Suren Pillay
GANGSTERISM has been at the centre of much debate and discussion of late. Gang leaders have become peace crusaders and peace crusaders are breaking the law.
Social scientists, community workers and clergy have argued convincingly that gangsterism is a historical response by working-class communities to unemployment, poverty and loss of self-esteem. Sociologists say gangs provide a sense of belonging and community amongst youth. The solution, they argue, would therefore lie in solving the socio-economic problems of our society. Give people jobs and they won’t rob and steal, and they won’t sell drugs.
This argument does not explain the numbers of youth from middle- and upper-class families who are committing crime or serving time. It does not explain the esteem and status gangs enjoy among young people growing up with very little material discomfort. Much of the problem appears to lie with the culture that has spread across the globe: selling and celebrating anti- social heroes.
Most of the output of American cinema illustrates this. Actors like Jean-Claude van Damme, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger portray singularly violent and destructive characters. These ”heroes” are highly individualistic and anti-social. In the pursuit of a notion of ”justice”, they destroy half a town without a wince.
Even in good-cop genre movies it is not unusual to have an entire fleet of cars destroyed in the pursuit of a lone criminal, or a spectacular shoot-out in a busy centre crowded with hysterical people. The audience is focused on hero and not the helpless mass, which engenders pity, because it reflects the powerlessness of the audiences’ lives.
Cinemas in working-class areas consistently screen movies of a particular genre – dominated by ”skop, skiet and donder” – while those in the plush suburbs are the ”art-house” cinemas.
Violence sells. Any analysis of the media industry will tell you that. But it sells only where it has an audience. The debate has been raging about the effect screened violence has on actual violence. It would be in the interests of only the multi-million- dollar movie industry to say that there is no relationship between the two.
Is it just a coincidence that more murders take place on the Cape Flats where audiences are fed a diet of violent cinema, than in the suburbs?
It seems, however, too mechanical to argue that viewers are simply a passive audience, they are also an active audience. They appropriate and situate images, values and actions within their own environment. Martin Scorcese may be portraying the mob in a way that shows how ruthless and brutal their power is, to make them unattractive, but the values appropriated by his audience might be the opposite.
Anti-humanist individualism is not only celebrated on celluloid. It pervades another mega-industry: sport: American sports in particular are major sources of income for a whole series of subsidiary industries, from shoe and clothing manufacturers, to network screening rights. Michael Jordan, Dennis Rodman, Charles Barkley and others are taken off the court and draped over sneakers, soft-drink cans and cereal boxes. Young people, in particular, rush to purchase these goods because they associate them with their heroes.
They don’t only buy the goods, they also buy the values. Just do it. Don’t think about the fact that it takes a month’s salary to buy them, just do it. Or that workers are being exploited in South East Asia to make them. Just do it. Buy them. Nike admitted in a Sports Illustrated article in 1993 that it actively pursues athletes with a ”bad-boy attitude” to represent it.
African-American alienation has become a highly marketable ”attitude” that permeates the sports industry as well as the music industry. The profits reaped off gangsta rap is a useful illustration of this.
The romanticised ”hood” is now appropriated from the Bronx to Bonteheuwel. Rap artists in Cape Town interpret their reality through historical constructs of alienated African- American youth. The ”attitude” of African- American youth resonates on the Cape Flats because it speaks a discourse of alienation, but is given cultural power by the media and financial interests which have appropriated its symbols. This has been occurring over a period extending well into the early gang formations in South Africa and their idealised American gangster heroes.
Gangsterism is not a new problem, but it is not only an economically motivated phenomenon. It has taken on an internal sociological dynamic that spans generations, that represents an identity that articulates the values of radical individualism as opposed to collective and social responsibility.
Gangsterism represents the expression of the individualism of liberal society in its most alienated and stark form. The private power wielded behind the closed doors of city boardrooms might be more dangerous to us in the long run.
Suren Pillay is a senior lecturer in political studies at the University of the Western Cape