‘We can’t give them freedom. We’re always at the window, watching’
PEOPLE were shouting outside. The mother ran down from her upstairs apartment and stood at the steps of the ramshackle shop, where her eldest son lay bleeding. “I can’t any more,” he said. She turned around. “Remember, I love you all. Remember,” he said, over and over.
The next day, for the second time in just over a year, the widowed mother buried a son.
Brothers Shafiek and Mustapha Nomdoe, who died in late 2012 and early 2014, were no angels. Both were members of the Laughing Boys, one of the half-dozen gangs that roam Hanover Park and have once again turned this two square kilometres of the Cape Flats into a war zone.
In a little more than two weeks, 16 people have been killed here.
The boys’ mother, Gaironesa Nomdoe, has lived in Hanover Park for more than 30 years, since leaving her Bo-Kaap home in the heart of Cape Town.
With hunger all around, she started volunteering at a local school, buttering bread for the starving children who showed up every morning. In exchange, she received a loaf of bread, sometimes with peanut butter. “Anything, so we had food on the table,” she said.
Nomdoe and her daughter Mymoena Abader spend most days after work staring out of the window, watching the activity in the open space boxed in by the apartment blocks that proliferate in the Cape flatlands.
“When we see faces that don’t belong here, we chase the children into the house. We know that soon after, it begins again,” said Abader.
Ten-year-old Aqeelah Abader is playing near a friend’s house, across from where boys are shooting marbles and young men loiter in small groups. Her twin brother, Shaqeel, is never out of sight of his mother.
Like many of the mothers of boys across the Cape Flats, Abader is desperate to keep him out of the clutches of the gangs, which recruit children as young as nine.
Many, like Mustapha and Shafiek, join out of fear, after being harassed, beaten or robbed by gang members from a rival area, often literally a stone’s throw from where they live.
Police intelligence says the latest spate of violence started when the council began renovating a block of flats, temporarily moving the residents, among them gang members, into a rival gang’s territory.
When the invading Ghetto Boys gang started robbing locals, complaints were laid at the feet of the controlling Hard Livings gang.
They retaliated in blood, setting off a chain of events that led to near
When we see faces that don’t belong here, we chase the children into the house. We know that soon after, it begins again
daily shootings in places such as Manenberg and Hanover Park. Most of the killings have been as a result of arguments between young men, nearly all teenagers.
As the sun sets on another day in Hanover Park, dusty men with paint-marked jeans start arriving home. Many more have not left the township at all. A young man walks over to a rock alongside the main thoroughfare, carefully smashes a beer bottle and joins a small group preparing their drugs.
By the evening, rain is pelting down on the zinc roof of the taxi rank where nearly 50 residents have gathered to discuss the seemingly endless violence.
The cigarettes burn brightly as women in floral doeks focus their attention on the man trying to make himself heard over the steady din of rain overhead.
“We know who they are. We know where they are. We need to go and take care of them!” argues the young firebrand, to raucous applause and cheers.
The meeting acts as an opportunity to vent, with many of those there — most of whom are women — shouting out their frustrations with perceived police inactivity and community apathy.
Earlier, a speaker told the crowd that the mothers needed to take the lead as they were the ones who had to bury their sons. That day a 25-year-old man had been shot and killed.
The meeting adjourns with a call for greater community action and a loose undertaking to organise a mass march.
Nomdoe does not think marching achieves anything. She thinks deploying the army may help.
Between her and Abader they are raising four children, the youngest two years old. The twins attend Parkfields Primary School, where last week two gangsters chased a rival near the school fence. A stray bullet struck the Grade 4 classroom, injuring a teacher.
“We didn’t have to say anything. The kids knew exactly what to do. They all got on the floor,” said one teacher.
Each day the twins are escorted through the treacherous terrain to the relative safety of their home. In recent weeks they have hardly been allowed outside. The two mothers are already concerned about the long school holidays.
“They also need their freedom outside but we can’t give it to them. We’re always at the window, watching,” said Nomdoe. Comment on this: write to tellus@sundaytimes.co.za or SMS us at 33971 www.timeslive.co.za