to be in here is in here,” the managers told me in tones that might apply to those confined in less happy institutions. But I got their drift. Anyone not meant to be in Dainfern runs the risk of being electrocuted, shot or arrested.
Embedded in the walls ringing the village are seismic sensors, and reinforced steel bars reach down three metres into the Earth to stop human moles who might tunnel beneath the fortifications. Detectors along the length of the perimeter wall listen for incursions. An electric fence tops the wall, carrying enough current, a polite notice warns, ”to cause death”.
Closed-circuit cameras constantly check the perimeter defences and in the gatehouse control-room, staff screen and record every visitor. Rapid reaction vehicles stand ready and armed patrols glide down Collingham Close and Willowgrove Road.
Patricia has lived here for years and got to the heart of what makes Dainferners happy. ”What we have here is the way it was. When you could stroll through your neighbourhood and leave your windows open. When your kids took their bikes and rode down to the river. What we’re doing is remaking the life of the Sixties in the new millennium.’’
John, a British builder, bought into Dainfern for the good life. Helicoptering over the area, he saw peaceful green acres and beautiful walls and said, ”right, I’ll have one of those”.
”Those” are the Dainfern mansions, ranging from the opulent to the preposterous, from Tuscan to French provincial to ”African Zen”.
Dainfern houses reflect a pecking order: the smaller places go to those who can shell out a couple million rands ”for the address”. The mansions belong to those who lavish a fortune on pilasters, crystal, koi and in-house movie theatres, while a litter of Porsches crowd the front yard.
But it is not just about money, said one resident, and I heard it over and over — ”it’s about living”.
The bucolic illusion is achieved by brilliant recreational engineering. It has nature trails, splashing fountains, green vistas and strolling guinea fowl. This is Jo’burg’s unlikely Eden — it prefers the well-heeled to the well-shriven, the rich over the righteous, and instead of angels posted outside its gates with flaming swords to keep out the riffraff, it has guards with guns and thousands of volts pulsing through the fence.
It’s not an anachronism in the new South Africa, however, it is the future.
Dainfern is selling what other, more opulent islands of rich isolation such as Carefree in Arizona, or the gargantuan Beverley Springs in California, are selling — safety in a dangerous world.
These ”lifestyles” are posited on the idea that you can, if you are rich enough, buy yourself into high- security nirvana built to your specifications. In the old South Africa, only black people lived in ”townships”; in the future South Africa, the planners of Dainfern have realised, everyone will live in townships.
These futuristic high-security sybarite compounds — and they are springing up everywhere north of Jo’burg — boxy, walled-in hutches with none of Dainfern’s space and strange serenity — must be serviced, usually by low-end suppliers in nearby satellite villages. And Dainfern has not one, but two of those, and the silver pipe in the sky connects them like an umbilical cord.
Diepsloot is just down the road. It is a vast, apocalyptic place of rutted roads, shacks, houses, thin children, thinner goats, cooking fires, constant funerals, dirt roads and dust. To stand on its outer edge is to see it literally spreading towards the reinforced walls of Dainfern.
You do not see white faces in Diepsloot. South Africa is not interested in history; all the talk is of the ”new”. But history is terrifyingly interested in South Africa. Close the door on the the past and the ghosts come through the window.
So it was that one morning, on a patch of veld hard by the fine walls of Dainfern, I met a man called Lucky directing a team of diggers from Tsogo Funerals, searching for forgotten graves of people who once lived on the old farms that became the giant new walled estates. Clans such as the Bapong, the Sithole and Monanereng lived here for centuries.
Tradition requires that ancestors be honoured. ”How can this happen if you don’t know where they are buried?” asked Lucky.
The developers of the great walled suburbs are sure all ancestors were exhumed and reburied. Lucky and the relatives of the lost ancestors dispute this. Lucky suspects that some of the missing ancestors may lie buried beneath the Italian tiles and parquet floors of Dainfern. There is a court case in progress and tempers are frayed.
The residents of Dainfern stay put while those of Diepsloot lucky enough to have jobs move between township shacks and Tuscan mansions in their guise as gardeners, builders and security guards. In this phantasmagoric city, maybe that’s one way of spotting who the real South Africans are — they have to lead more lives.
It is not always remembered that, in South Africa, it is blacks and not whites who are most at risk from being shot, raped and robbed. Given the choice, I have no doubt Diepsloot would opt for the hermetic happiness of Dainfern.
Anyone who imagines that Dainfern represents some kind of short-lived aberration has not been looking hard at South Africa. — Â