[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Although formed more as partof a struggle by migrant youth for control over urban space than for criminal ac-tivity these groups of young African men existing at the margins of urban life invari-ably came into conflict with the law, particularly as white anxiety around the changesassociated with black urbanization increased (La Hausse, 1990, p.91).The resultingcriminalization of African youth would become a recurring theme throughout thetwentieth century.Similar dynamics were repeated in other urban areas and in the county s gold anddiamond mining compounds.Organizations of township and camp residents beganto emerge in response to social marginalizaton and served to absorb the influx ofyoung men from rural areas whose social structures were collapsing under the weightof colonialism.The structures, however, were often involved in a variety of activitiesthat complicate the somewhat simplistic implications of the term gang. In laborcompounds, for example, gangs preyed on recently arrived migrants, but also pro-vided loans, employment leads, access to housing, and physical protection for theirmembers (Kynoch, 1999, p.10).South African prison gangs emerged at approximately the same time and underpressure of the same forces, although they took a different form.South Africa sprison gangs are today divided into three separate organizations, the 26s, 27s, the28s, and are commonly referred to as the Numbers.The Numbers evolved in latenineteenth-century Johannesburg out of outlaw bands such as the Ninevites, led bythe famous Zulu migrant Nongoloza, which often preyed on African workers drawnfrom the same social strata as the bandits themselves.Although the Ninevites as amarauding gang were brought under control by 1910, the group had infiltrated theprisons and was actively recruiting among the growing inmate population, made upof black men criminalized by South Africa s racial laws, such that by the 1930s theprecursors of today s Number gangs had spread to virtually every prison in the country(Steinberg, 2004).Gangs under ApartheidThe implementation of apartheid by the National Party after 1948 both repro-duced existing conditions giving rise to gangs and set in motion new ones.The riseof the colored gangs which receive so much attention in South Africa today can betraced directly to removal policies implemented beginning in the 1950s.There were 224 SOUTH AFRICAN GANGSgangs in the colored communities of Cape Town, where the majority of the nation scolored population lives, prior to the forced removal, but these were generally mar-ginal social formations, their growth checked by tight-knit communities in placeslike District Six.The removal of entire communities from the inner city and surrounding suburbsof Cape Town to the distant and desolate Cape Flats tore the social fabric, generat-ing unemployment, separating families, and provoking social instability, all of whichprovided ideal conditions for the gangs to flourish (Merten, 2002).The introductionof the addictive drug Mandrax to the Western Cape in the 1970s further entrenchedthe gangs in the local economy and in Cape Flats communities, generating incomebut also exacerbating social instability in the form of substance abuse and relatedproblems, and leading to an increase in gang violence.The demise of the Ninevites did not mean the end of African gangs.Rather, gangspersisted in townships, prisons, and labor compounds across the country as migra-tion, urbanization, poverty, and marginalization continued to define social condi-tions for many young men.Combined with increasingly punitive measures aimed aturban blacks by the apartheid state these conditions ensured the expansion of theblack criminalization.With the growth of political activity and political organiza-tion sparked by the Soweto uprisings of 1976, however, gang activity subsided for aabout a decade, as political organizations provided alternatives for township youthand acted as counterweights to gang growth.The state s relationship to gangs during apartheid took three general forms: cor-ruption, collaboration, and disinterest.Each of these, in their own way, contributedto the gang problem as it exists today.Prior to the 1970s police either ignored gangactivity in non-white areas, as it had little bearing on the safety and security of thewhite community, or police were paid to turn the other way.As the anti-apartheidstruggle intensified, however, the state saw in gangs a potentially useful destabilisingforce in African and colored townships, as well as an important source of intelligence.In some areas gangs aligned themselves with either the state or with the liberationmovements.In general, however, as state repression escalated in the 1980s, gangs took advan-tage of the chaos and began to reorganize, becoming increasingly involved withplanned murders, extortion, bribery, theft and robbery rackets, and drug and gunsyndicates, their activities often overlapping with the state s counterinsurgencyagenda.The decade stretching from 1983 to 1993, when state violence was at itsmost intense, proved to be a period of renewed gang activity (Haefele, 1998).Gangs in South Africa TodayGangs in South Africa today are in the process of transformation and growth
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
