A wall against crime or against the poor? As xenophobic attacks rise, critics say Black South Africans are fighting the wrong enemies

CAPE TOWN — A controversial $7 million wall rising along Cape Town’s N2 highway has reignited a painful debate about race, poverty, and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa.

For a growing number of pan-African voices, the structure is a symptom of something deeper: a dangerous misalignment of priorities among black South Africans, who are simultaneously turning violent against fellow African immigrants while a resurgent settler class consolidates power.

The nearly 9-kilometer “N2 Edge” safety barrier, branded by critics as an “apartheid wall,” is designed to separate the highway leading from Cape Town International Airport from the sprawling, impoverished black townships of Nyanga and surrounding settlements. The route has long been known as the “N2 hell run” due to frequent hijackings, smash-and-grab ambushes, and occasional deadly attacks on motorists.

City officials, led by the centre-right Democratic Alliance (DA), defend the R114 million (approximately $7 million) project as a necessary crime-fighting measure. Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said the road is used by “hundreds of thousands of people a day,” many of them local commuters who feel unsafe.

A woman was fatally stabbed at a traffic light just off the highway after leaving the airport complex in December 2025, an incident that accelerated the project’s approval.

But former anti-apartheid activist and cleric Allan Boesak has called the wall an attempt to “hide the poor.”

“They are trying to build a wall behind which they are trying to hide the poor,” Boesak said at a recent Ramadan community gathering. “They are trying to hide the fact that there is indeed a black Cape Town and a white Cape Town – a privileged Cape Town and a privileged-deprived Cape Town.”

A Wave of Xenophobic Violence

The wall controversy comes amid a resurgence of xenophobic and Afrophobic attacks across South Africa. In recent months, immigrants from Ghana, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, and other African nations have been assaulted, robbed, and driven from their homes in townships near Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town (as shown in many viral videos inundating social media feeds).

Shops owned by foreign nationals have been looted, and at least seven people have been killed in xenophobic mob attacks since the beginning of the year, according to civil society monitors.

South African police have made dozens of arrests, but community leaders say the violence reflects deep-seated resentment over unemployment, housing shortages, and crime, frustrations that are frequently misdirected at fellow Africans.

One pro-African unity commentator, whose analysis has circulated widely in response to the recent violence, argues that black South Africans are being manipulated by a familiar colonial playbook.

“The settler class has always been unified,” the commentator, Shannel R Oliver wrote. “When will Africa be?”

The U.S.-based commentator pointed to historical precedents:

“The Belgians turned the Hutu against the Tutsi. The British divided the Igbo and the Yoruba, the Fante and the Ashanti — specifically to crush unified African resistance. Today the targets are Xhosa and Zulu, township against township, African immigrant against South African.”

Strategic Assets and Secessionist Ambitions

The wall’s construction also coincides with renewed efforts by some members of Cape Town’s white minority to break the Western Cape away from South Africa entirely. A UK-born immigrant named Phil Craig has been lobbying Washington to support secession, reportedly comparing Cape Town’s strategic value to Panama and Greenland — two territories former U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to seize by military force.

Oliver described Craig’s campaign as “an invitation to a foreign power to invade a sovereign nation” and “treason.”

Cape Town generates approximately 10% of South Africa’s entire GDP. With Red Sea shipping lanes disrupted by conflict, the Cape Sea Route has emerged as one of the world’s most strategically valuable maritime corridors.

“Whoever controls Cape Town controls the southern gateway of an entire continent,” Oliver warned.

Two Crises, One Question

On the ground in Nyanga, residents say the wall does nothing to address their own vulnerability to crime. According to police statistics, the Nyanga Police Station recorded the highest number of robberies with aggravating circumstances in the country between October and December 2025, and the second-highest number of murders — a 29% increase from the previous quarter.

“Walls might stop bullets but it doesn’t stop crime,” said city councillor Jonathan Cupido of the GOOD political party. Cupido accused the DA-led city government of trying to “hide what we cannot fix.”

At the Cape Town Mardi Gras festival this month, activists carried banners reading “Homes not walls!” — redirecting attention to the city’s deepening housing crisis. Nyanga Community Policing Forum chairman Dumisani Qwebe urged authorities to focus on improving living environments “rather than thinking of building a security wall on the N2.”

Yet as black South Africans protest the wall and, in other moments, attack African immigrants, the commentator’s central question lingers: Who is the real enemy?

“European immigrants are flooding in, buying up land and driving up costs, welcomed by the same settler class building the apartheid wall,” he wrote. “While South African communities are turned against each other, the settler class has always been unified. When will Africa be?”

City authorities have not responded to accusations that the wall is racially motivated. The N2 Edge project is proceeding as planned, with completion expected in early 2027.

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Wednesday, June 3, 2026. Stay informed with today’s front pages of Ghanaian newspapers, all in one place.