Killing Fields Beauregard Tromp ‘Nobody cares about us dying here’
Reporter | As the politicians play the blame game, at least one person is shot dead on the Cape Flats each day. and photographer visited Hanover Park, where gangsters know life is short The crime networks have links to neighbouring countries, Europe, Sou
ALONG Surren Road in Hanover Park a beautiful new sport and skate park with manicured grass verges stands empty. Beside it the ubiquitous two-storey council flats are teeming with activity, men young and old shuffling by as the Cape Doctor rages and tenacious children playing in smatterings on the centre courts.
For weeks now, young men have chased each other back and forth around this park, making it a no-go zone, with mothers peeping from windows at their children playing close by.
This is Hanover Park on the Cape Flats. Not even the shadow of the picture-postcard Table Mountain reaches here.
“Nobody cares about us dying here,” said mother-of-three Bridgette, on the periphery of a community meeting to discuss the violence.
Gang-related killings on the Cape Flats have nearly doubled in a year and while politicians argue about who’s to blame, at least one person is shot dead here every day.
Western Cape police crime statistics show that in the 201213 financial year, 309 people were killed in gang-related violence. A year later, that number has jumped to 524.
These numbers contribute to Cape Town recently being named the most dangerous place in South Africa and the 20th most dangerous in the world, by Mexican think tank Citizens’ Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice.
The DA-led provincial government has for the past two years called on the army to be deployed to deal with the crisis, claiming there have been 86 gang-related murders over three years in Hanover Park without a single conviction. It lays the blame squarely at the feet of the ANC-led national government.
“Every child that dies in Hanover Park, in Mitchells Plain, is an indication of the punishment the ANC is dishing out to our people in those communities,” social development MEC Albert Fritz argued last week in the legislature.
The response from the provincial ANC’s Pat Lekker is that the DA is an ineffective government that does little to address the root problems of gangsterism, instead focusing its attention
There have been 86 gang murders over three years in Hanover Park without a single conviction
on collating data around the scourge.
The Cape Flats is a product of apartheid-era forced removals, many of the families having been kicked out of areas at the foot of Table Mountain such as District Six, Claremont and Rondebosch. The fractured, displaced communities proved fer- tile ground for gangsterism, which has proliferated and evolved, with links to organised crime networks in neighbouring countries, South America, Europe and Southeast Asia.
Today the 15 major gangs across the Cape Flats — such as the Americans, Hard Livings, Sexy Boys, Mongrels — are aligned to the prison number gangs, the 26s, 27s and 28s, each focused on accumulating as much wealth as possible. Locally that’s done through drug dealing, gun running, protection rackets and a few legitimate businesses.
“Locking people up is not a deterrent because for these guys going to jail is growth,” said Operation Combat police commander Major-General Jeremy Vearie, referring to how incarceration helps gangsters progress within the ranks and serves to acknowledge their deeds.
His unit has led the charge against the gangs. Its members are hand-picked, recruited from the police, and they use similar tactics and legislation as adopted by US law enforcement officials in taking down the likes of Al Capone and the Mafia.
Their efforts have helped bring calm to areas like Lavender Hill, where from 2012 to 2013 scores, including an eight-yearold girl, were killed.
Two months ago, the unit dismantled the Junior Cisko Yankees gang in Worcester, believed to be behind a spate of murders in that area.
Hanover Park’s Mongrels gang leader, Cecil “Ses” Brown, is in court facing racketeering charges.
Vearie scoffs at the idea of a return to the death penalty.
“How is the death penalty a deterrent when these guys live with the reality that they’re going to die at any point?” he said.
For him the only lasting solution is a change in environment and the building of alternative, community-based centres of power such as street committees to combat the iron grip of gangs.
In possibly the loudest acknowledgement of the unit’s success and the perils of its work, gangsters stormed the Manenberg home of one of Combat’s members, killing his 71year-old mother and seriously injuring his elder brother.
At any point we each have numerous contracts out on us. We all know it
“At any point we each have numerous contracts out on us. We all know it,” said Vearie.
The spate of killings in Hanover Park, although gang-related, has not followed the convention of gang wars and has more than a sprinkling of the bizarre. Starting on October 28, in less than three weeks, these are a few of the incidents:
A man who did odd jobs for drug money was about to mow a lawn at 3am. He got into a quarrel with a man passing by and ended up dead on the grass.
Ikky was a drug dealer who sold to everybody and anybody. Two gangsters tried to shake him down for money to buy a gun. He came up short and was killed. Ikky’s friend wasn’t going to let it slide, so he killed three of the gangsters.
Two gangsters robbed their gang leader’s girlfriend and mother. The two were “disciplined”. Things got out of hand; they died of their injuries.
A gangster stole drugs from his own gang and fled. When he returned three weeks later, he was shot in his own home.
Two brothers were sitting in a car when a gunman walked up to them. Nine bullets hit one and 11 the other.
Children as young as 10 are able to relay the reasons behind those killed and who shot them.
“Within one or two hours I’ll know who shot you. But it’s difficult to make an arrest because no one wants to testify,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Desmond Laing, who polices Hanover Park.
In recent weeks, guns have flooded Hanover Park and this, coupled with trigger-happy young gangsters keen to make a name for themselves, the ravages of crystal meth (tik) and the lack of leadership among gangs, has resulted in endless shootings.
A 9mm semiautomatic pistol sells for R1 500 on the Cape Flats. In the first half of November, police confiscated 18 firearms in Hanover Park. In the past year, Western Cape police have confiscated more than 2 000 weapons.
Operation Combat this year bust a syndicate involved in the issuing of gun licences to Cape Flats gangsters. Among those arrested were three policemen from the central firearms registry in Pretoria.