Gang Entry And Exit In Cape Town

Gang Entry and Exit in Cape Town: Getting Beyond The Streets in Africa’s Deadliest City showcases a practical starting point for changing how criminologists think about gangs and street culture – offering hope to those trying to exit gang life, as well as those trying to help them do so.

A study of the experiences of gang members from working class neighbourhoods on the Cape Flats in South Africa, dealing with criminality and the search for dignity.

"Cape Town is two cities. One is beautiful beyond imagining, known since its beginning as the 'fairest cape' in the world. Here tourists come to lounge on beaches, scale misty peaks and dine in fine restaurants. The other is one of the most dangerous cities in the world, where police need bullet-proof vests and sometimes army backup. Here gangs of young men rule the night with heavy calibre handguns, dispensing heroin, cocaine, crystal meth and fear. This is a story of the second city... In Gang Town, investigative journalist and criminologist Don Pinnock draws on more than thirty years of research to provide a nuanced and definitive portrait of youngsters caught up in violent crime."--Page [4] of book cover.

The contributors respond to the absence of critical debate surrounding the ways in which spaces of the city do not merely contain, but also constitute, urban poverty. The volume explores how the spaces of the city actively produce and reproduce urban poverty.

Cape Town has some of the highest figures of violent crime in the world, but how is it that young men avoid and enact physical aggression and navigate stressful and dangerous situations? Surviving Gangs, Violence and Racism in Cape Town offers an ethnographic study of young men in Cape Town and considers how they stay safe in when growing up in post-apartheid South Africa. Breaking away from previous studies looking at structural inequality and differences, this unique book focuses instead on the practices and interactions between 47 young men, and what they do to become a "ghetto chameleon". Indeed, exploring in detail what young men do to survive conflicts and what is at stake, Lindegaard depicts how they must become flexible in who they are in order to fit in and be safe when they move between "black" or "coloured" township areas and the "white" suburbs of Cape Town. Opening the reader’s mind to the relational aspect of violence, Surviving Gangs, Violence and Racism in Cape Town will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as African Studies, Qualitative Criminology, Sociology, Gang Violence and Anthropology.