Gangs, Politics and Dignity in Cape Town (review)

Gangs, Politics and Dignity in Cape Town is a compelling ethnography of racial and gendered identities in Heideveld, a gang-ridden lower-middle-class coloured township. The book examines how its residents are caught between the paradoxes of racial and gendered identities that continue to be relevant, even though apartheid was abolished more than fifteen years ago. The book carefully explores daily struggles for survival and self-worth in relation to larger political transformations. It shows how apartheid policy set out to establish coloured identity as a liminal category that is bound to specific localities and how these social categories, despite democratization, remain riddled with contradictions and tensions.

Jensen explores how residents of Heideveld experience the spaces and identities that were at the heart of the apartheid era. The social category of the skollie, the prototypical coloured gangster or hoodlum, was deeply entrenched in the apartheid era. Nonetheless, even though the skollie reifies coloured men as violent and immoral, it can offer surprising opportunities for dignity. With a careful eye for ethnographic detail, Jensen also describes the discomfort that skollies experience when they transgress the moral spaces that are reminiscent of apartheid. When a group of youngsters go on an outing to the nearby touristic and predominantly white Waterfront, the unease becomes palpable. Although identities are open to renegotiation, this outing reveals their harsh restrictions and territorial boundedness.

In chapter 3 Jensen avoids reifying gangsterism as a bounded racial and gendered category by first examining wider neighborhood relations. Based on interviews with gang members and their relatives and neighbors, the chapter makes clear how diffuse the boundaries between gang and non-gang are. Gangs appear to be fairly chaotic and are often haphazardly organized. Despite, or perhaps because of, these diffuse boundaries, the gang embodies skollie-ness and repositions men as potentially wealthy, rebellious, and independent, as opposed to the often-voiced opinion that men are weak, financially irresponsible, socially inept, and even childlike.

Chapters 4 and 5 examine how dignity and self-worth are entangled with brutal crimes and political transformation. For the residents of Heideveld, the state is present mainly through police and prison, and Jensen offers a disheartening account of the arbitrary ways in which gangsters are identified and imprisoned by the police. Democratization still plays a major role in the shaping of identities such as skollie-ness, but it also has made other interactions possible. Chapters 5 and 7 explain how men can gain dignity by collaborating with the police through the formation of neighborhood watches. These novel partnerships with state institutions have become crucial to the "enactment of the gendered moral community" (167).

Chapter 6 reveals why for women ordentlikheid (orderliness) is at the heart of the paradoxes of "different models of respectability" (165). The ambiguities of identity and violence become particularly clear in Jensen's account of a public protest against male violence. The women's public rejection of violence becomes much more complex in situations in which the women's sons are involved in gangs. This fascinating chapter reveals how their rejection of gangsters goes along with maternal care and even pride in their sons' struggle for a dignified life. Women have elaborate ideas about which forms of violence should be condemned or accepted, and for women, as for men, violence can be considered part of respectability. Jensen shows how survival in Heideveld seems to be impossible without assertiveness and even violence, without losing sight that, as one informant says, "Actually, Heideveld is `n lekker plek [a nice place]. It is better than all the other township areas" (148).

The ethnography offers a careful analysis of changing liminal and entangled social identities that are at the heart of democratization. The theoretical expositions are valuable, even though they sometimes distract from the persuasive ethnographic accounts. It is admirable how Jensen built up relationships and trust in an area that...