Anger, fear as gang violence explodes in Cape Town

A child plays in a playground in Cape Flats, an area in Cape Town, South Africa, notorious for its gang wars and high numbers of child murders, on Sept. 11, 2020. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

A streak of killings in South Africa’s dangerous ganglands in Cape Town has led communities to demand protection as city officials say they lack the resources to stop the violence.

“One gangster, one bullet,” scores chanted at a recent march led by an anti-gang group in the sprawling Cape Flats area after authorities recorded 59 murders over seven days last month.

“Our communities are fearful,” said Cape Flats Safety Forum activist Lynn Phillips at a new protest this past weekend. “We don’t have to switch on Netflix to hear gun violence. We sleep, we eat, and we wake up with gun violence.”

The toll is “deeply alarming”, said municipal safety official Jean-Pierre Smith during a nighttime patrol of another part of the neglected stretches of a city that attracts hordes of tourists to lush suburbs less than 20 kilometres (12 miles) away.

“We do have a massive spike at the moment” in a murder rate that already averages about 300 every three months, Smith told AFP, citing leadership and turf battles between gangs involved in drugs and extortion.

In the past weeks, a two-month-old boy died after being struck by a stray bullet inside his home and a 12-year-old girl was killed in crossfire.

On Smith’s late-night patrol, police vehicles wound through the streets of the Lavender Hill suburb, where children played outside cramped apartments.

Police periodically frisked people and checked vehicles, seizing from one several bottles of a codeine-based cough syrup sold on the black market, and taking the driver in for questioning.

Smith photographed gang insignia spray-painted on a public building.

In the absence of adequate intelligence gathering, police searched all men of “gang age” -- late teens to around 25 years old, he said.

“There is a known deficiency in the ability of the police to detect crime, investigate it and drive prosecutions,” he said.

Fraction of convictions

“The police do nothing here... and they are disrespecting the people,” Tanya Ruyters, 55, told AFP, angrily, after her son was allegedly shot by a gangster outside a court, his body under a white cloth behind her.

Just two to three percent of gang-related murders in the Cape Town area result in convictions, Smith said.

“Detectives are massively overloaded, with massive case volumes, too many to reasonably handle,” he said.

At the same time, “the gangs are getting more sophisticated,” he said. As they scoop up cash and experience, they recruit more corrupt judges and police onto their payrolls, he added.

Within South Africa’s murder rate of around 63 killings a day over January to March this year, the Western Cape province -- which includes Cape Town -- records the second-highest number, according to police statistics.

Cape Town districts, also dealing with a rise in deadly clashes in the minibus taxi industry, hold the country’s top five spots for murder.

Battlefield

In Lavender Hill, less than five kilometres from the sandy beaches of False Bay, Mark Nicholson lives near a plot known as “the battlefield” because of its history as a gangster killing ground.

He has lost seven relatives in three years to gang violence in his suburb, one of several created decades ago when the apartheid government forced “Coloured” people out of the city centre.

“When I see a young boy laying dead and he’s been shot, I cry because we’ve been through this,” he told AFP.

Nicholson runs a project to get youngsters off the street and into sports.

“My fight is not against the gangsters,” he said. “I need to change these children’s lives so that they don’t get trapped into the violence.”

Others are calling for more radical action.

A breakaway group within the People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD), an organization that in the 1990s targeted gang leaders for assassination and whose leaders have previously been jailed, has called for the army to be deployed.

“We need to give a clear message to those gangsters that we are no longer going to allow their lawlessness to control our communities,” said PAGAD G-Force representative Zainoneesa Rashid ahead of the latest protest.