Dr Wamuwi Mbao: Everybody needs good neighbours

It’s the middle of the decade. In another five years’ time, who can say what we’ll find, what lies waiting down that line, at the end of 2029? Yes, I’m paraphrasing Abba (you read this publication for cultural variety, after all), whose maddening earworm Happy New Year is a salutary wish for “a vision (now and then) / of a world where every neighbour is a friend”. It’s a quaint thought, in a world of high walls and electric fences, that we ought to try and show kindness to those we share the planet with, while we wait to see whether plague, inferno or Elon will finish us off.

A fear of the unknown is a hereditary hangover from the days when unfamiliar berries, bumps in the night, and wrong turns might have proven to be your undoing. Nowadays, it expresses itself in frenzied WhatsApp voice notes about the dilapidated Hyundai with the dark windows that’s idling on the corner.

Technically, our neighbours aren’t exactly candidates for stranger danger (you know where they live), but I certainly retain a healthy suspicion of the people next door. It’s different when you live in a stand-alone house, with a garden (or the pretence of one) to insulate yourself from the people who fate and the housing market have conspired to place next door to you. Even if you wave cheerily at your neighbour each morning, or greet each other on the park run, you don’t really know what they’re up to.

Think of the many documentaries that interview the neighbour (this will be you) after the heinous crime has been discovered. Most times, people never suspect that the nice man next door was carrying out depraved and sordid acts. Partly, this is because our solipsism disinclines us to care about what’s happening with those outside our zone of intimacy. We guard our own privacy by collectively agreeing on certain boundaries and thus suburbia is formed, with all its pleasures and secrets.

Visiting my parents this past December, I was reminded of what nice things old suburban neighbourhoods are. The suburb where they live has none of the crisp gloss of a glamorous lifestyle estate. Nobody whizzes about on golf carts. No one hollers from a padel court. But it has its appeal. It’s quiet, for one, in that idiosyncratically middle-class way that’s embarrassingly nice.

Two weeks there turned me into an amateur birdwatcher. I’m pretty certain I spotted artist Lefifi Tladi out for a morning stroll, which is exactly the sort of implausible thing that happens in neighbourhoods that have settled into a kind of threadbare dotage.

The families next door share an easy camaraderie borne of many years of sharing the same street. This is, to be sure, a dying suburb, where the council has largely absconded and the population is ageing out and not being replenished fast enough. This is a story familiar to many South African towns. I give it another decade or two, at best.

My generation is distrustful of this kind of human settlement in an age when owning property is horrendously unattainable for most people. This distrust has bred the modern securitised townhouse complex — an astonishingly disappointing solution that works right up until your neighbour’s child buys a drum kit. The townhouse is meant to walk back the uncompromisingly modernist vision of living symbolised by the apartment block, a vision of simplistic harmony with one’s neighbour-friends. In an apartment building, the collage of humanity is never quite far enough away.

There’s the chap above you who whiles away the midnight oil practising his pétanque skills (to judge from the suspicious thumps that resonate concerningly across his floor/your ceiling). There’s the unseen, villainously early riser whose morning routine is accompanied by an orchestra of crashing cups and the cymbal of glassware (how do they have anything left?) before they slam their door with enough gusto to wake the dead. Someone three floors up from us serenades the entire building with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon every afternoon, which admittedly lends a pleasantly trippy atmosphere to the day.

Because we are all recent survivors of a strange and inward early decade in which the banalities of living among our fellows became starkly apparent, the next few years will probably be marked by the effects of us trying to escape that artificially enforced proximity. But across the globe, as fires and floods and state-sanctioned mass murderers reduce whole communities to ashes, stories of good neighbourliness rise to the fore.

There are, among the displaced and the bombed and those seeking refuge, kindly souls rallying in community to rescue, rebuild, comfort, and console. While it becomes ever more parlous to speak of “us” and “we” with any certainty, these scenes of neighbourly kindness remind us that it is possible to rise above our indifference towards one another.

From the February edition of Wanted, 2025