Segregation in Macondo

In our class discussions we talked about the banana company in Macondo and how the Americans make a separate town for themselves. The segregated section is "surrounded by a metal fence topped with a band of electrified chicken wire." Ally brought up the point of apartheid, and I would like to elaborate. Last year we read "Once Upon a Time" by Nadine Gordimer, and there are many similarities between the story's setting and Macondo. In the story, indigenous people of South Africa are barred from entering where white people live and there is a rise of crime. The family in the frame story is concerned and builds a tall wall topped with barb wire. In the end, the little boy gets strangled in the wires, and we can draw parallels with Macondo because the chicken wire represents the foreigners' attitude toward the locals and the detrimental effects of the banana company. Governments are involved in both stories. In "Once Upon a Time," the narrator lives in a creaking house, which symbolizes the unstable South African government that depends on the exportation of gold. So by definition, South Africa at the time can be considered a banana republic. The Colombian government is unstable as well. The authors, Márquez and Gordimer, are quite similar too. They both cared dearly for their own countries, received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and passed away in 2014.