Do Good Fences Really Make Good Neighbors?

            Robert Frost wrote many times in “Mending Wall” that “Good fences make good neighbors.”  But being surrounded by fences, looking at fences, and being separated by fences all the time here is making me think that he was way off.  Most properties here are surrounded by at least a fence; in most cases a wall encloses the properties with an electric fence lining the top.  I was struck by the fact that these walls surrounded individual residential homes, schools, businesses, and shopping centers.  When I think off walls and fences I initially wonder, “Who are they trying to keep out?” 

At school especially, fencing in the property makes some sense to me because it can help to regulate that all school visitors are being accounted for and that random strangers aren’t roaming through school grounds.  But the homes and businesses struck me as odd, I was told that during the time shortly after the fall of apartheid many people chose to raise them because they felt they needed protection from the desegregation.  I was also told that during the 2010 World Cup walls and fences were erected around the townships in order to ensure that no tourists would accidentally enter them.  When we spoke with the man who lead us through Addo Elephant Park, he said “Oh, so you all are seeing the real South Africa” when we mentioned that we were working in a township school.  That statement along with the knowledge that the townships had been intentionally hidden from World Cup concerned me.  If it is known among locals that there are great wealth disparities and many areas of extreme poverty which need some form of assistance, why then would the government go to such great lengths to conceal this from others?  The "'New South Africa' --mean[s] all shapes and colors" but in an inclusive society made for all shapes and colors why are people still barricading themselves behind walls and hiding parts of their country from the eyes of the rest of the world? (Coombes 73).It makes me think that the great strides towards equality that have been made on paper have really only been made on paper and not in practice.