Chiara Carter and Marianne Merten
In the mythology of the Cape Flats’s Americans gang, the six white and seven red lines on the stars and stripes flag represent crisp banknotes stained in blood.
Criminologist Don Pinnock says this representation, integrated into the gang’s initiation ritual, illustrates key elements of Cape gangsterism – money, violence and secret rituals.
This year began with horrific violence – a bomb blast, assassinations and an audacious raid where hooded robbers held up one of the largest police stations in Cape Town.
Police statistics show how little has been done to combat such crimes. Last year, out of 667 violent attacks, 188 were blamed on People against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) and 28 suspects arrested. A further 140 suspects were arrested in connection with 470 gang-related attacks. However, not a single person was sentenced and most suspects are out on bail.
While the Pagad-related violence became a feature of Cape Town in mid- 1996, gangsterism has a long history in the Cape.
The number of crime bosses who announced they had quit crime, moved out of Cape Town or handed themselves over to police last year signalled it was a very bad year for the industry. They were targets of assassinations and bomb blasts as well as the government, which drew up new tough laws aimed at removing the right to form gangs and at confiscating crime’s ill-gotten gains.
However, this is not enough to eliminate gangsterism – not least because gangs have a complex and varied relationship with their communities.
On the one hand, the community is the prey: the victims who live in the crossfire, whose children are raped, assaulted or recruited.
On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of people are involved in the underworld economy – from brothels, shebeens, stolen goods and the drug trade to money-laundering industries like taxis and tow-trucks.
The University of Cape Town’s Institute of Criminology head Wilfried Scharf says there are many facets to the relationship between community and gangs. There is economic dependency of the gangs on the communities – most of the millions made by gangs comes from the drug trade, still based on mandrax and dagga bought by the poor.
Many people who live around gang headquarters benefit by having their silence bought. They are helped with rent payments, contributions are made to funerals, and sometimes their sons are employed as gangsters and their daughters as prostitutes. In return, a “parcel” of drugs or a hot gun could be hidden in their homes.
The Staggie brothers, who run the Hard Livings gang of the dismal Mannenberg township, are viewed by some as benefactors.
When Rashied Staggie appeared in the Kuilsriver Magistrate’s Court last year in connection with the theft of 53 weapons, including automatic rifles, from a police base near Faure outside Cape Town, women from Mannenberg were there to demand his release.
They shouted: “Viva Staggie, Viva”, and said the gang boss was a saviour to the poor. “He’s God’s gift. He’s the people’s hero,” they shouted during recess.
Such displays of affection for underworld figures are neither unusual, nor inexplicable. Staggie, Americans gang boss Neville Herrold in Athlone, Ernest “Lastig” Solomons in Belhar and Mongrel gang leader Ismail April made it out of poverty.
A former gangster turned social worker in Mannenberg says becoming associated with gangsters is often inadvertent because of the “assistance” they provide.
“The gangsters remain popular because they supposedly identify with the poverty and hardship of their neighbours. They often provide the loans, the money, the bread,” says anti-crime activist Irvin Kinnes.
They also meddle with housing. Last year, gangsters made death threats against Cape Town housing chief Billy Cobbett after he slammed their involvement in housing allocation. The row was sparked by gangsters stopping officials from evicting a family in Mannenberg.
They were led by Staggie’s younger brother Solly, a self- proclaimed community worker and activist, who last year mediated a taxi conflict in the area.
Months before Rashaad Staggie was lynched during a Pagad protest at his Salt River home in 1996, he was spotted handing out R50 notes to strikers from the clothing industry.
After his death, a mural was painted in Woodstock in commemoration. It dominated the decayed area not so much because of its size as its style – the heroic realist mode favoured by communists to portray idealised peasants.
Rashied Staggie has now set up home in KwaZulu-Natal but the Staggie family remains involved in Cape Town life.
Even gangsters who have physically left remain role models for the youth. On almost every Woodstock street corner, boys and a few girls can be seen practising cocking guns, aiming and pulling the trigger. Their younger brothers and sisters collect spent pellets for re-use. Their hot favourite is a Glock, but the silver Smith & Wesson is a close runner-up.
A social worker said such games were part of “breaking in” for the gangs. The children envy the gangsters’ expensive cars, clothing and jewellery. They listen to gangsta rappers like Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac Shakur, who had “Thug Life” tattooed across his chest and stomach. Both rappers are depicted in murals painted on walls in Mannenberg.
Gaynor Wasser of the Western Cape Anti-Crime Forum says the glorification of gangsters cannot be denied.
“The reality is that it’s all about the clothes you wear. Our interventions are limited because we can’t offer food or jobs,” Wasser says.
Scharf says there are sinister and violent relationships between gangs and “their” community.
A common story told is that gangs invite young single mothers to parties in Sea Point. They are treated to a fancy hairdo and expensive makeup and plied with liquor. They are then raped by a gang leader or a group of gang members and told that they are now owned by the gang, and must work for it as a prostitute.
Any deviance from instructions will be taken seriously and the gang will arrange for the woman’s child to be removed from her custody and put in foster care. The house of the woman is then taken over by the gang to store drugs and weapons and to serve as a safe house.
Joining a gang, voluntarily or involuntarily, is usually a life- sentence.
Gangsters are marked physically by tattoos and scars, and are bound by the secret knowledge they share and actions, including murder, which place them outside the bounds of conventional society.
Tales of former gangsters being hunted down by the gangs they abandoned are not unusual.
It is common cause that social, economic and political factors combine to provide the gangs with their lifeblood – young members who are initiated into a life of crime.
The ravages of apartheid, including forced removals, damaged family and neighbourhood networks and at the same time strengthened the street gangs transported to the Cape Flats from District Six.
However, socio-economic factors are not enough to explain the resilience and vigour of Cape Town’s gangs. Other factors – questions of identity, emasculation and Westernisation – all play a part in ensuring the gangs remain an attractive option for many youths.
Bored in a bleak and often hostile environment, many youngsters, usually male, join gangs which offer not only an alternative lifestyle, but excitement, a sense of belonging and meaning .
Gangs afford protection, companionship and status. They also offer power – physical and economic.
Despite state promises to crack down on crime and new laws outlawing gang membership, anti-crime activists say rooting out the gangs is no easy matter.
Kinnes, who grew up in Mannenberg, says that in the 1970s a community initiative known as “the peacemakers” tried to mobilise the community against gang violence, but the movement disintegrated.
“Over the years, the police came and went, the gangsters remained. The social workers came and went, the gangsters and poverty remained,” he says.
Kinnes says gangsterism in the Cape has been given the space to become an industry on which hundreds of thousands of people rely.
Pinnock has moved beyond the obvious socio-economic causes. He argues that the wild behaviour of delinquents is based on a far deeper factor – the need for initiation into adulthood.
In his book Gangs, Rituals and Rites of Passage, he argues that Western society has ceased to escort young men into adulthood through appropriate rites of passage. Gangs take over at a limbo phase, steering the boy, but into trouble. Rather than a punitive justice system, Pinnock proposes an intensive programme for boys to become warriors where they are given the challenges and responsibilities of adulthood.