![]() He likes to tell visitors that the pipe in the sky is the track of the new high-speed train that will one day dissect Gauteng. Hugo is Swiss and has lived here for years. ![]() The day I went to Dainfern, sunshine lay like honey on Highgate Village, children played in Waltham Drive and the golfers trundled in electric carts over the fairway. ![]() Dainfern is the answer to the Jo'burgers prayer - to live an unlocked life in a safe place where no bullets fly and hijackers fear to tread. What segregates South Africans these days is security, and how much of it you can buy is what separates the saved from the servants. They all sell freedom from fear - but Dainfern does it better, and does it with style. Or they move into cluster-villages, gated, guarded and patrolled round the clock. Jo'burg is the city of beautiful walls where people fortify their houses, barricade their flats, electrify their fences, buy dogs and guns. The hijacker who wants your car will shoot a black businessman as easily as a white housewife. So people hardly notice the shining viaduct slung high overhead, much as Berliners didn't really "see" the Berlin wall, and for much the same reason - they really don't want to know what it is there for.īut then you can't do much about aerial sewage - what you can protect yourself against is crime and fear. It is not that Dainferners are embarrassed about the pipe it goes with the territory, and anyway now and then it springs a leak and everyone knows what Jo'burgers know anyway: shit happens. The pipe carries sewage between the different communities that throng the flat veld outside Jo'burg. Set among fields, nature trails, and wooded suburbs, it is, inch for inch, probably the most costly secure space in Africa. A great silver pipe in the sky runs above the heads of the residents of an estate called Dainfern, a walled fortress-suburb in the northern stretches of Johannesburg. ![]()
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