Cape Town – Cape Town’s plans to build a wall to prevent attacks on the airport highway have divided South Africa’s tourist hotspot, with critics calling it an apartheid throwback to hide poverty.
The nearly nine-kilometre (six-mile) wall will separate part of the road that leads in from the international airport from the packed, impoverished settlements that line the route.
Attacks – some deadly – have been reported for years along the busy multi-lane route, including hijackings and smash-and-grab ambushes.
“They’ll come with a stone and break the windscreen,” said e-hailing driver Mustafa Hashim, recounting stories of attacks on the corridor known as the “N2 hell run”.
“If you want to keep your life, then you just leave them to take whatever they want,” Hashim, in his 30s, told AFP.
The city announced the 114-million-rand (nearly $7 million) N2 Edge safety project in December, shortly after a woman was fatally stabbed at a traffic light just off the highway after leaving the airport complex.
The key feature is a three-metre (10-foot) “safety barrier” to reinforce a broken concrete palisade fence and keep the road clear of criminals as well as pedestrians and animals.
“Literally hundreds of thousands of people a day use that road, and many of them feel unsafe,” said Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, stressing that most were local commuters.
‘Walls don’t stop crime’
Residents of the Nyanga informal settlement that will fall behind the highway wall say they are victims of the same crimes reported on the road, but the new barrier will do nothing to help them.
The attackers just disappear into the maze of shacks, said Linda Monakali, 43.
“This wall will assist the motorists, but for us, the perpetrators will be with us,” she told AFP.
Between October and December 2025, the Nyanga Police Station reported the highest number of robberies with aggravating circumstances in the country, according to police statistics.
The station was also listed as the second highest for murders, seeing a 29 percent increase compared to the previous quarter.
Cape Town’s high crime and murder rate is concentrated in its poorer areas – another world from the upmarket areas, beaches and mountains that attract millions of tourists.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has announced the imminent deployment of the army to parts of the city gripped by bloody gang wars.
City authorities should work out “how can we ensure we better our living environment rather than thinking of building a security wall on the N2,” said Nyanga Community Policing Forum chairman Dumisani Qwebe.
This included 24-hour surveillance cameras and decent sanitation, with women particularly at risk of sexual violence when they use outside toilets at night.
“Walls might stop bullets but it doesn’t stop crime,” said city councillor Jonathan Cupido from the GOOD political party.
The city’s government – led by the centre-right Democratic Alliance (DA) party – is “trying to hide what we cannot fix”, Cupido said.
‘Hide the poor’
Thirty years after the end of white-minority rule, disparities between Cape Town’s formerly segregated white and black areas are stark, with the city’s DA authorities accused of not doing enough tackle the imbalance.
Anger over the N2 wall dominated the Cape Town Pride mardi gras this month where activists carried banners reading “Homes not walls!”, telling the city to address its deepening housing crisis instead.
“They are trying to build a wall behind which they are trying to hide the poor,” former anti-apartheid activist and cleric Allan Boesak said at a recent Ramadan community gathering, calling it an “apartheid wall”.
“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,” he said.
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Compiled by Betha Madhomu
