A type of perceptual narrowing shapes the DA’s policies and approach to politics

The erasure of South Africa’s cultural landscape that started with enforcement of the Group Areas Act in the 1950s continues in Cape Town, and there is no end in sight.

By Ismail Lagardien

2 Nov 2025

In continuation of a discussion I began a couple of weeks ago, I want to start with the statement that South Africa belongs to everyone who lives in the country. That seems like a fair statement. Unless, of course, you want to forcefully remove or expel people who don’t “belong”. That “belonging” – who belongs and who does not – depends on the caprices of fashion. There should never be a time when any one group of people should be expelled from their homes, from their land and from their cultural landscape.

This power to determine who belongs and who does not is sometimes shoehorned into populist politics and rhetoric as a means to manipulate sentiments. At the extremes, it is used to remove people from their homes or places of worship. This removal becomes much more wicked when a people’s cultural landscape is being erased and when (even) their community burial sites are destroyed.

You can, of course, erase cultural landscapes by building over them in the process of “development”. South Africa is not at war, the most effective way to destroy natural and cultural landscapes. There is, nevertheless, a battle under way, between forces that want to push the country further away from the horrible past, rolling back injustices of the past (and restoring cultural landscapes ravaged by apartheid), and forces that want to either pull the country back or slickly push it in a different direction which comes with the tiresome and toxic belief that the past is past and that we should move on. They make quite clever arguments, mind you, that conveniently skirt away from accountability.

James Baldwin referred to this ignore-the-past statement as a way to downplay the violence and oppression of the past, and provides the white community with a false sense of moral superiority when (in my view) they say “let’s create jobs” or “let’s attract investment”. Who can argue against that, lah?

What they see in the mirror, Baldwin suggested, was “an appallingly oppressive and bloody history, known all over the world. What they see is a disastrous, continuing, present, condition which menaces them, and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility. But since, in the main, they seem to lack the energy to change this condition, they would rather not be reminded of it. [In conversations among themselves] they make reassuring sounds… In any case, whatever they bring to one another, is certainly not freedom from guilt. The guilt remains, more deeply rooted, more securely lodged than the oldest of old trees.”

The Democratic Alliance (DA) is the embodiment of all of the above. In Cape Town, the DA has steadily been driving the destruction of the cultural landscape. This is a conclusion that can be reached when one considers the way that properties in the Bo-Kaap, a valuable resource site for the Muslim (Malay and Coloured) community, are being bought and sold, something which has been discussed in this space, previously. The DA’s policy approach is achieved through a type of perceptual narrowing, which I will better explain, below.

An inception point of this destruction was during 1996. That was when developers for the Wiehahn family petitioned to build over a kramat (sacred Muslim burial site) in Oudekraal. The local community in Cape Town successfully petitioned against the development, and the project was eventually stalled – much to the dismay of Wiehahn’s legal representatives, who invoked fears about land rights claims during the apartheid era being under threat. Here is that issue about politics (during apartheid era) securing land rights for white people in Cape Town, and lack of accountability for the racist acquisition of property during the previous era.

Places of worship, cultural heritage are in the way of development

How does one explain this apparently wilful blindness and refusal to accept that others have claims to their cultural landscape, and the right to prevent the (further) erasure of things that matter to them? One explanation, the one which seems to be preferred, is the quite simplistic economistic idea that “investment”, or “job creation” and economic expansion/growth are more important than people’s homes, their places of worship and places where they spend their lives and express their culture and heritage. There is also the wilful ignoring and a refusal to accept accountability, which Baldwin so eloquently expressed, and the assumption that your cherubic cheeks are filled with only innocence and good intent.

Then there is something that I have been mulling over for a while.

There is a scientific concept that I want to appropriate from psychology and redeploy as a metaphor. Perceptual narrowing describes a biological and developmental mechanism; a neurological tuning process driven by exposure and reinforcement. Applied to politicians analogously, we may say that some politicians tend to suffer from patterns of selective attention and institutional habituation.

As a metaphor, someone like, say, Helen Zille or Geordin Hill-Lewis, who do not see race and/or are insensitive to the spatial legacy of apartheid, undergo a kind of perceptual narrowing during policymaking. They are sensitive and see only some signals, the preservation of white privilege and extension of liberal capitalism (that investment is required, and that housing developments and skyscrapers need to be erected), while other signals (like the legacy of spatial inequality, or the cultural landscape of people who are not white) disappear from view. It reminds me of an animal instinct. When a wild animal breaks into your campsite, it wants your food and is not aware of and does not see the discomfort or fear in you. It is this animal instinct, and a quite rapacious capitalism, that those two clever Germans referred to when they said that with the capitalist surge, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned”. Liberal economists have their own spin when they refer to Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of “creative destruction,” which I believe simply sanitises capitalism’s destructive forces.

So, the statement at the top, that South Africa belongs to everyone who lives in it, includes the homes and landscapes that give cultural meaning to belonging. The heavy caveat, here, is that criminals, racists, thugs and supremacists, and cold-hearted liberals, have a right to belong. The question is whether they can be stopped. I doubt that they can. Starting with the Codesa process in the early 1990s, we have become more and more the best democracy that money can buy. DM

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Places of worship, cultural heritage are in the way of development