The N2 Wall is Not Safety. It is Violence

Dangerous Precedent

I live in Bonteheuwel, alongside the N2. This matters because decisions made about this road are not abstract policy debates. They shape how we move, how we are seen, and whether we are treated as citizens or risks to be managed.
The City of Cape Town plans to build a R110 million wall along the N2. They say it is for safety. But walls have a way of multiplying once we accept their logic. 

If crime along the N2 justifies fencing off working-class communities, what stops the same rationale being applied to Jakes Gerwel Drive tomorrow? That road runs from the N1 through to Mitchells Plain. It is already known for frequent smash-and-grab incidents. By the City’s own reasoning, this too could qualify for a barrier. If that happens, Bonteheuwel will be fenced in from two sides, not because we are criminals, but because we live near roads the City has failed to make safe.

Safety becomes something provided for those passing through, not for those who live here. And the question must be asked plainly: safety for who?

If safety were the principle, the same logic would apply to Borchards Quarry Road, the R300 to Stock Road corridor, Prince George Drive, the N7 near Du Noon, and multiple other routes with similar incidents. Yet walls are not proposed there. What distinguishes the N2 is not crime alone. It is visibility. It is what tourists and the elite see on the way from the airport. It is whose poverty is deemed unsightly.

Congestion is a Policy Failure

The City treats crime along the N2 as if it emerges from the surrounding community. But smash-and-grab incidents flourish where cars are forced to slow down, stop, or crawl. That is not accidental. It is the predictable outcome of decades of transport planning failure.

Working-class communities remain distant from jobs, schools, hospitals, and economic centres while public transport has deteriorated. The result is chronic congestion on a few arterial roads. This congestion creates vulnerability. Stalled cars, packed intersections, and stressed commuters become easy targets. The problem is not that people live nearby. The problem is that the City has forced too many people into the same narrow corridors with no alternatives.

Rail should have been the pressure valve. Instead, it collapsed. The Central Line, serving Langa, Bonteheuwel, Mitchells Plain, and Khayelitsha, was non-functional for years due to lack of investment in rolling stock (replacing or purchasing new trains), vandalism, decay, and neglect. Partial restoration has not fixed the problem. 

Services are inconsistent and unsafe. Bus-based alternatives have also failed. MyCiTi remains unevenly accessible and insufficient for the volume of daily travel. People do what they must. They drive, take taxis, and crowd onto the same roads. Then the City responds to its own planning failure by proposing a wall.

The Daily Fear

There is something the City’s plans never capture: the unthinkable stress of simply coming and going from our own neighbourhoods. Every intersection matters. We know which are dangerous because we live with that knowledge in our bodies. I approach certain traffic lights with shoulders tight, scanning mirrors, calculating escape routes.
I have been a victim of a smash-and-grab myself. And like many women, I do not travel alone. I carry women and children, groceries, school bags, the weight of responsibility. The fear is visceral. It is the knowledge that if something happens, help may not come quickly, or at all.

If safety were truly the priority, we would see 24/7 safety mechanisms at hotspots: visible policing, rapid-response units, staffed control rooms, and functional emergency systems. Instead, what we experience is absence. Women in particular carry the psychological cost of this failure. Children absorb it too. And yet, in the City’s framing, this trauma is displaced onto geography. The danger is said to come from the community rather than from the failure to provide continuous, reliable safety where risk is known. Building a wall does nothing to protect the woman stopped at a red light with children in the back seat.

Planning Without Dignity

Over the years, Cape Town has implemented infill housing developments in poor communities, building on every available open space, often without investment in transport infrastructure, road capacity, or public services. At the same time, the city has experienced a steady influx of people from rural areas and other provinces. Growth without planning is harmful.
The City has densified already stressed areas without upgrading roads, increasing public transport, or providing alternatives. Congestion worsens, stress intensifies, and vulnerability increases. Instead of acknowledging this as a planning failure, the City reframes the consequences as a security problem and proposes to fence communities off. A wall is not a response to crime. It is an admission that planning has failed, and that the City would rather contain the fallout than correct the cause.

Walls Other Us

Walls do not just separate space. They separate people from possibility. They send a message that some citizens are inside the city’s moral and political community and others are outside, even when those others work, shop, pay rates, send children to school, and contribute to the life of the city.

Research shows that living next to physical barriers increases stress, anxiety, and social withdrawal, even when controlling for poverty and crime. 

The wall itself becomes trauma.

In South Africa, this is not abstract. Apartheid geography separated people from opportunity, belonging, and citizenship. Physical barriers were a tool of power, not protection. Today, the language used to justify this wall, safety for motorists, controlling movement, protecting visitors echoes a logic that once underpinned pass laws and forced removals. This is not safety. It is containment.

The N2 Wall is Violence

The City claims it wants safety, but what it is planning is violence.

It is psychological violence, instilling fear and reinforcing stigma. It is structural violence, formalising inequality, limiting access to opportunity, and turning centuries of injustice into concrete reality. It is direct violence, constraining freedom of movement, making emergency response harder, and trapping communities already burdened by neglect.

Walls do not make streets safer. They contain risk, assign blame, and displace responsibility from the City onto the people it should be protecting. This is governance through fear, exclusion disguised as policy, and a continuation of apartheid logic.

Communities like Bonteheuwel, Langa, Heideveld, Guguletu,Mitchells Plain, and Khayelitsha already endure daily stress, gendered trauma, unsafe intersections, and transport failures. To wall us in is to formalise that suffering and make poverty and precarity a barrier between the City and its citizens.

If the City truly cared about safety, it would invest in frequent, safe, and reliable public transport, redesign dangerous intersections, deploy 24/7 safety mechanisms, and address the root causes of crime: poverty, inequality, unemployment, and exclusion. Anything less is not policy. It is violence.

We should not be silent while our communities are walled off. We should not let the City frame our lives as threats to be managed. This wall is a political choice. It is a continuation of apartheid thinking, dressed in the language of safety, and a direct attack on the dignity, freedom, and humanity of the poor.

Let's fight this now and always insist on community centred solutions that directly benefit the affected poor communities.

Let's demand for funds for the wall be applied for a track for those running along the N2, for building recreational parks and sports fields for the children playing football on the side of the N2, let's involve community safety structures and pay them for patrolling sections of the N2 that is neighbouring their community.  Let's insists on lighting, cameras and drones along the N2.  Let's build more footbridge across the N2 for workers, learners and families.  

Let us fight back on the collective punishment of whole communities because a few criminals.  Let us run awareness and pshyco-social support programmes to deal with the underlying issues and trauma which brought our people to this point. 

Let's us never find ourselves in an open prison situation for the comfort of the privileged few.

Henriette  Abrahams 
2 February 2026