5 Nov

Wire cage

It started years ago with the fencing of private estates. Over time, neighbourhoods also started controling access routes. House owners erected electric fences on top of their boundary walls. After some years it only seemed normal that the public spaces in the city should also be fenced. First city hall. Then the park around the art museum. The public squares — suddenly not public at all.

No-one walked the streets unless they were forced. That was — until the invention of the wire cage. An ingenious invention, a cage on wheels. Now you could take your prison with you wherever you needed to go. People pulled up their cages next to one another and could open little portals to exchange goods when needed. No attacker with a knife could get near. Those who suffered from extra paranoia even attached bulletproof glass on the inside of the cages. Over time, people kitted out the cages to be comfortable around the clock — spaces for sitting, sleeping, changing. When you had to visit a loo you merely parked your cage over a manhole, opened it and proceeded with business.

In a world where every citizen lived in their own cell, the opportunities to have conversations or have any kind of human connection grew scarce. People started commiting suicide inside their cages in ever more dramatic ways — a final ode to individuality.

Welcome to the end of days.

(A note: in South Africa we truly live behind fences and in cages. I found this piece very hard to write as the reality is so frightening I don’t really know how to weave a narrative around it. We are caged animals, living in isolation, too afraid to get out of our cells. This is the final result of Apartheid.)