SATURDAY MAY 26 2001

Cape Town police lose war in ghetto

FROM MICHAEL DYNES IN THE CAPE FLATS

A 14-YEAR-OLD schoolgirl is gang-raped, stabbed 52 times in the back and dumped in a derelict house before her assailants casually slit her throat. Shots ring out through the night as another gang leader meets his death in a hail of bullets in a drive-by killing by a rival band of mobsters that has become the hallmark of gangland killings.

Teenagers armed with automatic weapons brazenly take up positions on the rooftops to take pot-shots at police officers as they race through the labyrinthine slums in pursuit of gang members who have just raided a liquor store.

“It’s crazy out there,” Inspector Adriaan Saulse of the Cape Town Police Gang Unit, said. “I’m 12 years in this business and I know we’re losing the fight against the gangs. We’re nothing more than firefighters. That’s about as much as we can do.”

Almost 200 people have been shot this year in what police have called the biggest gang war in living memory to have erupted across the Cape Flats — a vast urban sprawl under the shadow of Cape Town’s Table Mountain which served as a dumping ground during the apartheid era for people of mixed race, the “coloureds”, as they were called.

More than 150 gangs with a total membership of at least 120,000 people rule vast tracts of the derelict landscape, running rackets from drug dealing to prostitution, loan sharking and murder.

Through fear, intimidation and patronage, gangs such as the “Americans”, the “Hard Livings”, the “Mongrels”, the “Born Frees” and the “Sexy Boys” have created a mini-state which the South African authorities seem unable or unwilling to take on.

Tattooed, knife-wielding youngsters, wearing flashy clothes and driving fast cars, hang around street corners peddling Mandrax, crack and Ecstasy.

They deal in women and young girls and run protection rackets — anything that will make a quick buck.

Terrified residents complain that the neighbourhood has become a war zone and nobody is able to do anything about it. Sitting in the police unit’s headquarters on the edge of the Cape Flats, Mr Saulse agrees that he is fighting a hopeless battle.

“I’ve got 44 men and seven vehicles to take on the gangs,” he said. “I need a thousand officers to have any hope of making a dent in the problem. Our annual overtime budget is 70,000 rand (£7,000). That’s gone in two weekends. We can’t even afford to run a 24-hour operation any more.”

Gangs flourished in the Cape Flats under apartheid when the area was designated a “coloured area” — for people not black enough to be classified as Bantu or white enough to be European. But their numbers have since risen sharply.

Now the “Americans” are trying to take over the entire area, prompting nightly gunbattles between rival gangs fighting to retain control over their little patches of territory.

Communities on the Cape Flats are victims and beneficiaries of the gangland culture. They are the ones caught in the crossfire. It is their children who are raped, assaulted, recruited and murdered. Yet thousands benefit from the underworld economy of brothels, shebeens (illegal drinking dens), stolen goods, drugs and money laundering, which brings jobs and incomes to people who otherwise possibly may have nothing.

Repeated attempts to clean up the gangs have led nowhere. People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad), a vigilante group, was set up by Muslim clerics to take on the gangs, but soon degenerated into gangsterism. Its leading members are being tried for a number of terrorist incidents and the murder of Rashaad Staggie, a former leader of the “Hard Livings”, who was shot and set on fire by Pagad hit-men.

Three members of the Americans were each given two life sentences last month for the gang-rape and murder of Valencia Farmer, a schoolgirl of 14, whose broken body was found dumped in an abandoned building.

Once inside prison they will have to face the notorious jail gangs known as the “Numbers”: the “26s” who specialise in robbery, the “27s” who carry out killings and the “28s” who sodomise other inmates. “Even among that lot, the rape and murder of a child will not be tolerated,” a member of the police gang unit said. “They’ll be taken out with a sharpened spoon before long.”

But for every gang member sent to jail, there are another 100 potential recruits waiting to take their places. “Go to the primary schools and see for yourself,” Mr Saulse said. “There are kids there aged eight and nine talking the language of the gangsters. They are already part of the culture. They see the dealing and the killing. They can’t wait for the money and status that comes with gang membership.

“We go to the schools to warn the kids about joining the gangs,” Mr Saulse added. “I tell them that the average life expectancy of a gang member is very low. If you manage to get to 23, you’re very lucky. Most gang members are either dead or in prison by that age.

“But it doesn’t seem to make much difference. It’s all pretty bleak.”