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Introduction

Boys everywhere have a need for rituals marking their passage to manhood. If society does not provide them they will inevitably invent their own.

Joseph Campbell, mythologist

One night before embarking on this book I dreamed I’d been allocated a house in a rural village. It turned out to be a single wall with an old door and dirt floor, nothing else. I spent some time cleaning the floor and, as evening fell, there was a knock on the door. I opened and a hoard of ragged, hungry-looking local children flooded in. I thought: ‘I have nothing for them.’ They were very sweet but rowdy, so after a while I asked them to leave, but they wouldn’t. Eventually I shoved a few through the door saying: ‘Go outside now.’ A boy looked at me, then at the sky where the roof should be and the sides where walls should be and said: ‘There’s no inside.’

When I awoke the meaning of the dream was clear. For around 30 years, on and off, I’d been highlighting the plight of young people at risk in Cape Town in books and lectures. I had co-founded an organisation, Usiko Trust, to take young men from distressed families to beautiful wilderness places and help them build resilience in the face of absent fathers, poverty, shame and the hyper-masculinity of gang life. The message from the world of dreams was that this was just a start. So far all I had was a wall with a door through which children could enter. The structure was incomplete with no roof for protection from the elements. There was still a lot to do before the building was habitable. And children in need were not people against whom I could shut the door.

Cape Town is my adopted city – I grew up in the Eastern Cape – but it was love at first sight. On my initial visit in the 1960s, a journalist friend said I couldn’t understand the city unless I spent time in District Six. We wandered up Hanover Street late one afternoon past scruffy little shops, corner cafes, a bustling fish market and the Star, Avalon and British bioscopes. It was alive with people and swarming with beautiful children. People said hi and howzit and did we have a smoke for them? They were happy to chat, interested in why we were there and warned us to be careful of the skollies at night.

From that moment Cape Town was for me this kind of place and these sort of people: friendly, easy going, funny and warm. That they were deemed ‘coloured’ under apartheid seemed irrelevant to me. Which was odd, really. I was ‘white’ and my sister and I were raised in a simple, racially defined family, my father a stern, honest policeman. It’s not that we never questioned apartheid; we never really noticed it. It was just the way things were. For me, though, the idea of classifying people by their colour just wouldn’t stick. The more different they appeared to be tonally or culturally, the more interesting I found them. So much so that, in the late 1960s, I joined a ‘black’ newspaper – The World – and went to live in Soweto. My mother went proudly to buy a copy to see her son in print and phoned me aghast. ‘What am I going to tell my friends when they ask me where you work?’ she asked, tearfully.

Relocating to Cape Town, several years later, neighbourhoods like District Six, Lower Claremont, Harfield Village and Elsies River felt … comfortable. In a way I couldn’t explain, these were people with whom I didn’t have to put up a front and pretend anything. Their generosity of spirit was embracing. And that’s when I became angry at the way they were being treated as second-class citizens, pushed out of their homes into racial ghettoes. But what incensed me even more was the effect on their children. Families were breaking under the strain, stress levels were rising, kids were forming surrogate families described as gangs and substance abuse was going through the roof.

My wife and I moved into a cottage in Harfield Village before segregation had ripped its coloured community apart and I began hanging out in the newly-formed racial ghettos to see the impact of the Group Areas Act on families. Many told me that when the time came to move, grandparents who couldn’t bear to lose their community simply died of broken hearts. Through meeting a remarkable person and sometime drug merchant named Chicken, I was introduced to Bobby and Fatima April in Hanover Park. Bobby, known as Stone, was the leader of a gang that began in District Six as Bungalow 13 (B13) and later became the Mongrels. Stone realised I was genuinely interested and not just snooping. He let me spend time with the gang and was happy to answer my questions. Stone was proud of his gang and delighted that ‘someone from the university’ was interested in it.

There were things I found out that astounded me, but which I could never break trust and divulge. The sheer size of gang enterprise and the criminal underworld, even in the early 1980s, was astonishing. The Mongrels showed me their rituals and signs, where the drugs were coming from and which cops were on the take. In return I made myself useful taking photographs for Stone, doing gangland weddings and far too many funerals. I was in his headquarters one day when a pantechnicon offloaded bags of cannabis from special compartments welded into its understructure. The trucking line, I found out, was owned by the son of one of the apartheid government’s most senior cabinet ministers at the time.

My association with the Mongrels and several other gangs resulted in a book The Brotherhoods. This was followed, several years later, by a closer look at gang rituals which became Gangs, Rituals and Rites of Passage. And here I was in 2014, back in gangland nearly two decades later. The idea was to dust off my old research, see how things had changed under democracy and bring The Brotherhoods up to date. How wrong I was. The result would be an entirely new perpective and a new criminology of deviance.

In the intervening years, my adopted city had changed almost beyond recognition. On the one hand it is now more attractive, with many of the country’s best restaurants, clubs and coffee shops. It is consistently rated in the top 10 international tourist destinations and celebrities from abroad are often seen strolling along its waterfront, tanning on its beaches or enjoying themselves on elegant wine farms nearby. You can be whisked to the top of Table Mountain by a new, high-tech cable car where, after dark, the city below twinkles like scattered jewels. Many foreigners, charmed by its languid atmosphere and with strong First World currencies, have bought sea-facing homes they’d never afford back home. For holidaymakers it’s easy Africa, offering the amenities of Europe or America with added sunshine and the spice of adventure.

But the city has also become increasingly violent. As the sun dips in the west, the iconic mountain casts a dark shadow across the Cape Flats and some of the most dangerous neighbourhoods in the world. This is not surprising. Cape Town is home to thousands of adolescents on the road to nowhere. In overcrowded townships the chance of death by violence is now higher than in some of the world’s most volatile war zones. Here statistics trump hyperbole. In one year, between April 2014 and March 2015, there were six murders and seven attempted murders a day, 30 637 reported assaults (84 a day)1. Most of the victims and perpetrators are young men labelled under apartheid as coloured or black.2 In the absence of recreational amenities, sound schooling or, in many cases, stable family structures, young people have nothing to do but hang out in the streets, form friendship groups and fight or fuck each other. They do this in the knowledge that life is now, the future holds a frightening emptiness and, in many areas, the possibility of death before the age of 30 is a strong possibility.

Foreigners lounging on palm-lined Camps Bay beach gazing at the steep mountains framed by gossamer clouds would find it hard to imagine the shootouts, drug wars and human trafficking taking place a few kilometres from where they sit. Locals in the mountain suburbs are more aware of places unsafe to venture and the sort of people who look like trouble. They live in hope 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 act as a signal to an unborn child which genetically code for more aggressive adulthood.

Part 5, Toxic Neighbourhoods, explores the societal roots of persistent deviance where poverty, joblessness, a failing education system, risky neighbourhoods and high levels of drug availability make gang membership just about the only option available for income and the context within which to strut your stuff among peers.

Part 6, Towards Resilience, is a complete about-turn on the problem of gangs. On the basis of findings in the previous five sections, it proposes a rethink on early child development, education, after-school care, the war on drugs, policing, imprisonment and the way we work with adolescents. It lays out alternative life-path planning for young people at risk through a compassionate understanding of personal transformation.

The Appendix is a toolbox of things I’ve found to be useful game-changers for parents, teachers and community workers when dealing with high-risk adolescents.

Endnotes

1. In that year 6 643 motor vehicles were reported stolen (18 a day).

2. There is no such thing, in biological or physical terms, as ‘race’ or ‘race groups’. What we understand as ‘race’ is the product of centuries of ideological social construction. The effects of this, however, are real enough and are embedded, even today in ‘non-racial’ South Africa, in statistics and countless official forms. ‘Race’ should be read only as a proxy for other real social processes of marginalisation, opression, exploitation and exclusion. A danger is that when we deploy racial categories, we imagine that the category itself is the causal agent. For this reason, in his article Gender, Class, ‘Race’ and Violence, Don Foster suggests that it is therefore prudent to speak of ‘racialised’ categories or groups (in Youth Violence: Sources and Solutions in South Africa by CL Ward, A Van der Merwe and A Dawes (eds) (UCT Press 2012).

3. Cape Times, July 30 2012, p1.

4. Dolly, Caryn: Cape Times, May 24 2011.

5. Pinnock, Don: The Brotherhoods (David Philip Publishers, Cape Town, 1984).