describes a fantastical drama of a plague of “white blindness” that hits a city, causing panic and a militarised attempt to forcibly quarantine those affected in an abandoned mental asylum. The affliction should be understood as an allegorical presentation of society’s blindness to the way we treat one another; hence, it spreads in a matter of days throughout the population.
The city’s response to the threat of Covid-19 has been, once again, removing people to a distant internment camp in Strandfontein. Quarantine may work in specific situations for people suspected of having Covid-19, but it is not a feasible way to configure society. The Strandfontein camp was an attempt to restructure where people live, to resegregate the city whose street population actively defies racial and economic boundaries. In doing so, the city removed more than a thousand people from their neighbourhoods where they sleep and work.
This is why when the city de-densified the three largest tents in the camp, from about 500 people each to about 250, it was merely plastering over a structural problem: 250 people in one huge tent not only ignores national18 against groups of more than 50 people, but it removes any capacity for the individual to exercise the necessary health precautions to protect themselves from the virus.
If the city can afford to spend R18 000 per person a month at Strandfontein, they can certainly afford a couple thousand a month to cover the cost of putting them up in empty student residences or hotels during the lockdown or, better yet, into permanent homes. Additional forms of support and services can be made available through partnerships with NGOs.
At least they tried to protect the homeless.
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