We Are Fighting the World. Gary Kynoch
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To privilege a gang’s relationship to the government and its agents as the defining characteristic of that gang (whether the gang is classified as antistate, apolitical, or allied with the government) overlooks the complex manner in which gangs fit into their communities and the variety of roles they played in the townships.29 This approach also obscures the issue of identity. Gang identities were forged as a result of numerous factors—relations with rival gangs, the methods by which gang members supported themselves, political affiliation, specific rituals and cultural idioms, gender relations, ethnicity, age, territorialism, and so on—designed to contextualize the world of the townships, an environment in which the white-ruled state was an important but by no means the only, or even the dominant, influence. Group identities, which shaped activities and community relations, developed to meet the needs and correspond with the worldviews of gang members struggling to survive in hostile surroundings. Gangs tended to be preoccupied with rival groups within the townships rather than with larger political issues. This is not to argue that gangs defined themselves exclusively through relationships with competitors or did not consciously resist the agents of the state, only that a host of influences contributed to gang identity and determined gang activities. In other words, it is unlikely that gangs defined themselves, or were regarded by different groups in the community, primarily according to their place on the resistance continuum.
Focusing exclusively on the destructive impact of gangs obscures the multifaceted roles these groups performed within the townships. Without discounting the mayhem gangs inflicted on urban residents, it is important to recognize that the communities that harbored criminal groups did not view them solely as a destructive force. It is unlikely that gangs could have flourished in South Africa without a significant degree of support from segments of urban communities. This support shifted in emphasis, from mere tolerance to outright alliances, and different gangs drew support from different sections of the community at different times, contingent on a variety of social, economic, and political factors.
Gang-community relationships merit much closer scrutiny than they have typically received. Resentment toward the authorities that regulated township dwellers’ movements, rights of residence, and access to jobs and subjected townspeople to constant harassment through liquor and pass raids meant that gang violence directed at the police was likely to be celebrated by many community members. A former tsotsi highlights the ambivalent relationship between gangs and their neighbors. “The gangs were a great paradox. People couldn’t understand why they would rob them, stab them and then fight the police. So there was this love-hate relationship.”30 Other than battling the police, gangs engaged in activities that met with varying degrees of popular approval, including the victimization of white-, Indian-, and Chinese-owned businesses, brawls with white gangs, and participation in political initiatives. Moreover, many gangs conducted their criminal activities away from their home areas and thus probably did not earn the enmity of the people among whom they lived.
Some township residents shared in the spoils of the gangs’ criminal exploits, especially through the distribution of heavily discounted stolen goods.31 Poverty and the brutally high rates of unemployment in the townships ensured that many families appreciated any source of income, including proceeds from criminal activity, and in certain areas gangs provided crucial economic inputs. Cape Flats gangs seem particularly influential in this regard: “They are popular figures providing income for an estimated 100,000 people through the illicit economy they control, sometimes paying the water and electricity bills of entire neighbourhoods.”32 Such developments fostered an economic interdependence between gangs and local residents and entrenched an acceptance of criminal culture within large sections of the affected communities. Although the vast majority of gangs were predatory in some respect, they often engaged in activities or represented ideals that were approved by substantial numbers of township residents.
THE MARASHEA
Readers familiar with South African urban and gang literature will have come across the Russians in articles by Bonner, Jeff Guy, and Motlatsi Thabane and, more recently, some of my own work.33 Despite the gangs’ widespread reputation for violence and the fact that the association has operated in South Africa for more than fifty years, these articles are the sole publications whose primary focus is the Marashea.34 Bonner, much like Guy and Thabane, presents the Marashea as a fighting association of Basotho migrants who banded together on the Rand in the 1940s and 1950s for protection from urban criminals and ethnic rivals, to obtain control over migrant Basotho women, and to celebrate their identity as Basotho by engaging in exhilarating internecine battles. Both articles deal with the Russian gangs in their formative years on the Rand and pay special attention to the violence that seems to have defined the gangs. Indeed, Bonner states, “The Russians on the Reef were, above all, a fighting machine.”35 Neither study extends its focus beyond the Witwatersrand of the 1950s, although Bonner claims that increasingly heavier prison sentences imposed on regular offenders, combined with more stringent influx controls, significantly weakened the Russians by the mid-1960s.36
While the Russians retained a presence in Johannesburg and neighboring towns, the strength of the association shifted to informal settlements and townships surrounding the newly established gold mines. Members not employed on the mines were forced to seek alternative sources of income, and the gangs became increasingly commercially oriented. In particular, they established large-scale liquor distribution and prostitution rackets that catered to the needs of African mineworkers housed in single-sex hostels. The patronage of mineworkers became the economic backbone of the Marashea, and different gangs operated throughout the mining areas. Their close ties with miners ensured that the groups became involved in the often violent politics of the mining industry. As mining groups expanded, the remaining urban Marashea struggled to survive. With diminishing numbers and a shrinking economic base, these groups competed fiercely for resources and became central players in a series of taxi wars that raged throughout the 1980s. However, despite efforts to maintain connections with their colleagues in the mining areas, the Johannesburg gangs were never able to regain their former stature.
The politicized conflicts of the 1980s and 1990s drew in the Marashea, along with many other combatants. A number of mining groups fought with supporters of the newly formed National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), which had close, albeit informal, links with the ANC. Marashea networks of influence and patronage were threatened by this new force, and the gangs defended their interests, sometimes in collusion with mine management and security. Following bloody and protracted fighting, the NUM emerged victorious and the Marashea had to adapt to a new political dispensation on the mines. The Russians were not as active in the violence on the Rand, which was dominated by conflicts between ANC supporters and IFP-aligned hostel dwellers. The few incidents of conflict seem to have been fought largely along generational lines when older members of the urban Marashea groups refused to recognize the authority of the youthful comrades. These disputes, while bloody, were overshadowed by ANC-Inkatha hostilities. The Marashea continues to operate in South Africa, although its livelihood is threatened by retrenchments in the mining sector and the AIDS pandemic that is taking a particularly heavy toll among mining populations.
2
THE MARASHEA WAS FOUNDED by adult male Basotho migrants working in South African cities and mines. Age, gender, and ethnicity have remained defining features of the Russian gangs to the present day. The stability associated with adult members who do not graduate out of a youth gang lifestyle has been important to the organizational coherence of the Marashea. Men control the various Marashea groups, and the exploitation of female members, combined with a militaristic masculine identity, has shaped the history of the society. A Sesotho identity remains at the very core of Borashea, for the gangs exist to meet the needs of Basotho migrants operating in an alienating and often hostile South African environment. Over the past fifty years the Marashea has undergone many changes and in many ways has stayed the same. In any case its existence reinforces the argument that, despite the constraints imposed by apartheid, Africans constructed influential organizations that often had a greater degree of localized power than various government agencies.
FORMATION
Any study of the Marashea must