A giant smiley face painted on a shack, a stripey T-shirt on a beach, a crook of an elbow in a rural dusty goat pen and an offbeat finger puppet on a Cape Town city wall: street art or vandalism?
The work of Falko Starr, which splits a giant mural over four different South African locations, could be classed as vandalism under a new Cape Town clamp-down that lumps graffiti with drugs, crime and gangs.
The toughened attitude is backed by a new control unit and by-law that classifies all graffiti as a public nuisance with a hefty 15,000 rand (US$2,200) fine or three months in jail for first-time offenses.
Photo: AFP
“The need arose for legislation in this regard because of basically the amount of graffiti that appears right across the city,” city official Anton Visser said.
The aim is to wipe out tagging — individual graffiti signatures — and in particular gangster tagging and offensive graffiti.
“I’d say in most areas in the city there is a high level of graffiti, especially in the gang-infested areas,” Visser said. “The intention is obviously not to target the graffiti artists.”
The law sets out a permit system for city-vetted works, with even private property owners banned from having graffiti on their properties without city permission.
Critics say it is too broad and violates freedom of expression and criminalizes public art.
Graffiti in Cape Town stretches from crude turf-markers to stirring works, with some artists exhibiting internationally.
Professional writer Starr, who painted the Splitpiece installations, said the city’s graffiti grew out of the sprawling Cape Flats to where the former white state forcibly relocated non-whites during apartheid.
“A lot of graffiti then had a little political connotation in it,” Starr said. “We kind of all just made it up. We were just doing it out of social cause, trying to make a change in our society because it was still apartheid then.”
Today there are an estimated 100 to 200 graffiti writers in Cape Town.
Nick Herbert, owner of Cape Town graffiti shop Shelflife, said the law will hamper well-known artists and require property owners to seek permission for anything beyond a street number.
“But you’re still going to get the guys who do the tagging and the illegal stuff,” he said.
The new four-person control unit is tasked with policing Cape Town’s huge metro area, attempting to tackle a backlog of lodged complaints, while the city aims to raise 1 million rands initially to fund a clean-up.
Submissions against the by-law, which states that graffiti damages the image of Cape Town’s world-renowned beauty, have included a petition with more than 2,000 signatures.
However, Visser said many had not read the law, which he said made provision for artists, with plans for dedicated walls, and for permits — which the city can refuse — to ensure works meet certain standards.
“People need to know what the law is all about. It needs to be enforced,” Visser said. “It [the graffiti] is going to cost the city thousands to remove, it’s extremely expensive, and it’s actually vandalism. And it reduces the value of property as well, so we need to take this seriously.”
Gently spraying a character on a mural-covered Cape Flats wall, Starr had few concerns.
“What difference is the by-law going to make? There’s been illegal graffiti before,” he said. “If you’re going to get caught, you’re still going to get into trouble, so what difference is it going to make?”
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000