Online Reporter
CAPE TOWN. – The distraught father lies on the narrow, single bed and points to two small bullet holes in the wall of his house.
This is stark evidence of a moment that shattered his family’s life forever.
Devon Africa’s four-year-old son Davin was shot dead in February, caught in the crossfire of a shoot-out between criminals.
He was a victim of the gang warfare that has plagued the Cape Flats, the townships around Cape Town − a legacy of apartheid, when the non-white population was forcibly moved from the centre of the wealthy city to the under-resourced outskirts.
“This is the bullet hole here,” he says. “This is where he slept.”
The family had already endured unspeakable horror.
Davin’s older sister, Kelly Amber, was killed two years earlier, also shot as rivals fired at each other.
She was 12.
Now Devon and his wife, Undean, have only their youngest daughter left.
“She asks me: ‘Where’s my brother?’” says Undean. “So I told her he’s with Jesus in daddy’s heart and in my heart.”
These murders took place in an area known as Wesbank, but many other families across the wider Cape Flats area have had to endure similar nightmares, despite assurances by the police of increased patrols.
The numbers tell a horrifying story.
The Western Cape province − in which the Cape Flats sit – consistently sees the overwhelming majority of gang-related murders in South Africa, according to the police.
Officially, this is a policing priority for the government.
President Cyril Ramaphosa set up a special unit to combat gang violence in 2018, he also briefly deployed the army to the area the following year, but the problem has persisted, and the killings have continued.
“There’s a whole history and generations of people who have been born into these gangs,” says Gareth Newham, head of the Justice and Violence Prevention programme at the Institute for Security Studies in Johannesburg.
“(They) flourish in areas that have largely been neglected or underdeveloped by the state. The gangs provide a form of social structure that actually provides services to the communities that the state doesn’t. They provide food for homes. Money for electricity. Money for transport or funerals. These gangs even pay school fees.”
They are embedded in the community and “that’s why it’s so difficult for the police to tackle them… it means that they can use non-gang members’ houses to store drugs and store weapons”. − BBC
