Exposing South Africa's Underworld
E-Book, Englisch, 296 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-86842-712-3
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Mark Shaw is director of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime and senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science's International Drug Policy Project. He was until recently National Research Foundation Professor of Justice and Security at the Centre of Criminology, University of Cape Town, where he is now an adjunct professor.
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Prologue:
Killing Laylah ‘It was killing me,’ she said. ‘The fact that I was just a tool – a tool for men. I wanted to make my own way. Hold my own life. So I became a shooter. Not, like, all at one go, but after a while.’ Perhaps we have become too conditioned by James Bond movies. The assassin par excellence of popular culture, whether working for criminals or the government, has a certain cachet in our imagination. The tuxedo, or at least the smart shirt, well-groomed looks and self-confident personality have come to form a certain image in our minds. But the young scowling woman sitting in front of me in the Nando’s certainly did not look the part. She looked damaged, in fact, in the way so many people who pass you in the street do. A look of exhaustion, dark rings under her eyes – and a sense she doubted that I was who I said I was. The chicken franchise was in that gritty buffer zone of bustling post-industrial Cape Town between the city and the Cape Flats. It is where parts of the new Cape Town are being born, but where some of its harder bits refuse to die. ‘Edgy,’ as someone once described it to me, although that does not quite capture the place. The sense of twilight menace about the place, often drawn upon in crime novels about the city, was suddenly broken by an old lady carrying a baby on her back past the window of the take-away. I am being deliberately vague about the location because the arrangement for the interview with ‘Laylah’ (not her real name) had included, unnecessarily in my view, an agreement that the location was to be a secret, and I want to stay true to that. Suffice to say it is a part of the city recognisable to anyone who has driven along the arterial roads that connect the fragmented geography of apartheid. It is one of the places where a cosmopolitan place like Cape Town comes together geographically, but also quite literally. Outside the windows of the chicken restaurant, taxis drew in and out, offloading their passengers, cars snaked past, and people walked briskly by carrying their bags and bundles. The meeting was part of a two-year quest I had begun at the University of Cape Town to explore organised crime in South Africa. It was a tough assignment: what was organised crime in the South African context? That’s what I was researching. Interview after interview, and a parallel research project on measuring violence in the country, had brought some focus. What, I increasingly wanted to know, drove the organised market for violence in South Africa? This market for violence, and its connections with other criminal markets, seemed to be having a series of consequences for all South Africans. And it had not been explored. That meant I needed to find out more about it by searching for the hitmen of the criminal underworld. Or, in this case, a hitwoman. Like all such interviews, the introductions had been arranged through a string of intermediaries. Yes, so and so did that sort of thing, but they were hard to reach. I will come back to you, I would be told. Silence for weeks. I – or a go-between – would end up driving to people’s houses, asking, ‘Would they speak?’ Not about incidents – about killing people, as such – more about their lives. ‘But their lives are fucked,’ said one intermediary. ‘What’s of interest there?’ It’s for research, I would explain, in what seemed to be a slightly self-important tone, given the litany of ‘fucked-up’ lives in front of us. ‘Come back again – let me see what we can do,’ I’d be told. Backwards and forwards like this until this Nando’s meeting was set up – and several others. Tales of murder, mixed with chicken and washed down with a Coke. The Nando’s was quiet, the smell of grilled chicken hitting you like a wave on entering. She was already there. Some restless-looking gang types were sitting a few tables away. Her minders? Hard to tell. Would she talk? Not quickly, it seemed. The best way in, I thought … talk about growing up. It sounds neutral enough, although in such a context it is far from it. In this city, saying where you grew up may be as good as saying which gang you work with. But there seemed no obvious alternative; she did not look like one for small talk with strangers. ‘So … er … where did you grow up?’ ‘Hanover Park,’ she answers. You could picture those tenement blocks, row after row, outside staircases, washing draped between the buildings. Such buildings always reminded me of my school classrooms, as if apartheid-era architects had a failure of imagination and designed all buildings the same – square, blockish and with brown window frames. The smell of dagga in the air. People crammed in – a contradictory place: a sense of community but one pervaded by fear. But, in the end, Laylah didn’t say too much about growing up. What she did say, though, almost immediately, was that she had been raped. More than once, in fact. That was how it was for a girl in the gang, she said. It was as simple as that: when I had asked her about growing up, she had told me where and then added that she had been raped. But there was an important link between the rapes and what she had become. ‘It made me angry. Fok, it really peed me off!’ And, as if to emphasise this last point, she indicated the pistol strapped to her ankle. (Now that is a bit more James Bond-like – but it seemed almost incongruous: a piece of heavy, cold metal strapped to her slight, bony female body. Not that the circumstances made the gun any less deadly.) The boys in the corner shifted around, adjusting their leather jackets, stroking their hair. Laylah ignored them. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘the thing about girls is that gangs and taxi people sometimes use them because they are not like what you would expect.’ Too true. Laylah didn’t look like a killer. In fact she said she was not one at the beginning. She said she was a ‘lure’. ‘A what?’ I ask. Well, you know, those fishing things. Shiny, dangly, vulnerable. Makes the prey come. ‘I acted as a lure. That was the first time. I got him to come.’ She smiled grimly. ‘Not to come. Although I would have done that too. I got him to come to an area where my gang could kill him. They did it. That was my job.’ It was a story that I had heard before. Another woman, in tears, had explained to me a few weeks earlier – on a bench, next to a jungle gym in a dusty Cape Flats park – that her job had been to ring the bell or wait at the gate. A woman standing there: gang members think with their dicks, and if you think with your dick, you are liable to be shot in the head. Laylah shifts on the bench. She is dressed in a pair of tight jeans. She is wearing a baseball jacket and a scarf on her head. And an unlikely piece of steel strapped to her ankle. Would it have made her walk lopsidedly? I wondered. In the end, I did not find out. She remained seated until I left – prim, perched on the bench. Perhaps ‘petite’ would be one way she could be described, although it’s not a word that seems to fit her perfectly. But it’s enough to convey that she is not masculine and muscular. Yet she is not exactly feeble and feminine either. She got raped by a gang boss too. ‘He was an ugly bastard,’ she said, like she might have if we had been making a movie. ‘He was drunk, pawing at me …’ She stopped. ‘Anyway, that’s what happened.’ Even in its truncated form, the story of the rape was shocking. What is even more shocking is that it is a standard feature of every gang woman’s story. Told in countless interviews. Even in just those few words, I could tell it sounded cruel – and it left her angry. There were other cases, too, but she had been drugged up. Then she hitched up with a gang member, ‘a real killer’, as she described him. ‘He shot a lot of people,’ she said chillingly, her lips spelling out the words slowly for emphasis, so that I would understand that he was not your run-of-the-mill criminal. He left his guns with her. That was a sign of trust, I suppose – to leave the hardware with the girlfriend. The trust seemed to be a one-way deal, though: the killer, it turned out, was having an affair with another girl. Laylah’s response: to shoot the other girl. ‘Fok, she deserved it … carrying on like that! Everyone knew.’ Not shot dead, you understand. She was not good enough for that yet. She shot her in the arm. She said this so matter-of-factly that it took my breath away. She did not rage at her lover, the killer. Instead, she shot the killer’s side entertainment. In the arm. ‘The arm?’ ‘Yes, she put her arms up and the gun went off.’ Nothing came of it. At the hospital nobody asked any questions and, after all, who would have gone to the cops for that? Not the killer’s bit on the side – she was too much part of the pack. ‘He’s dead now,’ she said. ‘Sorry … who is dead?’ The killer. He was shot by another gang. They pumped him full of bullets, shot him in the face. Hard to explain the motive, but it seems he had changed gangs or allegiance within the gang. Difficult to tell, for sure. I had heard about something similar before in Manenberg, a gang-afflicted hellhole notorious for a recent spate of gang turf wars. Shooting gangsters in the face is done as a way of denying those who change allegiance a final identity. You lose your face, the ultimate mark of dishonour. One literally carried to the grave. Laylah did not want to say too much more about it. What was clear, though, is that his killing...
