We Are Fighting the World: A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947-1999 (review)

We Are Fighting the World is a rich and provocative look at gang activity and crime in South Africa, which remains one of the world's most violent societies despite the dramatic changes that followed the end of apartheid. Drawing on extensive interviews with former and current gangsters, Gary Kynoch provides a nuanced history of this criminal world, arguing that that history is vital to understand contemporary South Africa.

Kynoch explores the origins and development of criminal gangs created by labour migrants from neighbouring Lesotho who were living in South Africa. The gangsters called themselves 'Marashea' – 'the Russians' in the Sotho language – adopting the name to invoke the Soviet Union's Second World War military prowess. Migrants from Lesotho generally had little formal education, so they had limited options in South Africa, where white wealth rested on the exploitation of cheap black labour. Criminal opportunities abounded in the overcrowded and poorly serviced townships that Africans were restricted to under apartheid; some migrants resorted to illegal beer-brewing, theft, prostitution, or selling marijuana, and the men who profited from these activities organized themselves to defend their markets and offer 'protection' to residents. Kynoch captures this chaotic world well, emphasizing several key themes throughout the book: gangster culture and values within this violent masculinist context; gender dynamics, particularly male gang members' control over women members and their sexuality; the economic opportunism of criminals; and the central role of ethnic identity and allegiances among Africans. He provides a rich portrait of the men and women involved in the Marashea; while the book concentrates on the activities of these gang members from Lesotho, its insights certainly have wider implications, especially in light of the growing historical literature on criminal activity and organization in South Africa.

There are several important arguments that run through We Are Fighting the World, making it a provocative and important work. Kynoch challenges readers to conceptualize criminality and its role in South Africa's history and historiography in new ways. Rather than seeing gangsters as predators and morally tainted, or as social bandits in a didactic tale of repression, resistance, and liberation, Kynoch argues we should understand them as part of the diverse social worlds that black South Africans created, worlds that were inhabited by creative and morally complex actors. This position is also rooted in another of the book's important insights – while the apartheid state could exert tremendous coercive power over the townships through the police and army, it had a limited ability to direct and shape the daily lives of black South Africans. Accordingly, it failed to provide effective policing and judicial services for township residents, particularly as the police concentrated on enforcing the pass laws and containing black political activity, creating the conditions for vigilantism, gang activity, and a culture of violence. Kynoch builds on this argument by contending that the roots of the violence that plagues South Africa today are very important. Most accounts look no further back than the 1980s, but this book traces the history of criminal organization and conflict back to the dislocations and violence of the early twentieth century and the deep racial and economic inequalities that were central to South Africa's industrial expansion. Moreover, he also argues for the importance of ethnic identities and allegiances among Africans in the new spaces of the mines and urban centres in this period, which helps to explain the centrality of ethnicity in political violence today. Kynoch's argument about ethnicity is a subtle and important one; while he recognizes that South Africa's white minority regimes manipulated ethnic as well as racial categories, he is also contending that Africans not only accepted these identities, but helped to shape them and give them power in their lives.

Overall, this is an intriguing and thoughtful book. While some ele- ments of Kynoch's argument will mainly be of interest...