Pagad and the gangsters may at last find common ground – in a Christian church. Marianne Merten reports
Reborn Christian Rashied Staggie has joined the Rhema Church. He has become the latest self-confessed gangster to turn to the Bible. It remains to be seen whether his conversion will see him abandoning his multimillion-rand vice network and donating its proceeds to the Lord’s work.
His wife, Rashieda, and sister-in-law, Denise, the widow of Staggie’s twin brother, Rashaad, who was killed in August 1996, are also reborn. Since then Rashied Staggie has abandoned his baseball cap, heavy gold jewellery and dark shades in favour of dark suits, a clean-shaven face and a Bible under the arm at public appearances.
Staggie revealed his conversion from Islam to Christianity after being wounded in a drive-by shooting on his home turf of Manenberg last month.
The Hard Livings gang boss has started a new peace initiative to end the almost three-year-old Cape Flats conflict, despite a clear refusal from the vigilante group People against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) to meet gangsters to sort out their differences.
He has expressed the view that churches need to take a more active role in trying to improve people’s lives – not necessarily attacking individual criminals, but rather the causes of gangsterism and drug dealing.
Pagad and the charismatic church leaders of the Rhema Church, the Lighthouse, His People and Shekinah Tabernacle are setting up a working committee based on an agreement, reached at a secret five-hour meeting last week in Cape Town, ”to rid society of the evil of drugs, crime and corruption at all levels”. Next week the churches will again meet gang leaders like Staggie to help pave their road to redemption.
Staggie’s wish that churches play a leading role in helping communities beset by gangsterism now seems to have come true, although not necessarily in the way the gang boss wished for.
In a joint statement issued after last week’s meeting, the churches and Pagad agreed to form ”a united front against gangsterism and drug lords”. The way to redemption would be open to all those gangsters who ”genuinely transformed”, but only after a process of public reformation, renunciation and restitution for harm done to communities.
Rhema leader Pastor Ray McCauley looked slightly uncomfortable and flushed as he listened to Pagad representative Cassiem Parker’s insistence that the anti-drug group would never talk to gangsters unless they openly transformed. Neither would Pagad renounce its right to defend itself.
Said Parker: ”Peace isn’t a coexistence of silence in the background of injustice, but a peace our Creator can be satisfied with.”
A ”sane and sober society” has been the rallying call for the anti-drug vigilantes for more than two years and has found an echo among the churches. On the basis of this demand and ”the divine law of the Creator”, Pagad and the churches have joined under the Cape Peace Initiative.
The driving force of the peace mission is the Pentecostal-Charismatic Shekinah Tabernacle church of Beacon Valley in Mitchell’s Plain on the Cape Flats. It was there that Staggie, a Muslim, was baptised in a temporary pool as a saved Christian in front of a 1 000-strong congregation.
Murdered Mitchells Plain 28s gang boss Glen Khan, also born a Muslim, never completed the road to salvation. Although he and his wife had expressed their wish to convert, he was killed in a drive-by shooting on Easter Sunday. The church hosted his funeral service as schools in the area closed for the day.
It was also at Shekinah Tabernacle that self-proclaimed reformed gangster Ivan Waldeck, a prominent representative for the now defunct Community Outreach (Core) group of gangsters who said they were reformed, found the Lord several years ago. He worked with Pastor Albern Martens, who found the faith while in jail for fraud some time ago.
News of Staggie’s conversion is still met with scepticism. Previous attempts by Staggie and other key Western Cape gang leaders, most of whom have since been killed, under the banner of Core failed to convince authorities and residents on the Cape Flats that they had changed their ways.
For many, Staggie’s new-found faith, like his move to KwaZulu-Natal, is a tactic to draw attention away from his vice empire as the state is focusing on his assets and those of other organised crime bosses. Even within the church grouping, there is an attitude of wait and see whether Staggie will follow his new life with new deeds.
Yet Shekinah Tabernacle pastor Vivian Rix says he wants to believe the conversion is true. The church got involved because it was burying too many gangsters and murder victims.
Although the churches seem to have found some common ground with Pagad, the meeting with the gangsters did not go off smoothly. Church leaders came under some flak for meeting Pagad without convincing the anti- drug group it must talk to gangsters who want to reform.
Staggie and his gang members complain there are still no alternatives for those among them who want to give up their drug- dealing, free-wheeling lifestyle.
For example, Kensington gang boss Chris Patterson says he has a stack of money he would like to invest in a legal business, but he’s worried about the new laws which allow for the seizure of assets.
Rix vehemently rejects any claims the gangsters are pouring money into the churches. ”We are not receiving cash from the gangsters because it would compromise our initiative,” he insists.
In the face of steadfast refusal from authorities to talk to Pagad and gangsters, perhaps the way of the Lord will help the Western Cape out of its bloodshed.