In the Cape Peninsula baboon crisis, the language, assumptions and policy options being advanced echo apartheid's architecture of control: spatial segregation, forced removal, containment and, when those fail, elimination.

A few weeks ago, residents from Rooiels, Pringle Bay and Betty's Bay, together with conservationists from across the Western Cape, came out with placards to challenge the escalation of aggressive baboon management strategies under DA-run municipalities. These approaches, widely regarded as ineffective, rest on an unacceptable premise: that the eradication or permanent removal of baboons constitutes a legitimate solution. Framed as wildlife management, this stance reflects a deeper ethical failure - one rooted in logics of exclusion, control and disposability.

South Africa likes to tell itself a comforting story about ending apartheid: that it is now a closed chapter, a moral aberration decisively rejected in 1994. Yet apartheid was not only a political system; it was also an ethical framework - one that normalised exclusion, hierarchy and disposability. Those logics did not vanish. They mutated. Today, they have resurfaced in unexpected places, including how we govern our relationship with non-human life.

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The ongoing crisis surrounding Cape Peninsula baboons is a case in point. Framed narrowly as a "human-wildlife conflict", it is in fact a mirror held up to our unresolved moral inheritance. The language, assumptions and policy options being advanced echo apartheid's architecture of control: spatial segregation, forced removal, containment...