‘Light in this darkness’: communities push back against Cape Town gang culture

Original article by Rachel Savage in Cape Town. Photographs by Tommy Trenchard

In 2015, Deniël de Bruyn moved almost 300 miles to Cape Town, to live with relatives and try to overcome a drug problem. Nine months later, he was dead, shot in what gangsters in the township of Wesbank claimed was a case of mistaken identity, according to De Bruyn’s cousin Lindy Jacobs.

The shooting was witnessed by Jacobs’s 12-year-old son Zunadin. “My son’s life was never, never ever the same again,” she said. In 2018, Jacobs said, gangsters tried to kill Zunadin. She went to the police. But just two months later her son was dead too. Jacobs is now raising her 12-year-old grandson Noah, whose father was another casualty of gang violence.

The Cape Flats townships, where Black, Coloured and Indian South Africans were forced to move by the white minority apartheid regime in the 1960s and 70s, are full of stories like Jacobs’. Of people whose families were torn apart by gangs, but who, despite everything, are committed to their communities.

After the man who allegedly killed her son was himself killed by a rival gang, Jacobs refused to celebrate: “I said to myself, ‘He is also somebody’s child.’” She focused on running home gardening workshops and football training for children, leading the local chapter of Balls Not Guns, a collective of Cape Flats women’s volunteer groups that promotes participation in sport.

“I always remember light, light, light in this darkness,” she said. “Because if there’s nobody that is trying to light, what is going to happen with our youth?”

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Last year, there were more than 1,037 gang-related murders in the wider Western Cape province, according to police data. That was 16% higher than in 2024. The splintering of gangs has escalated the turf wars over territories where they sell drugs and extort businesses, while also trapping ordinary people in the crossfire.

The surge in violence prompted South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, to announce in his annual state of the nation address on 12 February that the military would be deployed to combat gangs.

Many community members were sceptical, noting that when the army was sent into the Cape Flats in 2019, gangsters merely laid low before returning. “They’re going to instil fear, it’s going to happen for a short while … and then what?” said Gloria Veale, an activist who runs Balls Not Guns.

“Those concerns are legitimate … I do think that, in the circumstances, in order to save lives and restore some calm, this action was necessary,” the acting police minister, Firoz Cachalia, said in an interview.

The army will support the police rather than carrying out policing themselves, he said, adding: “This is not a magic bullet … What these communities need … is development.”

Gangs proliferated in Cape Town during apartheid, when the forced removal of about 150,000 people from designated “white areas” to the Cape Flats ruptured families and communities.

Ben de Vos, a criminologist who runs an NGO in the township of Mitchells Plain, reeled off the problems: “The spatial inequalities, the congested communities, the unemployment, which is sky-high. The drug economy gives an alternative economy.”

South Africa’s unemployment rate stands at more than 40%. While the Western Cape has lower unemployment than the rest of the country, non-white South Africans, who still make up the vast majority of township populations, are least likely to have jobs.

Local experts also expressed concern about the growing recruitment of children by gangs, including of children they said were left without state support after being excluded. “The whole of government has failed to come up with a youth intervention strategy,” said Martin Makasi, the chair of the Nyanga community police forum, a body linking the police and residents.

“There’s a huge lack of trust [in police],” said Irvin Kinnes, an associate professor in criminology at the University of Cape Town. Meanwhile, he said, corruption, from police on the ground to the very top of government, is fuelling gang crime: “The violence on the Cape Flats is a symptom of the bigger problem of corruption, in a system of accumulation that’s not working for people.”

The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime found in 2019 that Cape Town’s 13 largest gangs, which include the Fancy Boys, the Americans and the Hard Livings, had a membership of about 72,000. It said in a research note last year that there were no up-to-date figures, adding that splintering had increased both the number and size of gangs.

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In Hanover Park, on the other side of Cape Town’s international airport from Wesbank, people lined up outside a community centre to get handouts – peanut butter, mouthwash and deodorant – from a charity.

Inside the centre, Craven Engel, who runs the anti-gang organisation CeaseFire, worried about a split that had birthed three new gangs: the Ghetto Kids, Only the Family and the Young Gifted Boys. The Mongrels, another gang, had also fractured in two, with the two sides now supporting different gangs. “You’ve got this kind of horrible dynamic that, if things happen, you don’t know who is doing it on behalf of whom,” he said.

CeaseFire employs former gangsters to mediate between warring groups and support people who want to leave. Dalton (not his real name) entered the CeaseFire offices for the first time, a slight, nervy figure, his hood up. A few weeks earlier, the 24-year-old’s younger brother was shot dead by a rival gang.

Dalton followed his cousins into his first gang when he was 17. “I wanted to be a gangster because they shot my father when I was five months old,” he said.

Now Dalton wanted out: the gang that had killed his brother was hunting him too. “Before he died, his word was he don’t want to lose me, because I’m the oldest,” he said. “The reason why he was in this gang was because of me. He was just 20 years old.”

Glenn Hans, a CeaseFire outreach officer, promised to take Dalton out of Hanover Park temporarily, tell the gangs he had left and help him to build a new life. He was optimistic for Dalton: “There’s gates up, out of the gang. You can go up. So he wants to move up in life.”

In every township, there are volunteers carving out safe spaces. On a Tuesday in Manenberg, a couple of miles east of Hanover Park, the local Balls Not Guns chapter provided a weekly lunch for pensioners and a chance to decompress. Afterwards, members of a grandmothers’ football team showed off their skills with a ball.

Deidre Richards, 55, one of the chapter leaders, said she sometimes felt like giving up. “But then again, if it’s your passion, you will just get up and try something or somebody else.”

A few streets away, professional dancer Darion Thorne runs dance classes for children every Saturday and fortnightly screenings of local films and children’s animations. “There are things that exist that are negative, but in the same way, things can exist that are positive,” he said.

A patter of shots sounded from outside the house the 33-year-old shares with his mother and nephew. Thorne cocked his head: “Is it shooting?” He waved it off.

Later, Thorne admitted he was always on alert, trying to keep the events he runs safe: “I’m in constant awareness of danger.”