South Africa Pilgrimage: Good Fences make Good Neighbours

The Fences of Joburg

Driving into Johannesburg I was struck by the extent and height of the fences.

Everywhere you look there are barbed wire, razor wire and electrified entanglements.

Signs on almost every fence declare “Armed Response”.

At Robben Island I was struck with the heroism and hope. In Joburg I am confronted with just how far there is to go.

I was reminded of a poem called “Mending a Wall” by Robert Frost

In the poem, the author is working with his neighbour to rebuild a damaged fence, when he wonders at the need for the fence in the first place:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘.Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

I can see how tempting it is to come up with a cliché.. to say that if they just took down the fences it would be alright.. It wouldn’t.

My colleague Andy and I are staying with two beautiful white South Africans, Brian and Jenny, and this mornings breakfast table discussion helped focus the dilemma facing South Africa, and in fact the world.

South Africa is partly what it is because the first world lives so closely to the third world. Australians, Americans or Canadians are not confronted with poverty on a daily basis the way South Africans are.

Brian and Jenny have been held up at gunpoint twice and just last week had a chair stolen from their front porch. He reflected this morning that the crime is understandable because often people have nothing to eat.

The understanding of the inequity doesn’t make it any easier to cope with violent crime, and many South Africans are now living in Perth, Vancouver and Europe.

Unless the fabric of the society changes, taking down the fences would lead to more problems, not less.

You need a wall when trust is not there, so really the trust and not the walls are the issue, which is what Frost was addressing with his poem.

South Africa is on a long journey to build a society where barbed wire is no longer necessary.

I can see the significance of what we have been doing in bringing communities together.

Today we are debriefing our journey with the pilgrimage. It’s great to be hearing both what was remarkable about the time, and also what could be better next time. Overall though I am left with two things: firstly this has been a more significant time than I was expecting it to be, and secondly the birth of Fusion South Africa is coming at a time when what it is we do when we are at our best, is just what is needed not only in this country but over the whole of Africa.