Gang Town. Don Pinnock
that ‘troubles’ won’t spill over into their neighbourhoods. Elsewhere, especially after dark, fear stalks the streets, children are locked inside for safety and the nocturnal knock on the door is not answered. Many of these areas are under effective criminal governance and police fear to exit their patrol vans.
When groups give themselves a collective name and undertake actions seen as anti-social, they are described by both the police and themselves as gangs, with all the freight the word implies. In South African law, gangs are illegal though pervasive and despite the law, almost unstoppable social formations. Adolescents may and do get involved in criminal acts. But to pass judgement on the perpetrators in terms of their actions alone is to miss a much deeper malaise in the city which has its roots in apartheid but has been exacerbated by the structural dissonances, neoapartheid and neoliberal tendencies of the post-1994 State.
In Cape Town today, as in the past, gang formation is the outcome of young people in search of an identity. These are youngsters whose only role models carry guns, the only smart cars belong to gang bosses and the only way to afford the accoutrements of identity is through illegal activities. Gang activity also alleviates boredom and provides an opportunity for adolescent performance under the gaze of peers.
In much adolescent gang action can be sensed a certain naive wildness, an unplanned theatricality, which seems to place more value on ritualistic performance than on the apparent goals of the action. There are initiations, dares and improbable tasks. To understand this we have to remember something important about our own adolescence: young teenagers, above all else, are mythmakers. They create and recreate situations and whole webs of significance little understood by the pragmatic adult world. They need to perform to win respect and the wilder the performance, the greater that respect.
In tough neighbourhoods, the performance can become extremely dangerous. On July 29, 2012, about 50 mostly school-going members of the Vuras gang in Site B, Khayelitsha, swept into an area in the same township known as Green Point, attacking anyone on site with pangas, axes, knives and guns.3 They claimed to be hunting for the Vatos gang. It was part of an ongoing battle in which four members of the gangs had been killed over the previous 10 days.
The Vuras kicked down doors searching for their ‘enemy’ and shouted that schools would be closed the next day. Pupils told a newspaper they feared going to school because there were ‘always gang fights and we are attacked with pangas on the way home after school’.
Police said they were monitoring the situation, but made no arrests. The only motive for the attack was revenge for a similar raid on the gang’s home territory, Site B, by the Vatos. The purpose of the gang, in this case, was defence of both territory and honour.
There are, however, groups of a different stripe also defined as gangs. The ruthlessness of just one of these was outlined in the National Prosecuting Authority’s case in 2012 against George ‘Geweld’ Thomas, a ‘shooter’ and head of a street faction of the 28s prison gang in Bishop Lavis. Thomas was imprisoned in 2008, awaiting trial with 18 others for murder, attempted murder, housebreaking, theft, drug dealing, unlawful possession of firearms and ammunition, intimidation and incitement to commit murder. The gang’s alleged focus was smuggling abalone and drugs.
According to the NPA, in the five and a half years preceding Thomas’s trial, which began in 2014, 21 people were killed at his behest, 12 of them state witnesses who agreed to testify against him. The ‘hits’ – many of them on a rival gang, the Clever Kids – were allegedly directed from his prison cell. From there, according to evidence and in defiance of prison rules on cellphone access, he made thousands of calls. Other deaths were inflicted upon members of Thomas’s own gang. These men were killed, it was alleged, to ensure their silence. According to a witness, in one of the hits before his arrest, Thomas sat in the back of an open truck with a rifle fitted with a telescopic sight and silencer while two henchmen in the front handed him ammunition as he fired at ‘enemies’. Prosecutors and investigating officers handling his trial were assigned bodyguards after receiving threats. Thomas, who had spent 21 of his 44 years in prison, told journalist Caryn Dolly he joined the 28 prison gang for protection but wanted to be a pastor.4 The presiding judge, Chantel Fortuin, said ‘the awful conditions in which he and 16 fellow accused lived before being imprisoned could not be used as an excuse for murder’ and noted that he used prison as his headquarters in a frenzy of killing. She handed Thomas seven life sentences.
Beyond the battle over drugs, turf and honour are other groups that could also be classified as gangs. These are networks spread throughout Cape Town which engage in a range of legal and illegal activities. Some are quick to use violence to ensure the smooth running of their businesses; others work by bribery, stealth and complex financial footwork. These include big gangs such as the Hard Livings and Americans, groups of foreign nationals and covert associations at many levels in the corporate and state sectors. Their connections reach from the streets of the city to the rest of the world and their activities range from money laundering, protection and touting drugs to global trafficking of drugs, animal products, reptiles, plants and humans.
My early work on gangs in South Africa looked at the way in which poverty and apartheid’s massive social engineering created stresses to which gangs were a teenage response.5 This view is captured by American sociologist Sarah van Gelder:
The result of this uprooting and neglect is that the solid core of contributing adult members crumbles, and the institutions that provide the foundations of community fall apart. The community safety net is left in tatters. Parents, exhausted by long hours required to make ends meet or demoralised by their inability to cope with the hardships of poverty, may turn to drugs and alcohol. Kids are left on their own in … adultless communities.
But when I began researching for this book, apartheid had officially ended and the country had a world-class Constitution and Bill of Rights, so why had the gang phenomenon continued to escalate at a frightening rate? Had social institutions not been rebuilt? Was the community safety net still in tatters? Were kids still out on the streets and left to their own resources? What sort of city had Cape Town become that wealth, luxury and beauty existed a few suburbs away from daily murder, assault, rape and mayhem? This book is my attempt to answer these questions and trace some paths towards a solution.
The book is divided into six parts that can be read separately, depending on your interest or requirements.
Part 1, Gang Town, explores the physical reconstitution of the city and the social impact of racial segregation which led to single-race ghettoes. It then looks at the city’s attempts to deal with its racial inheritance after democratic elections in 1994 saw the end of racism. In this section I investigate issues of governance and control in working class areas pre- and post-transition and frame the socio-political environment within which gangs arose.
Part 2, Cape Town’s Gangs, is a tour of the various types of gangs found in the city and begins with the essential question of what we mean by the term ‘gang’. While for most casual observers and, particularly, the media, gangs are seen merely as groups of dangerous young men involved in drugs and crime, a closer look reveals an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of forms and functions ranging from corner play groups through street warriors and merchgant gangs to fierce prison numbers, corporate racketeers and transnational networks.
Part 3, Understanding Adolescence, seeks to answer two questions: given that most risk taking and deviant behaviour throughout the world is massively heightened in the years from puberty to early 20s, what exactly is adolescence? A related question – and central to this book – is why it is that while for most adolescents, socially deviant behaviour is limited to teen years, some young people get persistently deeper and deeper into trouble from which they find it almost impossible to extract themselves.
Part 4, Families in Crisis, explores the familial roots of persistent deviance in the impact of fatherlessness, prenatal epigenetic damage and the problems that compound when affirmation and love are missing. It suggests the disturbing possibility that adverse conditions during pregnancy