Introduction

Cape Town is both one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations and one of the twenty most violent cities in the world (as well as South Africa’s most violent municipal region), according to the Mexican Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice (“Cape Town Is One of the Most Violent Cities in the World”). Political difference and racial disparity separate Cape Town from most other South African cities because of a rooted white population in whose hands most of the wealth and housing comforts of the Cape are found—despite the majority population being “coloured”.¹ Politically, the Western Cape is governed by the Democratic Alliance (DA), the main opposition to the country’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) government. While representative of different races in its leadership, the DA’s supporters in the Western Cape include most of the white population there, and the public perception is that the DA is a party for whites.

In the 2010s, an apparent national disillusionment with the ANC and other political parties emerged alongside the country’s worst levels of economic instability and an increase in organized crime, not helped by regular, high-profile cases of political corruption, fraud, and state capture. In some ways, Cape Town is a space caught between the control of the political class and that of the underworld. The role of organized crime leaders in this tension is entering public awareness through a series of violent episodes that have taken place in the Cape Town city centre, where gang-related violence used to be less noticeable.

Against this background, this chapter proposes to discuss three distinct but related types of gangsters: street gang members, prison gang members, and organized crime leaders, who are well integrated into civic society and have links to street and prison gangs as well as political and corporate reach. Understanding the three different forms of gangsters allows for the study of dense networks of territorial control over many parts of the Western Cape. An aim of this chapter is to display how ingratiated violent gang culture is to life in the Western Cape on a number of levels pertaining to space and habitus. The extent of gang activity as an almost unavoidable part of life for “coloured” men on the Cape Flats is detailed in South African Donovan Marsh’s Dollars and White Pipes (2005), winner of the Golden Horn Awards for Best Achievement in Script and Directing in a Feature Film in 2006, and South African Ian Gabriel’s Four Corners (2013), winner of the Best Narrative Feature at the Sante Fe Independent Film Festival in 2014. These films are part of a recent cultural interest in the Cape Flats, historically underserved by the local film and book industries, and in the portrayal of the stories explaining the mostly irresistible social factors leading to gang violence, now recognized as a national epidemic. Often, in well-known texts set in the Cape such as Richard Rive’s novel “Buckingham Palace,” District Six (1986) and the theatrical production District Six (named after the area in Cape Town that underwent forced removals in the 1960s), gangsters feature as notable background characters, important to plot but sometimes romanticized. By contrast, in the films to be discussed in this chapter, the complexities of identity and integration that gang members experience are a result of continuing spatial inequalities. In the wake of the landmark Brazilian film City of God (2002), films like Dollars and White Pipes and Four Corners re-introduce the gangster as a personal, corporate, and political leader, a threat to and protector of social order in both poverty-stricken as well as affluent areas of the Cape.

Social History of Cape Gangs

The Western Cape is the large province housing Cape Town and was known as the Cape Colony during British colonialism in the nineteenth century. The areas immediately surrounding Cape Town are known intimately under a collective grouping, “The Cape” (in Afrikaans, “Die Kaap”), distinct from the province in its entirety. The history of segregation, disruption, and displacement from colonialism through apartheid is the common bond connecting most of the population living outside of Cape Town.

Through the displacement caused by apartheid spatial engineering in the mid-twentieth century, large numbers of “coloured” families were relocated to the sandy flatland along the southeast coastal banks outside Cape Town, commonly known as the Cape Flats. To date, the greater population of the Cape housed there belongs to varying social classes, ranging from lower middle class to working class, and including unemployed people living in informal settlements (Pinnock, Gang Town 13). Since the initial relocation, crime and poverty have marked the Cape Flats, and the overwhelming trajectory of street gang violence remains its dominant narrative, with little authority provided by state law enforcement (Pinnock, Gang Town 188–91).

On the Cape Flats, gangsters pose as mayoral figures and run the local economy. This is in notable contrast to the more regulated, policed, and gentrified centre of Cape Town and its suburbs, where predominantly white, middle-class, and upper-class South Africans and Europeans live. The socio-economic distinction is necessary for the purposes of this chapter. For the longest time, the two spaces of Cape Town and the Cape Flats have been rendered distinct by their class, wealth, and race difference. Escalating gang violence on the Cape Flats and an increase in high profile attacks and killings at Cape Town nightclubs with gang affiliations point towards a changing power relationship between the two spaces, a change predicated on symbolic and structural violence, as will be discussed below.

Violence on the Cape Flats drives young men into gangs, as a means of protection and maintaining an illusory sense of territorial order and control. The study of Cape gang culture and tradition is inherently a study about the functions of violence. Much of the popular understanding of gang culture follows a US example mediated through media, predominantly film and music (Fraser and Hagedorn 42). Academic studies at times also reveal a tendency to follow a “top-down” (Fraser and Hagedorn 43) approach in defining gang culture with US gangs and media representations thereof as the “top” example. The South African example both accords with and strongly deviates from a number of “top-down” approaches to studying gangs—as much as this approach is deterministic and limited, there are tenets of Cape gang culture that easily fit it. The proliferation of US media culture is a clear influence, with 1990s-era gangster rap a lasting imprint on the Cape Flats through street art, fashion styling, and attitude. Given the spatial engineering and social crises that effectively limit many young people’s movements on the Cape Flats, the glamorization and valorization of gang violence there follows a “top-down” approach and simultaneously offers psychological relief from a sense of structural entrapment.

Sociologist Johan Galtung coined the term “structural violence” in 1969 (174) to describe differences between reality and perceptions among people in social systems. At the root of the definition of structural violence are the physical conditions that promote psychological entrapment or limiting behaviour among people in difficult living conditions. Galtung’s usage of the phrase did not specifically pertain to physical violence but, in this chapter, that connection is concentrated on exactly that because of its consequent nature in the study of South African social conditions. The vulnerable classes in a country such as South Africa are impacted by structural violence of space and location. Derelict housing, and abject lack of housing, count as forms of structural violence as they signify detrimental/harmful abandonment.

During and after apartheid, the violence enacted on vulnerable classes in South Africa has largely been directly linked to racism and more specifically, racism enforced through spatial segregation. Following colonial visions of the English Garden city, Cape Town was designed as a garrison city where natural barriers (gardens, hedges, and mountains) separated people (Jensen 42). The barriers extended to forced removals of “coloured” and black people away from the city centre—to the present day, the peripheries of the city and beyond house “coloured” South Africans and, closer to and under the poverty line, black South Africans and nationals from other African countries. To “coloured” people, the initial displacements came with a sense of lost safety, of having no choice in being bundled together in council areas, igniting high crime (Jensen 44). The Cape Flats has been a space where chronic violence is a daily reality experienced by communities as inevitable through the spatial strategy that created the Cape Flats and normalized violence.

The apartheid state, already instrumental in helping to foster the environment in which street gangs developed, also made use of gangs, in some instances, to eliminate political opponents. A “symbiotic relationship” (Pinnock, Gang Town 196–97) developed between the state and certain gangs and this empowered the latter to extend their influence and territory with minimal legal surveillance, circumstances that also facilitated assassinations of prominent political activists based in nearby communities (Pinnock, Gang Town 197). The involvement of state officials with gang culture pervades, as a regular form of enablement of gangs stems from police corruption and the sales of illegal firearms, a practice also rooted in the apartheid era (Pinnock, Gang Town 188–91). If the apartheid state mostly ignored gang activities (before aiding and abetting them) and allowed their growth, government (national and regional/local) control since 1994 has been similarly minimal and corrupt. The unprecedented event of the country’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, paying a visit to the Cape Flats in November 2018 and declaring “war on gangsterism” (Hyman) is paradoxical in its gesture: local and national government are largely perceived as corrupt, compromised, and criminal in most national opinion (Onishi and Gebrekidan).

The link between the power relations and spatial divisions described above can be understood by analysing what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls “habitus.” Following Galtung’s definition of structural violence, the unquestioning acceptance of a world order is an inherited mental conditioning

associated with a particular class of conditions of existence [which] produce the habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representation. (Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice 53)

According to Bourdieu, the “habitus” thus refers to the inherent acceptance, often unconscious or instinctual, of circumstances of physical and mental subordination and neglect (or abandonment) by a government or state (as well as by other citizens) (Bourdieu and Wacquant 98–103). Individuals internalize habitus as social and cultural capital, a knowledge of how to behave and negotiate specific places or environments, and Bourdieu specifically looks at this among lower classes (Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice 55). Habitus is coterminous with what he calls “symbolic violence” (Bourdieu, On Television 17) when individuals in a socio-spatial context—in the case of the Cape Flats, a poor area riddled with violence—come to accept their situation as inevitable. The spatial network of various social agents in a habitus is what Bourdieu calls a “field” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 97), and this term shall be used to describe some of the settings of the films.

Against this background, the films discussed in this chapter shed light on the intimate experiences of people living on the Cape Flats who are caught up by the legacy of apartheid spatial engineering and forces beyond their control. More precisely, the films show how the historically induced spatial divisions created by this violent history have produced enclosed urban spaces inhabited, and occasionally crossed, by different types of gangster figures.

Four Corners

According to the director of Four Corners, Ian Gabriel, the film attempts an authentic representation of the struggles of the contemporary youth (Gabriel). South Africans born during or after 1994 are referred to as “Born Frees” and Gabriel notes a contradiction in this for marginalized young South Africans, saying they are “born in tough times” (Gabriel), a reference to socio-economic conditions that have worsened rather than improved for the majority of at-risk South Africans since 1994. Gabriel claims that Four Corners assumes a responsibility to point to “positive possibilities” for the future of the Cape Flats’ youth, starting with the authentic representation of an “unknown world” to many South Africans (Gabriel).

Gabriel also mentions that the film tries to convey the power of family and love in times and spaces of violent conflict (Gabriel). The intimate connections between gang activity and members of families are crucial to the understandings of gang systems and networks on the Cape Flats and it is here that Four Corners pre-empts later works focusing on families caught in gang tensions.² Violence and family conflicts are inevitable for many on the Cape Flats, and the violence depicted in Four Corners is a study in “code of the street,” described by Elijah Anderson as “a set of informal rules governing interpersonal public behavior, particularly violence” (33).

The film tells the story of reformed gangster Farakhan, newly released from Pollsmoor Prison. While imprisoned, Farakhan rose to the rank of general in the “28” gang by committing murder and staying loyal to the gang. As a “28” member, his sworn enemies are the “26” gang. After leaving prison, Farakhan chooses to abandon gang life even though, according to the laws of numbers gangs like the “28,” no member may leave or break away without being killed. Farakhan’s ability to stay away from his former life of crime after his release is constantly disrupted by street gang violence. Gasant, the local leader of another gang, the Americans (subsidiary to the “26” gang), is aggressively opposed to him and uses Farakhan’s estranged son, teenage chess prodigy Ricardo, as leverage by drawing him into the Americans. As turf wars escalate, Farakhan’s attempts to live peacefully and bond with his son are pushed to a breaking point.

The film also includes other storylines, such as a background mystery surrounding an unidentified serial killer of children and a moral universe of good and bad police officials. These storylines help to outline the history and current state of the film’s setting.³ There is also a romance between Farakhan and Leila, a woman who remembers him from her childhood. They grew up together before she moved to London to study medicine. Their storyline appears to be included not as an exploration of romantic love but rather as a reminder of the difficulties they would face in having a relationship in the troubled, urban spaces that Farakhan is indelibly linked to. These other storylines do little for the film and our focus may be limited to the depictions of gang violence and gang politics.

While the film fails on a number of levels to capitalize on its insights into Cape Gang culture and offers little more than a formulaic crime narrative, it does present unique moments, such as hearing the prison language of Sabela. This is a mix of Afrikaans vernacular, English, and Zulu, a mix across cultures that is itself a rare occurrence in the Western Cape, spoken, in the film, by real members of the “28” gang. The film is also rare in that it concentrates on the differences and tensions between prison gangs and street gangs. Street gangs are visible, known for turf wars and often, but not exclusively, related to prison gangs, where a dissimilar, more ingrained and encoded social system is observed. A political order exists between the types of gangs, in that street gangs are composed mostly of members who have not yet been to prison while prison gangs are more ordered with a clear hierarchy of hardened criminals (mostly former street gangsters) who have survived violent initiation rites to claim their prison gang membership. If street gangs see regular changeovers of members entering or leaving, the rules of prison gangs are more entrenched and do not permit leaving.

Four Corners succeeds as a depiction of characters consumed by and trying to change the nature of the spaces they are in, likened to the four corners of a chessboard. The film opens with Farakhan’s son Ricardo severely wounded and, from there, tells its story in flashback, starting with Farakhan’s last days in prison a week earlier. Before this opening sequence, where Ricardo is being rushed to hospital, the film’s opening credits (accompanied by a voiceover) include a note explicitly comparing Cape gang warfare to a game of chess. The point is repeated by Gasant, later in the film, when he tells Ricardo that the Cape Flats are a moving chessboard. The film’s references to chess compose a basic message of entrapment: to be born male on the Cape Flats is to be born to combat and strategize, to be a pawn and, with good survival skills, to be elevated to the higher ranks of knight, bishop, and king. Part of the entrapment is enabled by a lack of mobility, or the difficulty of leaving the Cape Flats, exemplified by Ricardo. In what follows, I propose to examine this notion of entrapment by showing its relevance to the history of the Cape Flats and by discussing how it applies more precisely to gangs and prison life (both in reality and in the film’s fictional world). Finally, I will analyse how the film links this theme of entrapment to the “site” that is the individual human body. I will show that Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, introduced above, is what binds the dynamics of entrapment in all three spaces.

As noted by the empirical research individually conducted by Salo, Jensen, Soudien, Watkins, and Pinnock, life on the Cape Flats is often seen as a young man’s training ground for the inevitability of prison. To most young men, to be born there is to be prepared for a life of crime and imprisonment, either trained in being a soldier by an older gangster or mentored in how to cope with prison life by a former inmate. Metaphorically, I argue, the Cape Flats can also be seen as a prison. From this perspective, the challenge faced by Farakhan is that of a former prison inmate struggling to navigate an outdoor prison maintained by violent rules of social space and territorialism. These rules find their roots in the structural violence of the apartheid state, which imposed on “coloured” people a core plan of internment designed to encourage intimate hostility, where family members, neighbours, and friends regularly turned on one another in the battle for uneven living space. This was “a structured violence, a poisoning from within a la Foucault in that it depoliticized the people, weakening them and softening them, its damage done to the coloured psyche, insidiously” (Jensen 38).

Space was used to reinforce numerous forms of violence on the Cape Flats, but it could be argued that the violence was supposed to keep the Cape Flats static. Street-socialized youth “generally exhibited a deep-seated form of territorial place attachment that reflected a limited and limiting spatial immobility” (Jensen 40), indicating that the Cape Flats was to remain its own isolated zone, an alternative reality to the location of symbolic power that gave birth to it, namely Cape Town. At the level of a street gang with young men as its members, the policing of “turf” became a response to the veritable “imprisonment” of the Cape Flats.⁴ “Turf” could be policed as assiduously as the spaces of Cape Town were policed against “coloured” and black infringement during apartheid (and beyond); it was a way of mirroring the control exercised by the dominant society/class (Jensen 91). The violence of numbers gangs, particularly the excessive violence enacted against perceived traitors or deserters, seems almost a mimicry of the extremes of Dutch and English colonial punishments of disloyalty.⁵ The leaders of numbers gangs, who name themselves after numbers with symbolic meanings rooted in colonial-era criminal folklore (Steinberg 4–7), almost exclusively run Cape prisons. They also have a large network of control that far exceeds prison boundaries but their locus is Pollsmoor Prison, southeast of Cape Town. They can operate the neighbourhoods their members came from and place local street gangs under their control and auspices.

Typically, when a young man enters prison, he may either be initiated or protected. If he chooses the latter, it means he chooses a number. At times, this may not even be a known choice to him: it may be that someone in his family on the outside, wishing for his protection, knows someone else on the inside who will offer it. The family, having secured this protection, will rest happily, as will their son/brother/cousin on the inside, but in reality, all they did was perpetuate the cycle: their relative is bound to become a number now, and from the number there is no escape. The logic of this process, in which free will is sacrificed to safety imperatives that actually foster further oppression, points precisely to the power of habitus. Indeed, soon, the inmate who has been assigned a number will be the one on the inside offering his protection to the next newcomer, who will be subordinated in turn.

The prison scenes at the beginning of Four Corners show a meeting between Farakhan and the brotherhood of “28” gang members—an inner circle presided over by a character named Boeta Charlie, who speaks and instructs the inner circle in the prison language, Sabela. Translations show that Farakhan, leaving prison as a general of the “28”s, is expected to show his allegiance to the law of the number before his release by being complicit in the killing of a general of the rival “26” gang. It is the ritual “permission” for Farakhan to leave the prison. The film then cuts to Pollsmoor Juvenile Section for Boys Awaiting Trial, where Farakhan’s alienated son, Ricardo, is challenged to a game of chess. We note that both father and son are incarcerated and expected to be trialled, but from opposite ends of a spectrum: Ricardo is suspected of being an accessory to a murder in hostile gang territory, while Farakhan, at the end of his thirteen-year sentence for murder, is expected to partake in the killing of the rival “26” general. The almost ritualized nature of other boys challenging Ricardo suggests the visual association between father and son: both detained but soon to be released (Ricardo’s complicity cannot be proved), and both needing to be tested before they can leave.

The (ultimately unsuccessful) assassination of the “26” general in the prison is intercut with scenes of Ricardo playing chess, again linking father to son in a depiction of systems, sacraments, and forces at work on both of them. Farakhan does not actively take part in the attempted killing, but he has to observe it to the end. This pre-empts his admission to Boeta Charlie, following the attempted killing, of wanting to leave behind violence and his gang identity once he assimilates back into society. Ricardo’s game of chess ends in victory for him; the boy he defeats threatens violence before guards disrupt the event.

The film’s opening act articulates the inevitability of violence, imprisonment, and punishment for Cape Flats men. The criminalization of black bodies in South Africa has a specific association of punishment and incarceration for “coloured” men from the Western Cape (Baderoon 266), a legally structured violence that, during apartheid, created the conditions for street gang violence. The continuing, abject neglect of state protection for “coloured” men is regularly pointed out by Gasant in Four Corners, who alludes to a rigged game of chess, a structured inequity when he observes the Cape Flats. To survive the Cape Flats, men have to be ready to commit violence and, if imprisoned, need to be ready for more violence. The dire social message conveyed is that rehabilitation does not work, but this is what Farakhan and Ricardo’s story sets out to disprove.

Both father and son are bound to different codes of violence. Both also have secondary father figures looming over them, helping them to break free from their fields: for Farakhan this is Boeta Charlie, and for Ricardo this is Tito, the Juvenile case police inspector. There is a “code of the prison” Farakhan has had to abide by and a “code of the street” Ricardo is being coerced into, indicating that both father and son are under pressure from the laws of the fields they have spent most their lives in (Farakhan was imprisoned throughout Ricardo’s thirteen-year life on the Cape Flats).

Other linkages between characters are also established: the “26” general is taken to a hospital where Leila is stationed as an observer, meaning that an act of violence, perpetrated by Farakhan’s associates, is the first plot link between Farakhan and Leila. A radio broadcasting a cricket match is on during the operation to save the wounded man, and the same broadcast is being listened to by Farakhan as he awaits his exit from Pollsmoor. Finally, Leila’s importance and story arc are also established: in the film’s opening sequence, she is tending to Ricardo’s wounds as he is being rushed to hospital and this is the reason he survives, whereas she is removed from tending to the wounded “26” general by a male senior.

The habitus of the Cape prison, of the hospital, and of the neighbourhood Ricardo’s unwitting criminal activity took place in is alluded to in these opening ten minutes of the film. On a general level, we see the habitus of prison life, of discipline and control among inmates, who themselves are under the state auspices of discipline and control. At the hospital, Leila, an expatriate, is regarded as an outsider to a country that has a different outlook on crime and violence. Her being shrugged off by her senior is an act tinged with resentment both for her not being suited to dealing with the regularity of patients who are victims of violent crime (his view), and also because she is a woman with an equal rank. Ricardo, a teenager with no gang involvement at that point, is admonished by the detective, Tito, for his presence in hostile gang territory at the time he was apprehended. These narrative incidents show how these three major characters, despite their different backgrounds, all need to negotiate the unwritten rules and laws that govern the spaces they navigate—in other words, how habitus influences their experiences.

In the final part of this section, I will argue that a closer reading of such habitus in the film is provided by the linking device of the body. In my analysis, I will also invoke Michel Foucault’s idea of the docile body, discussed in his Discipline and Punish (136) and which, like Bourdieu’s habitus, is applicable to the study of prisons (Schlosser 37), one of the spaces in which Four Corners is set. The docile body, Foucault argues, is a body that can be “subjected, used, transformed and improved” (136), because there is a mental conditioning pivoted on obedience to the laws of the spaces it is in (or “fields,” to use Bourdieu’s terminology). A disciplined body, having internalized training to be efficient, acquiescent, and productive, serves an automated purpose by becoming a mechanism, repeating patterns, and obeying the laws of the power structures governing it, revealing a “formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful” (137). The usefulness lies in the individual body being linked to masses of other bodies through docility. In the field of the prison, Farakhan is expected to internalize laws presiding over his body, much as Ricardo is expected to internalize the laws presiding over his body on the Cape Flats. Both spaces are referred to as “four corners,” and both spaces are controlled by the state (structure) as well as criminals (governance).

As mentioned earlier, Ricardo is severely injured in the film’s opening sequence, his body wounded by a stray bullet. His is an injury that occurred in a house situated in (again) hostile gang territory. He was shot by Gasant, albeit accidentally, who, in this field, is a sworn enemy of Farakhan’s, even though Farakhan pleaded against violence. Both Ricardo and Farakhan refuse to be docile bodies, going against the unwritten rules of the neighbourhood habitus, and as a result, they suffer violence.

Farakhan, like other gang members, has his body covered in tattoos, including his “flag” that indicates his membership of the “28” gang (although midway through the film he burns the flag from his skin). Similarly, when Gassant tries to entice Ricardo to join his gang, he points to the “Americans” flag on his arm. Tattoos also cover Boeta Charlie’s entire body, including his face, indicating both his state rebellion as well as his allegiance to the “28” gang code and number laws. His body is a testament, a script obvious to anyone that sees him; it is a sign of danger in society but, under state control in prison, where the body is supposedly rendered docile, it is, in fact, docile only to the laws of the “28” gang.

Another body, that of the wounded “26” general, “introduces” Leila as a character and connects her to Farakhan, just as she is the one tending to his son Ricardo later in the storyline. In the hospital, she is “taught” by the indifferent senior about the Cape Flats habitus while trying to save the wounded man, his injury somehow not disrupting his body tattoos but instead destined to become a scar, another inscription of ordeal and survival. The presence of the body in the film’s first ten minutes suggests how “the presence of authority and its control over the individual bleeds from one arena into the other” (Schlosser 38).

Four Corners, for the most part, presents a study of habitus, and of acceptance of circumstance as well as rebellion against it. Characters enact and disobey the rules of the space, and their bodies, often carrying the insignia of the spaces they have experienced, have to be included in any transaction of response—responses emanating from others who accept the habitus or from the consequences of change itself, for the better and the worse of it. Habitus and its inscription on bodies is also explored in Four Corners in the larger space of the prison. While the prison scenes are limited to only the beginning of the film, they establish a visual coding of the differences between gang cultures. From there, the film proceeds with its study of more intimate differences, from divisions within the police force, territorialization of neighbourhoods, the emotional gulf between an expatriate (Leila) and someone whose geography is limited (Farakhan) and, ultimately, the differences between a father and son, differences only overcome through violence. The visual metaphors that associate the game of chess with gang warfare on the Cape Flats draw attention to the larger reality of spatial segregation, a methodical imposition by the apartheid regime, and its legacy.

Dollars and White Pipes

Dollars and White Pipes director Donovan Marsh stated that he made the film because he found the true story it was based on “incredible” and wanted to make a film that offered “a fascinating glimpse into a unique South African sub-culture” (Thomas). Today, the film offers a prescient commentary on the current spate of violent attacks on nightclubs in Cape Town. When it was released in 2005, the growth of an executive gangster figure in the Cape Town underworld had not yet entered the public imagination to the extent that it would years later. Like Four Corners, the film intended to shed light on the struggles of young, “coloured” men in Cape Town, specifically those few moving from the Cape Flats into the city itself. However, the violence many such young men were moving away from often followed them into the city by way of their connections to the Cape Flats, through friends, relatives, and enemies (Standing, qtd. in Pinnock, Gang Town 121). The film’s depiction of violence in an informal protection industry is far-sighted because it offers a view into inverted turf wars, relocating the violent gang clashes over territory from the Cape Flats to Cape Town.

The film is based on the true story of Bernie Baatjies, who was a consultant and associate producer on the film and whose biography appears in the end credits. On set and after the film’s release, gang members were allegedly consulted for their assessment of the film’s realism and depiction of linguistic code switching (Paterson 43). In the film, Bernie, an ambitious teenage dreamer living in the gang-plagued Hanover Park, drops out of school because he prioritizes money and drugs (dollars and white pipes), and fantasizes about wealth and power. He is influenced by the US television soap opera Dallas and aspires to be like the prosperous character J.R. Ewing. He believes that he can climb a ladder up to J.R. Ewing’s rung. After a battle between gangs—the Mongrels (who are in league with the Moroccans, the gang led by a character named Bulletproof Hussein) and the Americans—during which his friend Angelo is stabbed, Bernie flees to Cape Town on a train with only a bin bag of his things and a dream of a new life. On the train, he tricks Cecil, a man with learning disabilities, into switching positions with him, which he does by first stealing his shoes—literally stepping into them—and then later stealing his new job at Club Bliss, a nightclub. Even though the club is white-owned and caters to a white clientele, it is monitored by Mr Kuyser, an influential “coloured” man who offers “protection services” to the city’s clubs. Bernie climbs the social and managerial ranks at Club Bliss through scams and by winning the affection of the owner, Mr Bernard Farber; he eventually takes ownership of it when his employer is forced to flee after shooting a drug dealer (one of Mr Kuyser’s accomplices) inside the club. Bernie, as the new owner of Club Bliss, which he renames “Dallas,” refuses Mr Kuyser’s protection, which results in the establishment being attacked by Bulletproof Hussein and his gang from Hanover Park, showing that gangs from Cape Flats also operate in Cape Town, and thus that Bernie cannot escape them.

Falling into Mr Kuyser’s trap through not recognizing that Mr Kuyser and Hussein have a business connection, Bernie asks Mr Kuyser for his protection and financial aid, which involves Mr Kuyser staking a share in “Dallas” and gaining a foothold in the club for his activities. Bernie comes to realize that he is “climbing that staircase from both sides,” by which he means that the way to rise financially and socially is both by legitimate business and through gang violence. It is when he finds Mr Kuyser and Hussein together in the act of threatening to kill Cecil that Bernie eventually decides to abandon the club, release himself from Mr Kuyser’s control, and leave Cape Town altogether.

The film illustrates the differences and similarities in spatial violence endemic to Cape Town and the Cape Flats, with Bernie as a character who is transmobile. His story shows the impact of space on one’s identity. Bernie, like characters in other films about the Cape Flats, wants to get out of the closed-off space of Hanover Park, idealizing Cape Town as a better space associated with freedom, safety, and success. However, Bernie’s trajectory in Cape Town results in another entrapment and in him realizing that, as a “coloured” man, he has few opportunities at upward mobility. Spatial engineering and race categorization are two of the most obvious legacies of apartheid and the film makes numerous commentaries on both, bringing to light the continued realities of millions of people living outside Cape Town.

In the film, gang warfare over space and territory relies on a transcultural mobility between the Cape Flats and Cape Town that, paradoxically, goes hand in hand with entrapment. As mentioned earlier, Bernie leaves Hanover Park after seeing his friend, Angelo, attacked there, yet he finds an equally hostile environment, with some of the same gangsters, in Cape Town. Midway through the film, realizing the levels of entrapment caused by having any proximity to criminal activities, Bernie mentions that the Cape Flats and Cape Town are the same, saying: “Cape Town, Hanover Park. They’re all the same, the same things happen.”

The Mongrels, the Americans, the Mommy’s Boys, and the Moroccans—all of which are real gangs—are depicted at war in Hanover Park while the Moroccans gang is shown to also operate in Cape Town nightclubs. Geographically this is accurate in terms of representing mobility and territory expansion. Transcultural mobility of “coloured” people from the Cape Flats to Cape Town increased after 1994 with the hope of better employment opportunities, although this holds true more for women than for men (Jensen 53). Because of apartheid group areas laws, many “coloured” men internalized an inferiority in white/formerly white city space; even after 1994, Jensen observes, many “coloured” men, younger and older, experienced shyness and anxiety in Cape Town and were eager to leave it and return to their homes on the Cape Flats (53). In the film, Bernie provides a rare portrayal of a young “coloured” man exercising “transitory mobility,” defined by Lindegaard, Miller, and Reynald as “a form of spatial mobility that grants youth temporary access to social and cultural spaces outside their segregated residential neighborhoods” (969). This kind of access expands the cultural exchanges such youths are likely to encounter: Bernie develops a broader cultural experience by becoming familiar with Cape Town, while retaining his familiarity with Hanover Park. He knows how to navigate both spaces because, gradually, he gets better at identifying their differences and similarities. While his elevation to the position of owner of “Dallas” is assisted by his own acts of deception (duping Cecil) and scams (stealing beer to sell), as well as by Mr Farber’s absence, Bernie negotiates a clear path to his accomplishment until it draws the attention of organized crime. Soon, as already mentioned above, Bernie realizes he is as trapped in Cape Town as he was in Hanover Park. Mr Kuyser is a key figure in creating this sense of entrapment. He attempts to manipulate Bernie by appealing to their shared “coloured” identity, impressing upon Bernie that “no-one respects the coloured man.” In Mr Kuyser’s worldview, “coloured” identity demands violence in order to gain respect. When Bernie does not commit the violent acts Mr Kuyser orders him to, he is told by the crime boss that he is “disappointing.” After repeated failed attempts by Mr Kuyser to get him to commit acts of violence in order to prove he has “plak” (courage) and is one of “the family,” Bernie eventually resorts to violence to save Cecil by killing Bulletproof Hussein. With Hussein dead, a man who had haunted Bernie and instilled fear in him, Bernie is free of Mr Kuyser’s control. The shootout is the visual fulfilment of an earlier moment in the film, the gang battle in Hanover Park that culminated in Angelo’s stabbing by Hussein. Bernie left Hanover Park after that incident but had “unfinished business,” namely the demon-like Hussein, the transmobile gangster who goes where Bernie goes. With Hussein dead, Bernie can finally “leave” Hanover Park. The end credits inform the viewer that the real Bernie left both spaces—Hanover Park and Cape Town—to relocate to Johannesburg, thus leaving behind the traditions of gangs that merge violence, protection, and belonging.⁶

The first depiction of violence in the film is in a comical sequence that deflates this very violence because the end result of it is loss of life for everyone trying to prove their toughness. Gangsters fall over and gangs literally cancel one another out—much like the spaces of Hanover Park and Cape Town will cancel each other out for Bernie by the film’s end. The joke of the dead gangs is referenced and its serious undertone realized when Bernie acknowledges, after killing Hussein, that Hanover Park and Cape Town are both bound by the “code of the street” (Anderson), namely the earning of respect and protection through acts of violence, and that the code invariably leads to senseless death. According to Anderson, the code exists partly because of a “lack of faith in the police and judicial system” (Anderson 66), a point raised by both Mr Kuyser and Bernie in the film when they reflect on the treatment they would receive, as “coloured” men, from the police. Such beliefs motivate Mr Kuyser’s “protection services” and Bernie’s acquiescing to them although, in spite of this, he is relentlessly persecuted by Mr Kuyser to show complete subordination to him, in a way that replicates the oppression exercised on both men by the police, or the state.

As in Four Corners, there are two forms of governance at play. There is the social order of South Africa, in which “coloured” men feel neglected and abandoned (and often deemed to be “carceral”), a feeling that prevailed both during and after apartheid. Within this order is a second form of governance, the criminal order. This is represented by Mr Kuyser, who equates violence with respect and makes money from pushing back against the social order: Cape Town nightclubs, at the time, were still mostly white-owned, maintaining a socio-economic order from apartheid. Impacted by the forces of violence in both the fields of Hanover Park and Cape Town, Bernie ultimately flees both. Success as a “coloured” man in Cape Town, in this moment within the first decade of democracy, is still too inextricably linked to violence which, across different fields (prisons, streets, and organizations), is built into the codes of survival.

These codes and their demands obviously connect street gangs to prison gangs (as shown in the previous section on Four Corners) but, in Dollars and White Pipes, Bernie is regularly singled out or identified by his unwillingness to commit violence. His fear of violence keeps him from helping Angelo early in the film when he is under attack, and the tests of loyalty to which Mr Kuyser subjects him result in him “failing” to prove his credentials as a worthy subordinate. Even though Bernie kills Hussein in Mr Kuyser’s presence at the end of the film, thereby finally honouring the code of the street, this killing is an involuntary act focused on rescuing Cecil. Freed from spaces that have oppressed him and free of having to prove himself in the name of loyalty and race, Bernie leaves for Johannesburg to start over.

Where street gangsters and prison gangsters were prominent in Four Corners, a third gangster role of importance portrayed in Dollars and White Pipes is the socially adjusted gangster, member of civic society and often with organized crime business interests. This third figure is usually connected to the other two kinds of gangsters and, in the film, is represented by Mr Kuyser. In contemporary Cape Town, gangsters originally from the Cape Flats often control the security of prominent city nightclubs, offering them protection services. These links between Cape Flats gangs and city nightlife have only recently become publicly known through episodes of turf warfare in the city, regularly making news headlines since 2017. The violence enacted on Cape Town is symbolic and systemic; it is a transferal of Cape Flats practices of control, negation, and domination that offers a reading of retribution enacted by the overlords of one space (the Cape Flats) on the denizens of another. In this is a suggestion of a territorial reversal: the Cape Flats, for long the violent space created by apartheid displacement, holds power over Cape Town. Where once the Cape Flats saw the successful implementation of symbolic power with many people staying in their place, and often forced to do so because of escalating gang violence, it now holds a form of power over Cape Town. Partly, this has been supported by public perceptions of corrupt local and national governance as well as neglect of precarious spaces (Petrus 31).

The portrayal of Mr Kuyser in Dollars and White Pipes accurately depicts the basic elements of gang presences policing commercial areas in Cape Town. The provision of “protection services” is, ostensibly, at the heart of the most recent gang warfare in central Cape Town (Goga, Salcedo-Albaran, and Goredema, “A Network of Violence” 4–10; Dolley). Mr Kuyser seems a likely fit for any of the key players—arguably, this character could have been modelled on one or a few of them.⁷ The activities of prominent “protection service” providers may only have entered public knowledge more regularly after 2010 but the fortification of men with financial power, managing entertainment venues in South Africa, has been exposed mostly through high-profile killings.⁸

In Dollars and White Pipes, such events are foretold in an intimate manner, a small story of a single young man that would soon become the fate of many others. Whereas the real Bernie Baatjies left Cape Town, the nightclub industry (before Covid-19) revealed a cyclical pattern of violence that bears strong similarities to what the film shows. Nightclub revellers are at risk of being caught in crossfires. When such revellers are young “coloured” people, with better access to the city than before and immediately after 1994, and many from areas plagued by gang shootings and crossfires, a tragic irony exists.

Conclusion

Four Corners and Dollars and White Pipes succeed in shedding light on the intricate social designs of Cape gangs. While violence is incessant in both films, neither glamourizes it, instead emphasizing that violence perpetuates the circumstances of entrapment. While Dollars and White Pipes has a somewhat formulaic climax suggesting that Baatjies needed to resort to violence in order to escape from it, Four Corners takes a measured approach in how it depicts a father and son doing their utmost to resist the inevitability of violence in fields that are characterized by it. That the two characters almost succumb but manage to survive through staying true to their intentions speaks to the “positive” message aimed specifically at young South Africans (as intended by director Ian Gabriel), namely that violence is not the ultimate resort to a better life.

Recognizing the relationship between the Cape Flats and Cape Town is of importance especially with the media proliferation of Cape Flats news stories that are often negatively focused exclusively on violence with little mention of sociological context. Through these two films and others, as well as the increased admittance of Cape Flats writers to the literary market, the Cape Flats-Cape Town relationship is being presented for national understanding in ways that had not been considered before.

Notes

1. 1 The term “coloured” is a contentious reference to South Africans not categorized as white, black, or Indian under the formal apartheid classifications, and with mixed or shared roots in creolized ancestries.

2. 2 Such works include the novels What Will People Say by Rehanna Rossouw (2015) and Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee (2020) and the films Noem My Skollie (2016) and Ellen: The Ellen Pakkies Story (2018).

3. 3 In real life, the Cape Flats outside Mitchells Plain was troubled by a serial killer of children in 1993 and 1994.

4. 4 According to Jensen, “centuries-old criminalization of coloureds made the coloured population one of the most imprisoned groups on the planet; as formal labour and society were often closed to coloured youth, they inevitably took to illegal activities” (Jensen 91–92).

5. 5 Dutch colonial rule imparted severe punishments for betrayal of government that included torture and dismemberment, while the English practised martial law and public execution in South Africa for decades after it was outlawed in England (Giliomee; Burgess).

6. 6 In reality, Baatjies claims to have been a gangster for a period in his youth in Hanover Park and for a short time after living in Johannesburg before cutting all ties with crime (see “Klaberjas and Pipe Dreams”).

7. 7 The name most associated with nightclub and gang violence is that of a man who had been a Cape Town city employee for twenty years, where he had been successful in housing development, partnered with a businessman who was a “highly networked actor with links to high-ranking individuals” that included political leaders. The former city employee is the leader of a famous gang based in the Belhar suburb, where he is a prominent community leader; numerous assassination attempts have been made on his life during the conflicts for control of nightclub security in Cape Town. See Salcedo-Albaran, Goga, and Goredema, “Cape Town’s Underworld” (6).

8. 8 See Salcedo-Albaran, Goga, and Goredema, “Cape Town’s Underworld” (6) and “Who Killed Lolly Jackson?” for the overlap of suspects’ names.

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