The imprisonment in which many South Africans have decided to defend themselves from the 'outside world', the crime, the others and the unknown to feel more secure and safer is euphemistically called gated communities.
The aesthetic of these places, most of the time, surrounded by a beautiful nature, creates a 'kind of fake world' as a bubble to be protected in.
The presence of restaurants, shops, hairdressers, pre-primary schools, gym and sport fields inside the bubble make their residents to 'go out' inside, avoiding the contact of the 'other world'. And when it is really necessary, private transports avoid the residents of gated communities from the real contact with the reality. Private cars and private buses come and goes from the inside to the outside and opposite.
It is 6.30 a.m. when I notice the bus of a private school standing in the parking area waiting for the kids to be picked up and driven to their private schools. Some of the kids walk inside the gated community, many others are driven by the family cars inside the gated community. Kids who grow watching the reality from windows, the windows of the beautiful villas of their houses, the windows of their cars and the ones of the buses. After school they will be driven home in the same way. There are no other ways to see the outside world because that world is dangerous, as the mass-media bombard us every day as well as the crime statistics.
I feel in prison but at least I need to see around, ‘forbidding’ me to walk outside. I decide then to walk inside. Big and extensive fences surround the gated community: yellow advertisements panels say “Alcatraz” and my mind goes to the famous movies of the American prison having the same name. I feel in Alcatraz.
I am surprised by the fact that also inside the gated community it is visible the different ‘classes’ to which their residents belong. Small villas, big villas and even bigger one surrounded by other gates. I am shocked and my eyes don’t believe what they are seeing. But panels around remind all the people inside to ‘love the estate’ and to care about its children.
The roads are empty. Few times I saw few people jogging in the morning. In the afternoons there are more family members chatting with the kids or the neighbours in front of their houses.
Most of the people (10:1 maybe: I have started to count the drivers during one morning) living in the gated community are white South Africans and the workers are blacks. I have been told that all the workers are registered and to enter into the estate they need to use the finger print scanned under a technological machine.
And I think and ask myself which one will be the perception of the workers who pass all day long inside the gated community working as a maiden for example, at close contact with the ‘luxury of things’ and then they go back at the late afternoon. I question how psychologically safe and secure or which consequences this causes, for a person who in the morning works in a gated community and goes back to the settlement at night, maybe in a shark of few square meters.
I feel in prison again.
I think which kind of society we are building allowing all of this to happen.
