Army deployed to Cape Town ghetto as murder rate hits 43 in a weekend
It was about three o’clock on Monday afternoon when Tasmeen Simons spotted the three young men approaching. Tasmeen, 22, didn’t say anything, but her mother thinks she must have sensed something was wrong, because she stopped gathering in the washing from outside their tiny one-bedroom house and shoved her sister out of the way. It was an act of selflessness that cost her her life.
“I didn’t hear the shot. I just heard this screaming and shouting, so I ran out and there she was, lying on the ground,” said her mother, Jasmine. “It didn’t used to be like this round here.”
Police believe Tasmeen was killed unintentionally, the latest of hundreds of victims of crossfire in a gang war that has brought carnage and fear to South Africa’s most affluent city.
The Cape Flats, a sprawling area of townships and slums built on the flat coastal plain south of Cape Town, where the Simons family lives, have always been rough. Established in the Sixties when apartheid authorities cleared black and mixed-race families out of Cape Town itself, its neighbourhoods quickly became a by-word for deprivation and crime.
But over the past few years a drug-fuelled crime wave has wrought carnage on a scale that residents, police officers, and even former gangsters liken to a war zone.
More than 2,000 people have been killed in the poorest, predominantly black and mixed race, neighbourhoods over the past seven months. Almost half of those killings were gang related. There were 43 murders in the Cape Town area last weekend alone.
Last week, after a particular horrific 24 hours in which 13 people were
murdered, President Cyril Rhamaphosa announced he would send in the army. The move was welcomed by the Democratic Alliance, the opposition party that controls the Western Cape province, and when the troops finally rolled in on their huge armoured vehicles on Thursday they were greeted by cheering children and large crowds who watched
“It’s good,” said a 22-year-old man called Adam as soldiers in camouflage brandishing R4 assault rifles fanned out across a part of the Manenberg township controlled by the Hard Living gang on Thursday afternoon.
“But what do you think’s going to happen when they’ve gone? The shooting’s gonna start,” he laughed. “So what’s the use?”
The same question was repeated by residents across the townships this week. For everyone here understands that the problems here are far deeper, and the solutions far more difficult, than any army could tackle.
Most people here trace the current nightmare back to 1966, when authorities declared the city’s District Six a whites only area. Over the next decade, tens of thousands of black and coloured families were moved into hastily built housing projects on a featureless, sandy plain south of the city. Poorly built, isolated, and with few facilities, the new townships on the Cape Flats could almost have been intentionally designed to breed unemployment and crime.
Those displaced included Shaida Adams, now 73, and her son Turner, 54. And their family history typifies the ensuing descent into violence.
“I was born there, I went to school there, and one day they said ‘you’ve got to go’,” Mrs Adams said at her breezeblock home in Lavender Hill, a township so violent it is colloquially known as “kill me quick”.
“It was pathetic. There was nothing here, there were not even schools. The children didn’t have any facilities. And about 10 years after that the crime began, because there was nothing else for the kids to do,” she said.
Those kids included her own son,
‘You might not be in a gang, but if a family member is, then you’re connected. If you’ve got a kid in a gang, the mothers will hide the guns or drugs’
who fell in with a group called the Cape Town Scorpions. Finding he was “good with a knife”, he says he committed his first murder at the age of 13, was convicted for the first time at 16, and in and out of adult jails from 18.
By the time he emerged from his last prison spell in the 2000s, he was a feared “captain” in the 28s, one of South Africa’s most notorious prison gangs. At 54, he says his gangster days are behind him. But he is looking on anxiously as new generations enter the same cycle. Last year, his 22-year-old great-nephew was murdered, and he is “incredibly worried” about his 11-year-old cousin, who is just reaching gang recruitment age.
“Eighty to eighty five per cent of all the people who live here are affiliated with the gangs one way or another,” he explained. “You might not be in a gang, but if a family member is, then you’re connected. If you’ve got a kid in a gang, the mothers will hide the guns, or the drugs,” he said.
More alarming still, he says, is that the nature of gang crime has changed. Ever since the arrival in the 2000s of an epidemic of crystal meth – known as “tik” in Afrikaans slang, violence has doubled or even trebled.
Today, the Cape Flats townships are places of visible and astounding poverty, where families of 20 people are crammed into one-bedroom homes, and the only play facilities for children in crumbling three-storey apartment blocks of 60 households is a single rusting slide. They are also heavily segregated, and the poisonous legacy of apartheid is palpable. Much of the Cape Flats, including Manenberg and Lavender Hill, are Afrikaans-speaking, mixed-race areas where local residents are bitterly resentful of both South Africa’s well-off white minority and the black majority.
“Even for us, who live and work here, we find it difficult to believe how human beings can live in such conditions,” said Major General Andre Lincoln, the policeman in charge of Cape Town’s anti-gang unit (AGU) and himself a child of gang-run areas.
Founded just seven months ago, the AGU is the first ever dedicated anti-gang law enforcement organisation. Its stated intention is to “take down the gangs – not just respond to violent crime”. But its 200 personnel face an uphill struggle.
Maj Gen Lincoln estimates there are more than 90 gangs operating in the Western Cape, controlling a criminal economy worth millions of dollars and encompassing everything from drug dealing to vehicle theft and extorting protection money from nightclubs.
Raids and arrests will only go so far, says Maj Gen Lincoln. The emphasis has to be on targeting the gangs’ finances and bosses, who reside in affluent Cape Town suburbs.
Then there is addressing the poverty and deprivation at the core of the crime wave. Social services, school engagement, and addressing basic issues of justice are all key. But the biggest challenge is getting the local community to trust the police – who many locals view as corrupt, brutal, and even in league with the gangs.
That makes turning witness an incredibly dangerous thing to do.
Earlier this year, gang members murdered a Lavender Hill handyman, dismembered him with an angle grinder, put the body parts in carrier bags and left the lot in a shopping trolley around the corner. Local rumour is that he was killed to stop him testifying in a murder he had witnessed. It is typical of the tales that keep thousands of witnesses quiet, and killers free to roam the streets.
“The purpose of the Anti Gang Unit is to address that – to show that the police can be trusted,” said Maj Gen Lincoln. “I want to be able to get to a point where parents are not going to hide their children,” he added.
In that sense, Tasmeen Simons’s murder is an early success. Twenty minutes after police spoke to the killer’s mother, she frogmarched the 18-year-old into a police station. He had been involved in a fight involving the Fancy Boys, a gang who occupied a house next door to the Simons’. Several witnesses have come forward.
The prospect of justice is scant comfort to Tasmeen’s surviving family.
“We want our streets back,” said Mrs Simons. “We want them back for the children.”