Shaw Give Us More Guns

How South Africa's Guns were Armed
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-86842-879-3
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

'With remarkable courage, insight and access, Mark Shaw takes the reader into the darkest corners of South Africa's ganglands.' - Mandy Wiener The assassination of police investigator Charl Kinnear in Cape Town in 2020 was yet one more in a spate of murders related to the so-called 'guns to gangs' saga, in which state weapons are sold to South Africa's criminal underworld. It began in 2007 when Colonel Christiaan Prinsloo and his cronies began selling thousands of decommissioned police weapons to gang lords. Prinsloo's motive: to fund his son's university fees. The sale of weapons to criminals, which the police service has tried to downplay, has resulted in a killing spree of unprecedented proportions. Cape Town is now one of the most violent places on earth, and in 2019 the army was called in to patrol gang-infested areas. Give us more Guns, based on hundreds of interviews with police, experts and the gangsters themselves, tells the story of this callous crime for the first time. Mark Shaw explores how the guns get into the hands of South Africa's crime bosses and describes the bloodshed that ensues. He also uncovers accounts of rampant corruption within the police and in the state's gun-licensing system, probing the government failure that has been instrumental in arming the country's gangsters.

Mark Shaw is author of Hitmen for Hire (Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2017) and director of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Shaw, Mark

Leseproben

PREFACE: THE ZULU

It didn’t look like the kind of place where illegal weapons would be stashed – a smallish brick house with a chipped iron security gate, positioned between two windows like a rusty nose. There was a neat little garden gate, which opened with a creak. Some untidy shrubs lined the inside of the concrete wall. The security grill swung open. Expectantly, I went in.

The house was dark, with heavy velveteen curtains covering the windows. There was a white lace doily cloth covering the table, the kind that all respectable South African lower-middle-class houses had – at least in the 1970s. It was the sort of place where you would expect to find a lonely old lady sitting in the corner, watching TV maybe, waiting in vain for her grandchildren to visit.

This was a gang safe house. Our man emerged out of the shadows in the back. He had a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. It was not his house. He didn’t look like the lace doily type. The agreement we had was a simple one: he would show me something, just for the record. I would take a look, then leave. Usually I like to talk about things with people like the man in the baseball cap, but that hadn’t been part of the deal. Showing and talking were clearly different transactions.

After a brief nod between us, ‘baseball cap’ reached behind his back and produced the gun, with a kind of sweeping motion that bank robbers in the movies use – both arms coming forward like a butterfly stroke, the weapon in his right hand, then both hands coming together, elbows slightly bent, gun pointing forward and down. He snorted under the cap. A flash of gold teeth. Then he handed me the piece. We had not said a word to each other.

The gun was a Z88 – a 9 mm pistol. It sat heavy in my hand; dull and black. I weighed it up and drew a bead on the wall of his house, squinting down the sights in the gloom at a space between a flowery poster and a painting depicting the Cape mountains. I had wanted to check how the gun had been tampered with, but the light was too dim and the owner was glaring at me. I cupped the gun in both hands, looked at it as closely as I could. Then, feeling self-conscious, and not knowing what else to do, I gave it back to him. He took it, nodded approvingly, and then padded off to a back room to pack it away.

By that point, I had spent three years talking to people about how guns that were the property of the South African state had leaked into the hands of criminals. Most had been willing to talk, but few had been eager to show me their guns. Over the years, I had glimpsed plenty of Z88s – there had been furtive gestures to a barrel poking out from a straining belt or someone pointing out a police officer’s holstered gun – but until my meeting at the safe house I’d never held the gun in my hand. Several gun dealers had also shown me their Z88s. In one case, I got to see one of the earliest models, complete with its wooden box and bronze plate engraved in Afrikaans commemorating its production, like flotsam from a forgotten era. The gangster’s gun, in contrast, seemed all too real-life.

Emerging from the gloom again, baseball cap said abruptly that the gun he had shown me was known as a Zulu. He had emphasised the word for my benefit. ‘Here we call that gun a Zulu.’ The Zulu was the underworld gun of choice.

I have spoken to many gangsters about the Zulu. This was a middlelevel gang boss from Hanover Park, Cape Town, whom I met in 2017. Like so many others interviewed in the course of researching this book, he explained that the thing about the Zulu is its reliability. ‘It is mos hard to break. We are just plain used to it.’

Just the street name, Zulu, says a lot about this weapon. It plays to a series of stereotypes in South African history, conjuring up images of rampaging impis coming in for the kill. Having possession of a Zulu is a status symbol on the gang-ridden Cape Flats, a sign of power and the ability to influence the things and people around you, if only through the deadly act of aiming it at someone and pulling the trigger. As one gang interviewee put it, while sucking air though his teeth and giving out a short chuckle, ‘We sommer can kill with the best of them.’ He was by no means exaggerating: by that point, the murder rate in Cape Town had reached levels seen only in parts of Central America.

What is special about the Z88 is that it is a South African gun. All of our own making. Gangsters and other criminals are oddly proud of the Z88’s origins. Possessing this gun, a collective South African pride swells the chests of its rightful owners, police officers, and those they are meant to police. I can’t recall how many times this came up: the Z88 was a good gun because it was a local product made for local conditions – even though the design, as I was at pains to point out, had been borrowed from other models made elsewhere. ‘Yes, but it was made much better,’ retorted one representative of the underworld. ‘Local is lekker’ applies in gangland too.

Thousands of Zulus were manufactured over the years. It was designed in the late 1980s by Lyttelton Engineering Works near Pretoria on the basis of a request from the South African Police (SAP), which had been rapidly expanding and urgently needed more guns. The ‘88’ part indicates the year in which the first model was produced; the ‘Z’ reflects the surname of the chief engineer, one T.D. Zeederberg – nothing then to do with Zulus. Mr Zeederberg appears to have been something of a legend, known for his exacting standards and habit of making walking inspections of the factory to make sure that all was in order.1

The Zulus come in several configurations, but all have Z88 stamped on the barrel and the words ‘Made in South Africa’. Earlier versions have the ‘L’ and ‘E’ of Lyttelton Engineering on the handgrip; later versions have a ‘V’ embossed over a target. The ‘V’ stands for Vektor, which would later become the Denel brand name for the handgun.

The international sanctions imposed on apartheid South Africa in the 1980s had prevented the import of guns for the police service, so Lyttelton Engineering copied the design of the Italian Beretta 92 pistol, a sleek, good-looking and durable model. Beretta would later sue for copyright infringement in a case that eventually seemed to have been quietly dropped.2 In the violent uncertainties that characterised the last days of white rule, Zulus were bricks in the apartheid state’s crumbling defensive wall. Several decades later, it is a profound irony that these guns ended up in the hands of the very people they had been designed to shoot – men like the gangster who had let me hold his gun in that dark room, vectors in a spiralling orgy of killing that was to dominate the Cape Flats from around 2011.

The guns

The Zulus were recalled from the law-enforcement front line to be replaced by more modern guns purchased from outside South Africa. Decommissioned, they were stockpiled in the police armoury from about 2000, consigned for destruction. Well and good. Another step towards achieving a safer and democratic South Africa. The government was doing its work.

But then something happened, something with far-reaching and long-term consequences for all South Africans, but particularly those in areas where gang bosses carry more weight than municipal councillors or teachers. Instead of having the guns crushed and melted down at the police storage and destruction facility in Vereeniging, a middle-aged white police officer, resentful at his lack of promotion and eager to make a quick buck, removed the guns and sold them. At first, he sold them himself, then later he forged a business deal with a former shooting buddy and police reservist who acted as his middleman and sold the guns wholesale to the gangs.

The police colonel behind the theft and sale of the weapons was one Christiaan Lodewyk Prinsloo, gun expert, sworn protector of the public and illegal flogger of state property for cash. The alleged intermediary was Irshaad ‘Hunter’ Laher, one-time salesman, hunting enthusiast and restaurant owner.3 There are many others who will play a part in this story. But these two men stand at the centre.

The alleged leader of South Africa’s largest criminal group, the Americans gang, Sanie American, in a remarkable recorded interview before Prinsloo’s arrest in January 2015, described what was happening:

Today, people, the kids, they just wanna kill because there’s too much guns on the streets. There is one source that is providing the guns for all different gangsters in the Western Cape. The same person, if he comes with 300 guns and … you can only buy 50, then he goes to rival gangs. He sells to whatever that one can buy and whatever’s left he goes to the other gangster and he sells it to the other gang. That’s every second month, … they come with three, four hundred guns … and it’s all Z88s.4

As it turns out, Sanie American may have been peeved that other gangs were getting their hands on the guns first, and not his gang. That was soon to change. The guns spread like a mutant cancer through the gangs. From impending destruction to distribution on the street, the Zulus and other guns began inexplicably arriving in Cape Town, reaching men like the gangster in the baseball cap. They empowered some criminal formations and weakened others, who found themselves increasingly outgunned. They were sold to numerous...