“Please Ensure the Gate is Properly Closed”: Questioning the Swiss Presence in Apartheid South Africa Through the Swiss Social Club in Cape Town

It’s a special type of Swiss enclave that Denise Bertschi came across in South Africa in 2018: the Swiss Social & Sports Club welcomes Cape Town’s Swiss ex-pat community and temporary visitors to sit back and relax, be they businesspeople, bankers, or financial experts. In her video, Please ensure the gate is properly closed (2018), the Club’s caretaker, John, tells the history of this private enclave—but, too, of racist discrimination he has faced there, over the years, from being accused of theft to being deprived of the keys; thus he is a caretaker yet with limited access! This Swiss Club, its very existence, is perhaps the most caricatural proof of the close and continuing relations that Switzerland has maintained with South Africa since the earliest days of the Apartheid regime. Arms exports, banking maneuvers, gold mines, and Swiss bank loans were crucial to a regime regularly subjected to international boycotts (e.g. the arms trade resolution adopted by the UN Security Council in 1977 and international campaigns such as that of 1983/4, to stop the IMF making loans to the country)—none of which Switzerland participated in. Yet despite this economic pressure and international policy, despite widespread recognition of the racist regime’s brutality and the mounting tension among South Africans and in Switzerland (the latter evident in Gertrud Vogler’s photographs of anti-Apartheid protest marches, which Denise Bertschi represents), the Swiss government and Swiss companies never ceased to invoke neutrality and use smokescreens to uphold the status quo. In 2003, even, the Swiss government commission tasked with investigating the country’s involvement in Apartheid found itself suddenly denied access to the federal archives—which says a lot about the nature of that involvement.