Jamil F. Khan | The death of neighbourliness is the first sign of a society in decline

When we tell stories about our day-to-day experiences, there is one central character that appears in all of our stories – the neighbour. Sometimes the neighbour lives in the house next door to us, sometimes they wait in line behind us, sometimes they are a passer-by, and sometimes the patient in the next bed during a hospital stay.

Neighbours have become the best of friends, formed families together and given the most heart-warming eulogies at funerals. Our neighbours have been central to the stories we tell about ourselves, and they signify the relationality required for a society to function. The figure of the neighbour also appears as a footprint within recent history, in various ways. 

One of the most famous, and famously overlooked, Bible verses instructs humanity to “love your neighbour as yourself”. Considered a cornerstone of Christian teachings, the neighbour signifies all people we share the earth with. The teaching at the heart of this instruction is empathy and kindness, which are two values that define the relationship of neighbourliness. There is also an acknowledgement that human beings need each other and cannot exist in isolation – hence, coexistence must be nurtured. 

The figure of the neighbour has also occupied a suspicious and ominous place in historical memory, often during the orchestration and execution of crimes against humanity. The architect of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, when in office as the Prime Minister, often described apartheid as a “policy of good neighbourliness”.

This propaganda managed to manipulate such an endearing figure of social cohesion, the neighbour, to whitewash the extreme opposite – social death.

Though this piece of propaganda does not stand out in how apartheid is remembered, it should, because the neighbourly relationship referred to is between the citizen and the state. Being a good neighbour under apartheid meant endorsing the policies of the state. This possibility made neighbourliness dangerous and suspicious under a fascist regime. 

The figure of the neighbour has a very poignant and devastating place in Holocaust memory. Those who survived Nazi Germany, have remembered in vivid detail the horror of realising that their neighbours, who had previously been their friends, gave them away to the Nazi state.

There are also those who are remembered for their dedication to neighbourliness, by hiding their neighbours and refusing to collaborate with the state. Within those memories is an abhorrence for the betrayal of such a special alliance, between neighbours, that this occurrence stands out as a huge alarm bell amongst critical points of concern in the advancement of Nazism in German society. 

The very same chill descends on one when hearing accounts of those who survived the Rwandan Genocide. How neighbours who had been a source of community became bystanders, collaborators or took up actively committing mass murder against their neighbours. The point at which neighbours become suspicious signals an extreme decline in the human trajectory of a society.

Barbara Coloroso writes in Extraordinary Evil: A brief history of genocide that under conditions of genocide, those who are not targeted have to be conditioned to at least permit the injustice they see and at most to collaborate and participate in it. This conditioning is what breaks down the bonds of coexistence and cohesion that people form when in a community. It is always an ominous sign of worse things to come.

I saw a video clip on social media within the last month that showed immigration officers in the USA chasing an allegedly undocumented woman down the street.

This, while her daughter looked on and screamed, in tears. Around them were neighbours who came out to witness this. There were some comments on the video suggesting that her neighbours called immigration services on her or gave the officers information that led to the arrest.

There was a general air of mistrust amongst the anecdotes told in the comments. This mistrust signals a catastrophic undoing of social relations at the community level, in the same way it has done throughout history.

The comfort of complacency amongst Israeli citizens during this moment of genocide against Palestinians is an outcome of protracted social engineering, designed to manufacture consent for crimes against humanity. In many ways, people living under Israel’s tyranny represent the extreme outcome of destroying neighbourly relations through the enforcement of borders and perverting one of society’s most fundamental social codes. 

The neighbour, under conditions of apartheid, transforms from a friendly face into a boogeyman, a stalker, a murderer, and a traitor. When we can no longer trust the people who once kept our delivery until we came home or allowed us to wait on their couch for the locksmith, something devastating has happened.

More devastating is that it is happening right now. Poor engagement with history would lead some to believe that this is a new phenomenon, if they acknowledge that it is happening at all, but we have seen this happening at the worst times in world history. 

As South Africans, our fragile reconciliation attempts have also revealed how difficult it is to rehabilitate broken neighbourly relations. The indoctrination of white supremacist ideology, with segregation driving its logic, has left all of us estranged from each other. 

There remains a distrust and enmity amongst South Africans, which many are working to overcome. However, that this is still a struggle 77 years after apartheid started, 373 years after colonialism took root, shows how serious a danger this breakdown poses. 

The consequences are long-lasting, and every time this phenomenon unfolds in a society, as it has throughout history, we can be sure that freedom is under attack. Our responsibility, at the least, is to pay attention to what is happening around us.

While many of our choices may be constrained by economics and other hindrances, the one choice we can always make is to refuse our dehumanisation, to the point of losing sight of the humanity of others.

We can refuse to be seduced by state power to participate in normalising its violence. We can refuse to betray our neighbours in the shared fight for justice and freedom from authoritarian state power.

Jamil F. Khan is an author, doctoral critical diversity scholar, and research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study.