Spatial inequality affects everybody

One of the most unsettling and unexpected experiences I have had this year was receiving a letter in June from the school three of my children have happily attended since 2012 indicating that it was at risk of shutting down by the end of the year. 

My husband and I did not see this coming. We should have but did not. We did not see this coming, despite driving past a growing number of mothers and children sitting at three traffic lights on our way to school, holding out empty cups towards incoming traffic over the years. 

We did not see this coming despite driving in the early mornings past drug houses, squalor, dilapidated homes and the in-your-face decay that was happening right in front of our eyes. 

We had not anticipated how Covid-19 would obliterate the size of the school pupil population, because parents lost their jobs. 

You may wonder how the possible closure of an almost century-old elite independent school with a rich cultural and political heritage has anything to do with South Africa’s vexing land question, but it has much to do with it. 

The uncertainty about the future of the school led my overthinking and anxiety-laden mind into overdrive and into action. While my husband was leading and participating in urgently formed parent committees intent on “Project Save-the-School”, my naturally risk-averse character was set on ensuring that we placed our children into a new school or schools without delay. 

My fears were exacerbated by the knowledge of long waiting lists at many schools across the country. Having completed matric in a former model C school in northern Johannesburg and my husband at a school in the former homeland of Gazankulu, we did not have much we could offer any new schools in so far as the underlying but pervasive privilege stakes are concerned. 

With neither of us being an “old boy” or “old girl”, the placement of our children in new schools was not simply a matter of completing an application form. 

Much of it depended on the extent to which both our individual and combined histories were able to locate ourselves indirectly in the form of access and proximity to the colonial heritage histories of the schools. 

In case it has not become obvious by now, the origins of elite schools’ heritage are directly linked with how the country was not only demarcated by racial lines, poor and rich, it was also divided into urban and rural spaces, township and suburbia. The elite schools were once an extension of the separatist regime itself. Schools are microcosms and representations of spatial inequality. 

I often hear stories of those who lived a decade or more before me lamenting the yesteryear vibrancy, dynamism and appeal of places like Yeoville and Hillbrow, spoken of almost as if to describe a kind of sophisticated urban metropolis, later becoming symbols of revolt and rebellion against the apartheid architecture. 

By the time I was at university in the late 1990s, Yeoville was still a kind of arts and culture hub that bustled with jazz cafés and restaurants, with reggae, hip-hop and kwaito sounds of the time dominating the walls of the indelible Tandoor club. 

At the same time, perhaps what did not meet the eye was the “white flight” taking place at a rapid rate, with the wealthy, upwardly mobile moving to the nearby suburbs and often abandoning their apartments. When it became glaring that a new “black” government would take over the political leadership of the country, “white flight” took grip at scale. 

What was then termed by the National Party government as the “swart gevaar” resulted in a significant number of white landowners and homeowners fleeing the country without a trace, with commercial and residential properties alike increasingly becoming spooks of what they once were. 

The area surrounding my children’s school was not spared from the jarring urban decay. My children’s school bore the direct effect of what has happened (or not) in the past 28 years. The aftermath of de-industrialisation that came with the demise of the manufacturing and textile industry, the closure of factories, disinvestment and out-of-control crime led to abandoned buildings and failing infrastructure. 

With most of the city infrastructure left to rot, abandoned buildings became the only option for many of the vulnerable in our society. They occupied derelict buildings because of the government’s poor planning, haphazard immigration policies and governance.

Criminals and criminal elements were left to thrive to the detriment and exploitation of poor people. 

The levels of crimes do not involve fictitious characters. Having escaped a car hijacking at gunpoint while driving with two of my children in the back seat in broad daylight — having fetched my daughter from a violin lesson in May this year — it was not lost on me how connected and yet disconnected the lives of the haves and have-nots are in Johannesburg. 

Not long after my unfortunate incident, which could have been worse, one of the widely reported attempted heists took place in 2022, just a stone’s throw away from the school building.

It was not lost on me that I was using a route that connected various suburbia, forcing me to see and to acknowledge the squalor, overcrowding, abject poverty and a declining city. 

I was part and parcel of those who have to negotiate my way out of seeing the decay that has reached unparalleled levels. 

In my memoir My Land Obsession, I detail how my younger sister and I were ultimately able to secure admission into a formerly white school in the northern suburbs in 1994 after quite a struggle. 

My parents had a slightly different problem from the one I was experiencing as a parent in 2022. 

In 1994, my parents’ challenge in assisting me to acquire better education was centred on where we lived in relation to the location of the desired school. 

My father, who was starting his career as a full-time musician, had to fake his physical address to comply with the then-location proximity requirement of the school. 

The apartheid architecture of where we lived, and which school we wished to attend, was a spatial inequality issue. It was a land issue. Living in Soweto and wishing to go to a school in Highlands North was a tall order. 

In the case of my husband and I, the threat of the closure of our children’s school eventually abated. Through the resourcefulness, solidarity and single-mindedness of the parents and teacher body of the school, a solution was found. 

What it did involve, however, was the forced abandonment of the campus given its precarious location. 

It involved fleeing from poverty — which was jarring in our eyes — for a more secure and safer campus. 

It involved not having to see the decay.

This experience has caused me to think deeply about how the elite (of whom I admittedly form a part) tend to choose to either flee or pretend not to see the many socioeconomic problems we are faced with daily. 

We have even developed an uncanny ability to craft solutions that involve us tampering with and living with and working around the problem. 

One does not need to be a scholar to conclude that the government’s ambivalence and ineptitude in implementing spatial integration policies have failed. The upgrading of informal settlements is not happening at pace. The government’s failure to use its expropriation powers, especially regarding abandoned buildings, is well-documented. 

It is inescapable that the government must urgently implement regulatory policies that require a unitary repository for the application and finalisation of zoning applications. 

But the promise of a spatially equal and integrated society does not solely lie on the shoulders of the government. It also requires us, the elite, to reflect and probe our flawed and skewed concepts of contempt for poverty and by extension contempt for poor people. 

It is in our preoccupation with our notions of Nimbyism (“Not in my back yard”) that impede any meaningful progress, but where the solution involved a joint effort between the government and the management of the school in resolving the issue. Imagine if our solutions were focused on bridging spatial gaps not only in schools but where we live and work. 

Bulelwa Mabasa is a director and head of the land reform restitution and tenure practice at Werksmans Attorneys. She serves as the only attorney on the presidential advisory panel on land reform and is the co-author and co-editor of Land in South Africa: Contested Meanings and Nation-Formation and her memoir, My Land Obsession. She writes in her personal capacity.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.