Global Gangs: Street Violence across the World

1. Intimate Connections: Gangs and the Political Economy of Urbanization in South Africa

29 1 Intimate Connections: Gangs and the Political Economy of Urbanization in South Africa Steffen Jensen Gangs and gang culture have occupied central positions in the imaginaries and anxieties of mainstream society in South Africa for more than a century. In Cape Town, gangs, both yesterday and today, are said to constitute one of the most serious threats to the fabric of society. To some extent, the fears and anxieties are warranted, but the phenomenon of gangs must be explored in more detail to understand both when and how gangs are a problem and when the problems emerge from elsewhere. To sift through these issues, I explore three sets of related questions: first, how and why did youth gangs emerge as major social factors in Cape Town? Second, how have youth gangs in Cape Town evolved over time, and what are the reasons for their particular path of evolution? Finally, how are youth gangs situated within a wider panorama of violence in the city? What are their links with other armed actors, both state and nonstate? These questions beg the analysis of genesis, development, and relations with other violent networks. To that end, I explore how these questions are played out in the intimate sphere of township lives. A brief caveat is necessary before I begin exploring these issues. The gangs that I analyze in this chapter have emerged out of what in apartheid terminology were colored areas.1 However, South Africa is a testimony to the diversity in gang cultures, and gangs exist in many other areas as well, where they take on quite a different outlook. The diversity of gangs and gang culture should be attributed to the apartheid 30    steffen jensen regime and its racialization of economy and society. African gangs are different from colored gangs, not because they are racially different, but because Africans and coloreds were inscribed differently in the political economy of South Africa (Jensen 2008). Hence, throughout this chapter, I also discuss how gangs in Cape Town are different and have different histories separate from the African gangs of, especially, Johannesburg. Genesis: The Emergence of Gangs in Cape Town Gangs have a long history in Cape Town, beginning around the time of the Second World War. Thousands of impoverished rural residents migrated to the city. In the area where Cape Town is located, migrants mostly came from farms around the city and were either impoverished white farmers or colored farm workers. Both ended up in the urban sprawl of Cape Town. The city authorities watched this development with growing fear and anxiety, first because of the sheer multitude and increasing poverty of the urban fringes, especially in the area called District Six. Their second concern was with issues of race. As whites and nonwhites were equally impoverished, they all ended up in the poorer sections of the city, bringing into sharp relief the dangers of miscegenation and dilution of “white blood” and the precarious white right to rule. It is from around this period that issues of separation of races and racially based betterment schemes became paramount political questions, eventually resulting in the passing of apartheid’s spatial segregation laws and separate development. Apart from being based in fears of racial miscegenation, responses to the urban question were animated by racial stereotypes of, especially, colored men, not least the uncouth rural cousins, derogatorily termed plaas jappies (farm boys). These stereotypes drew on historical and racial understandings of the coloreds as happy-­ go-­ lucky, physically and emotionally weak, promiscuous, prone to drink, and almost inherently criminal (Western 1996). These stereotypes were embodied in the abstract figure of the skollie, the scavenger lurking in backstreets and dark alleys, terrorizing hardworking people of all colors (Salo 2004). Although the skollie was and is an abstraction, he animated government interventions, and as argued elsewhere, many coloreds internalized the abstract figure as a real, existing figure against the backdrop of which intimate connections    31 coloreds had to stake their claim to morality, residents and gangs alike (Jensen 2008). The first known gang in Cape Town dates back to the 1940s, when the Globe gang was formed as an anticrime, anti-­skollie initiative. However, economic need and state police pressure led Globe members to criminal activities,2 and soon the gangs began to constitute a problem in their own right. Pinnock (1984) argues that strong neighborhood webs of social and personal ties countered the gangs’ negative impact...