f XTENSION13, Belhar is a windswept 
coloured ghetto 
forty minutes' drive 
from Cape Town 
proper, although it All God's 
chillun might be even further 
for all it matters in 
terms of the scenery 
that makes the city such 
a popular tourist destin 
a t i o n . It is certainly a long way got colour 
By Adewale Maja-Pearce from Table Mountain, the famous landmark 
that can suddenly surprise you 
when you turn a corner; a long way 
from the traffic-free, cobbled 
Greenmarket Square with its makeshift 
stalls selling 'ethnic' artefacts from Zimbabwe 
and former Zaire and even Nigeria; 
a long way from the art galleries 
and the Italian cafes and the V&A Waterfront 
development where you can sit 
r.-.VV. :*^-S
and watch the boats sailing in and 
out of the harbour. 
I visited Extension 1 3 a couple of times in search of a 
coloured gangster called Lapepa. The coloured gangs are 
a prominent feature of life in the Western Cape province. 
According to received mythology, the first gangster was a 
mine worker called Pomabaza who set up shop in the 
1 820's when he realised that robbing the company was 
more lucrative than working for it. He settled in a place 
called Maritzburg and recruited two other men but one of 
them turned out to be a sodomite. This led to a disagreement 
and the formation of a rival gang. All three later met 
up again in a prison in Durban and agreed to co-operate 
in exploiting the system to their mutual benefit. 
There are currently an estimated 1 27 gangs with about 
80,000 members out of a total coloured population in the 
entire province of just over two million. Most members are 
recruited in the prisons, where they are taught gang history 
and sworn to a code of conduct which they take with them 
to the outside world. According to Roger Friedman, a local 
journalist who wrote about them extensively, 'their adherence 
to the code is the essence of their power and ability to 
survive; in a sense they are hostage to it'. Some of the 
more prominent gangs are the 24 gang, also known as the 
Royal Air Force, which plans and executes prison escapes; 
the 25 gang, the Pig Fives, which engages in sodomy and 
smuggling; and the 28 gang, Kamp van Nongoloza, which 
'engages in sodomy as an organised activity within the functions 
of the "silver line", and in violence as part of the 'golden 
line'. It also smuggles and robs, and usually conducts its 
activities at night.' 
It was Friedman who gave me Lapepa's cellular telephone 
number but Lapepa was evidently a busy man. 'He's 
not 'ere at the moment,' were the exact words spoken by 
the same person each time I rang. I'll call later,' I'd say, 
and he'd say, 'No problem.' I finally got to talk to the man 
himself and we arranged to meet at his headquarters the 
next day. It was a tricky place to find but he obligingly arranged 
to meet my taxi at a nearby petrol station. He was 
eager to be interviewed. This was because the gangsters 
were just then engaged in a public relations exercise following 
the 'execution' the previous August of Rashaad 
Staggie, co-leader with his twin brother, Rashied, of a particularly 
notorious gang known as the Hard Livings, by a 
Muslim vigilante group, People against Gangsterism and 
Drugs, or Pagad for short. 
Pagad (motto: 'We fear no one but Allah') emerged in 
early 1 996 with the avowed aim of ridding the ghettoes of 
the gangsters once and for all, principally by fire-bombing 
their houses. It was said to include veterans of armed Islamic 
campaigns in places like Bosnia, Lebanon and Afghanistan, 
and was also believed to have links with a homegrown 
Islamic fundamentalist body known as Qibla, which 
collaborated during the anti-apartheid struggle with the 
<GLENDORA HFVlEWx African Quarter/yon the Arts><V0l3@No\> 
former military wing of the extremist Pan-African Congress 
(motto: 'One settler, one bullet'). According to police figures, 
Pagad carried out twenty-three acts of 'naked terrorism' 
in the first three months of 1997 compared with ninetysix 
cases of gang-related crime in the same period, but the 
authorities feared that independent 'cells' within Pagad were 
running out of control and that, in consequence, 'the energy 
unleashed could reproduce itself in a pattern of militancy 
with a life of its own'. 
The murder of Rashaad Staggie took place after dark 
in a more up-market coloured area called Virginia Water, 
not far from the famous District 6. It seems that trouble was 
expected that night because there was a newspaper photographer 
already at the scene. The dramatic results were 
published world-wide. The first photo showed masked 
Pagad members laying siege to a house. The caption underneath 
said that they believed Rashied Staggie to be inside 
dealing drugs with a Nigerian gang and they wanted 
him to come out so they could kill him. The next photo 
showed Rashaad sitting alone in his BMW. He had driven 
over when he heard what was happening. He appeared to 
be smiling. The next photo showed Rashaad slumped over 
the steering wheel. There was blood everywhere. Nobody 
ever discovered who fired the first shot. The penultimate 
photo showed Rashaad fleeing from his vehicle in flames. 
He had been doused with petrol and set alight. The final 
photo showed a smouldering corpse on the tarmac just a 
few feet from the car. 
A coloured musician I later spent some time with in 
Mitchell's Plain, the largest of all the coloured ghettoes and 
even further out than Extension 1 3, summed up the prevailing 
view of the gangs by calling them 'filth'. He said this 
as we stood on a corner near his house and watched a 
carload of them cruise by. It was difficult to mistake them 
with their studied air of menace straight out of the movies. 
The following week-end, in the early hours of the morning, 
a middle-aged couple of some standing in the community 
were shot dead by a gang not far from where we had stood. 
Their corpses were thrown onto a rubbish dump and their 
car used to carry out a series of robberies at all-night petrol 
stations in the vicinity. The murdered woman's daughter 
said in a subsequent newspaper interview that the bullet 
had passed through her mother's throat and exited from 
the back of her head. Filth indeed: my musician friend said 
that Rashaad Staggie had the number 28 tattooed on his 
left hand between his thumb and forefinger, which meant 
that he sodomised new inmates in the prison. 
Following the death of his twin brother, Rashied Staggie 
got together with other prominent gangsters and announced 
that they were now reformed, and that they would henceforth 
cease all intra-gang warfare that was part of the hell 
of living in the ghettoes. They even pledged to assist the 
police in clamping down on crime, to which end they formed 
an umbrella organisation called the Community Outreach 
Forum, or Core for short. While I was there, Core made a
great show about apprehending three men who robbed and 
raped an 82 year-old woman in yet another coloured ghetto 
called Manenburg, which also happened to be Staggie's 
turf. According to the newspaper report, 'The Police, called 
at about 7.30pm to a Manenburg pool-room where the 
suspects were held, received a warm welcome from Core 
members, instead of the usual cold shoulder'. Staggie himself, 
with his newly-acquired taste for publicity, also took the 
opportunity to assure the people of Cape Town that he considered 
rape to be 'the lowest thing'. 
The problem for the authorities, however, was that Core 
pointedly refused to discuss gang involvement in the drugs 
trade - chiefly dagga, mandrax and cocaine - on the 
grounds that 'drugs is not a priority'. This obviously made 
it difficult for the ANC government to be seen to be negotiating 
with them, except that Core had a trump card, which 
was the city's (ultimately doomed) bid to host the 2004 
Olympic Games. Cape Town was on the short list of five 
with only three months to go before the International Olympic 
Committee was due to announce its decision. Five leading 
members of the Committee were in fact in town at that 
very moment enjoying Cape lobsters and Cape wine in 
one of the many restaurants on the V&A Waterfront, from 
where you could also watch the boats taking tourists to 
Robben Island, President Mandela's home for seventeen 
years in the bad old days; in the days when, as Staggie was 
quick to point out, soldiers of the ANC's military wing, 
Umkhonto we Sizwe, relied on the very same gangsters 
they now shirked for safe houses and safe routes. 
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in their support of the revolutionary struggle is a fanciful the two roads of crime, one leading to prison, the other to 
interpretation of recent history since the gangs themselves the graveyard. I was told later that all three of them were 
only flourished with the collusion of the apartheid state, which shot dead by a rival gang the previous year only weeks 
used them to control their own communities. Nevertheless, before the truce came into effect, which presumably meant 
the fact that some among them were sympathetic to the cause, 
that the young men currently hanging about the entrance 
either because of rivalry with other gangs or because they 
to the club where the fallen comrades of blessed memory 
were astute enough to see which way the wind was blowing 
had also stood less than a year ago, also with that same 
or because they were simply fed-up with the entire apartheid 
vague expectation, might live a little longer. 
structure was especially valuable in the only province where 
Lapepa, who told me that his real name was Ernie Pe- the coloureds were in the majority, and the only province 
ters, was the leader of The Firm. There was little concrete which went against the national trend in the first-ever demoinformation 
about his gang ('a mysterious outfit', accord- cratic elections in 1 994 and voted for the otherwise reviled 
ing to a newspaper report), although more than one per- National Party. This was the same party which sought to 
deny the very existence of the coloureds in the first place by son believed that it specialised in child pornography and 
forbidding inter-racial marriage; the same party whose child prostitution, in addition to selling drugs. Whatever 
leader's wife could so casually refer to them as 'left-overs' the case, Lapepa was also a leading light in Core. It was at 
and 'non-people' at the height of the elections, so sure was 
her husband of their votes; and the same party which forcibly 
moved 60,000 of them from their homes in District 6 at 
the foot of Table Mountain to Extension 13, where you can't 
see Table Mountain even on a clear day. 
There was a cruel but presumably unintended irony in 
<GLENDORA 
the names given to the streets in Extension 13: Organ, Ukelele, 
Wagner, Symphony, all of them dreamt up by a committee 
of white civil servants who weren't going to live there, hence 
the absence of 'beauty of form, harmony, and expression of 
emotion', just row upon row of single-storey boxes with a 
little patch of ground in front of each, and then long stretches 
of wasteland strewn with shopping bags and empty beer 
cans. I was admonished more than once by indignant ANC 
activists who knew better than me to go and see the squatter 
camps where the blacks lived and then compare the two, 
but this was the familiar response of the 'political lumberjacks', 
as Bessie Head put it, 'busy making capital on human 
lives'. Richard Rive, another coloured writer, also from 
Cape Town, put it a different way in his famous novel, 
'Buckingham Palace': District 6: 'Poor and dilapidated as 
Buckingham Palace is, we could sit on our front stoep at 
night and see the outlines of Table Mountain... We could sit 
on the back porch and see the ships at anchor in Table 
Bay... Where we were living in Azalea Court, when we 
opened the front door we could see only washing-lines and 
more washing-lines and the opposite courts.' 
Lapepa's headquarters, a shebeen-cum-nightclub he 
was just then busy renovating, occupied one corner of a 
square. The place would have been difficult to miss, partly 
because of the dozen or so young men loitering about the 
entrance, half-in and half-out, with that vague look of 
people waiting for somebody to arrive or something to 
happen, and partly because of the crude but colourful mural 
on the outside wall painted in the black, green, gold, red, 
blue and white - rainbow nation, indeed! - of the new South 
his club that I was to encounter Rashied Staggie, but that 
was later, on my second visit. This time I only saw Lapepa. 
He was in his mid-thirties and dark-skinned, almost black 
in fact and would have been taken as such in a country 
with a less attenuated response to colour. There was nothing 
particularly gangsterish about him, unlike some of the 
others I was to meet. He was of average height and build, 
Quarter,, on the A*><V0B@No!>
clean-shaven, with lots of gold rings on his fingers. The only 
distinctive feature about him was his missing upper front 
teeth, all four incisors, but this wasn't unusual among 
coloureds. 
Lapepa himself played up to the clean-cut image. JHe 
told me that he didn't drink alcohol or do drugs and that, 
unlike most of the other gangsters, he had never been to 
prison, but he was quick to add that he had already fathered 
nine children by almost as many women, although 
he didn't say how many women, exactly, and I didn't ask 
him. I asked instead about his gang. He said that it was 
formed seven years ago by shebeen owners like himself to 
provide mutual protection against extortion by the other 
gangs, principally the Americans, the Scorpions and the 
Sexy Boys. But that was during apartheid when getting a 
liquor licence was next to impossible if you weren't white. 
These days he just wanted what he'd always wanted, which 
was to run a successful business and provide a positive 
role model (his words) for the lighties, the children. The 
only problem, he said, was that the coloureds were still 
second in the queue now that the blacks had political power. 
But that was the coloured's lot for you, he added, always 
on the shitty end of the deal, and then he glanced at me in 
a knowing way, whereupon we both laughed. At that moment 
he didn't think I was British or Nigerian or Anglo- 
Nigerian or whatever I was trying to claim but just another 
coloured, and at that moment I thought so, too. Part of the 
point of being coloured, after all, is that almost any story 
fits, proof of which is that anybody can parent a coloured 
child, but by drawing me into his orbit, by letting me know 
that he considered me one of them, a brother, he was also 
exploiting the other point about being coloured, which is 
that you're the ultimate outsider, forever craving acceptance 
from those who belong, i.e. everybody else. But everybody 
else is necessarily untrustworthy, which is why coloureds 
can only really trust each other. Lapepa watched me as I 
paused over my notebook and failed to write anything, then 
he shrugged and said that he had to go to a meeting. We 
arranged to link up the following Sunday, when there was 
to be a gathering of the clans for the regular monthly pow- 
<GLI;NDORA REVIEW><African Quarterly on 
Title-page picture: shows aerial view of Cape Town 
through the mountains. Patch of land in the middle of 
the water is Robben Island 
© For all Cape Town, East Rand and Soweto pictures: 
Jide Adeniyi Jones 
Downtown in Cape Town, the evening of ANC victory at 
the first post-Apatheid polls 
wow with the Olympic Bid Committee, and he delivered me 
into the hands of Ricardo, who was to drive me back. There's 
no reason why you should spend all that money on a taxi,' 
he said, offering me his hand. 
Ricardo was a light-skinned eighteen year-old, tall and 
gangly and quick to smile. He told me that his nick-name 
was 'Donkey', wh-ich somehow fitted. Like Lapepa, he 
sported a lot of gold rings on his fingers; like Lapepa also, 
he was missing his upper front four teeth. He said he had 
them extracted three years ago by the dentist because everybody 
did it. Then he laughed. It was so that he could 
give better head, he said, just like the coloured women 
with missing teeth could give a better blow-job. He started 
laughing again but then broke off abruptly as we approached 
a corner. Five young men were standing on the 
verge with their hands rammed into the pockets of their 
leather jackets to keep from the cold of a late afternoon 
winter's day and pointedly stared at us. Ricardo stared back 
at them as we drove past, and it was only after we were out 
of range that he told me that they had tried to shoot him 
the previous night when he pulled into a nearby petrol station. 
He said that he was lucky to be alive. He could have 
shown me the bullet holes in the car he'd been driving if he 
had thought about it when we were still at the club. I asked 
him if it was true that his gang haq| renounced violence and 
he said, yes, it was. I asked him whether he had personally 
killed people in the old days. He hesitated a moment and 
then said, yes, he had. I asked him how many he had killed 
but he just laughed nervously and wouldn't say any more. 
There was an awkward silence and then I asked him if it 
was okay to light a spliff and he laughed with relief and 
nodded. When we reached the city, I had to direct him to 
Long Street, the best known street in Cape Town. He said 
that he rarely came into the city proper, that he was born in 
Extension 13 and had lived there all his life. I invited him 
up for a drink in the first-floor lounge of Bob's Bar and 
Bistro, the backpacker place I was putting up in. He refused 
at first and only agreed out of politeness when I 
pressed him. He hurried a soft drink and then took off, 
promising me a 'lekker skaaf, a nice smoke, the next time
I visited. 
I arrived the following Sunday at noon as arranged. 
Lapepa wasn't around. He had been in already and gone 
out again but I was assured that he would presently return. 
It was a dull, cold, overcast June day with occasional gusts 
of wind blowing from the sea, always threatening to rain 
but never quite managing to do so - a typical Winter's day 
in Cape Town, I was told. The same young men as before 
were hanging around the entrance of the club, zipped up 
in their leather jackets against the cold. They might not 
have moved in the intervening week. Only one person was 
busy. He was sweeping the public area which led into the 
club itself. The odd customer dropped by for a bottle of 
brandy or a can of beer from the off-licence, a makeshift, 
cage-like construction of plywood and glass to the immediate 
right as you stepped inside. Ricardo fetched me a 
can of beer from the big, glass-fronted refrigerator stacked 
from top to bottom with all the different brands available 
in the country. By-and-by I noticed a middle-aged coloured 
man on the other side of the square pushing a large wheelbarrow 
stacked high with vegetables. He had a peculiar 
gait, as if one leg was longer than the other and he couldn't 
bend the longer one at the knee. He parked his wheelbarrow 
directly opposite us and began calling out his wares. 
Otherwise, it was a quiet Sunday afternoon, just a few children 
and the odd mongrel dog playing under the solitary 
tree on the patch of green in front. 
\m • hour passed. I couldn't join in the conversation 
because it was conducted exclusively in Afrikaans, the 'pidgin 
Dutch' evolved by coloured society out of the linguistic 
mix of the early Cape settlers and the indigenous Africans 
from the seventeenth century onwards; the very mix, in fact, 
which brought the coloured people into existence in the first 
place. The irony was that Afrikaans had become so identified 
with the boere, the white man, that most coloureds had 
forgotten its origins and were liable to apologise for their 
proficiency in the language of the oppressor. But the ability 
of the boere to hijack the language was only partly accounted 
for by their overweening arrogance. The coloureds themselves, 
who can hardly believe that they possess anything 
approaching a culture since 'a race made up of weak materials 
and without the capacity for spiritual or intellectual 
growth' is hardly liable to produce anything more exalted 
than gangsterism. The quote is from Sarah Gertrude Millin, 
the white South African writer, from her celebrated novel, 
God's Step-Children: ' "We are all God's children," the Rev. 
<GLENDORA Quarterly 
Andrew Flood said. "But is God Himself not white?" asked 
Cachas. And, as the Rev. Andrew Flood hesitated for a reply, 
she made a suggestion. "Perhaps we brown people are 
His step-children," she said.' 
The author makes Cachas, debase herself out of her 
mouth in order to evade her own racism, except that a 
writer with a more inclusive vision of humanity might have 
had Cachas say the very same as an expression of the selfloathing 
that lies at the heart of the coloured condition. 
'Being coloured is like excrement,' said my musician friend; 
and it was obvious, even as he spoke, that his anger went 
deeper than an otherwise reasonable hatred of parasites 
whose existence in such large numbers challenged ability 
to protect his fifteen year-old daughter. 
The coloured is at once the symbol and the victim of the 
racial lie, a sort of mongrel compromise - half-caste, mixedrace, 
mulatto, quadroon, octoroon...: the terms are legion 
- to be mocked and despised for that very reason.But one 
irony of apartheid was that the blacks were equally culpable 
in exploiting the concept of race in which the colour 
of one's skin assumed a value in its own right. It is telling, 
for instance, that both blacks and whites subscribe to the 
apartheid conflation of 'black' and 'African' as though the 
two were synonymous, the blacks for authenticity in the land 
of their birth; the whites because they needed to maintain 
the fiction that they constituted an outpost of European 
progress. To be a coloured, in other words, is to be defined 
in terms of what you're not; 'not a White person or a Native', 
neither one thing nor the other. This is another way of 
saying that you exist in limbo - 'an intermediate state or 
condition of awaiting a decision'; 'a state of neglect or 
oblivion'- which is hardly the easiest of places to live. The 
concomitant spiritual emptiness, even nihilism, which this 
condition bespeaks was everywhere evident in the vacant 
expressions of the young men hanging about the entrance 
to Lapepa's club and ready to sacrifice their lives - Hammer, 
Milky and Benny - in order to prove their right to exist. 
'Come,' Ricardo said, sensing that I was getting bored 
or perhaps anxious to fulfil his role as my minder; 'let's go 
and have a lekker skaaf.' He rubbed his hands together. 
'It's cold,' he added, 'so you must have some smoke in 
your belly to warm up, no?', and then he laughed at himself 
and apologised for his poor English, but I said that his 
English was better than he thought. We passed close to the 
vegetable seller, who had all the while been watching us 
approach. He followed us into the yard, making an odd 
creaking sound as he walked, dragging one leg behind 
the other and up the steps to the enclosed porch that led 
directly into a narrow kitchen. The dealer, a rasta man with 
a knitted hat, a beard and a ready smile, welcomed me 
and said that we should smoke outside because his woman 
didn't like the smell of it. I could see his woman from where 
I was standing. She was watching television in the overcrowded 
living-room. She looked as if she didn't like a lot 
of things about her life. 
The dealer asked me if I wanted to smoke bottle top or
slow boat. The former, which entailed packing the ganga 
into the inverted neck of a broken bottle top, was generally 
preferred because you got a big hit quickly. The trick was to 
draw the smoke deep into your lungs at one go and then 
let it out slowly. I was content to roll a joint and take my 
time. The vegetable seller, meanwhile, was standing up 
against the wall looking expectantly as the bottle top made 
its rounds. Ricardo, noticing, nudged me in the ribs and 
said in a loud voice that the man used to be a big-time 
gangster until three years ago when he fell under a train 
and lost his legs. He used to be tall in those days, Ricardo 
said, taller even than me, but look at him now, 'short-short', 
barely five-and-a-half feet. The vegetable seller laughed 
along with everyone else and in the moment of merriment 
caused by his misfortune begged a quick hit. Nobody responded; 
they mightn't even have heard him. He shifted 
his position, making that creaking noise again. One leg 
must have been amputated above the knee, which was why 
it wouldn't bend, and then I realised that the sound I heard 
was made by newspapers packed tightly together between 
the limbs and the prosthetics. I wondered whether he had 
been pushed by a rival, or whether he had fallen by accident 
while showing off, as I had seen some men do by 
running along the platform and then somersaulting into 
the carriage at the last possible moment, but I didn't want 
to ask Ricardo in front of him and I forgot later. 
Meanwhile, in the cramped courtyard outside with the 
obligatory rusting car frame overgrown with weeds, a child 
of about ten was terrorising a black terrier by kicking a 
football at it. The terrier, in turn, driven to distraction by this 
senseless provocation, would immediately round on another 
<GLENDORA REVIEW><African Quarterly on the Arts><V0\'5@Ho\> 
Soweto 
dog, also a terrier, which was watching from a short distance. 
This went on for a few minutes, the boy pelting the 
dog, the dog attacking the other until the whole scene threatened 
to turn ugly as the dogs got madder and madder, 
baring their teeth and growling deep in the back of their 
throats, whereupon the assembled adults harried and kicked 
them into the street. Nobody thought to admonish the child, 
who wandered off to play with some friends on the green. 
Ricardo excused himself and went over to the club to see 
what was happening. I asked the rasta to bring me a glass, 
which I filled with beer and passed to the retired gangster. 
The rasta, glancing at the can in my hand, asked me if I 
drank a lot of beer and before I could answer he said that I 
should lay off the white man's Babylon and stick to the weed; 
that Jah had given us the weed to help us through the myriad 
travails of life, just like Bob Marley said. It was quite a little 
sermon. He clenched his fist and tapped his chest and then 
extended his arm. We grazed knuckles. 'Peace, brother,' he 
said. Presently, Ricardo returned to announce that Staggie 
had arrived and was currently being interviewed by some 
French |ournalists. On our way out, just as we reached the 
broken front gate, the gangster-turned-hawker let rip a stream 
of expletives, shouting at us that we should go and fuck 
ourselves, that we were shit and that he was going to fuck us 
up.
Some chairs had been arranged in a three-quarter circle 
in a clearing in the club proper. Staggie was sitting in the 
middle, with two of the journalists on one side and two 
bodyguards on the other. Staggie himself was a compact, 
light-skinned man in his early forties, not particularly goodlooking 
- rather ugly, in fact - but with a certain charisma.
The bodyguards were straight out of central casting. One 
was a tall, rangy, gorgeous-looking black man in his twenties, 
six foot tall with regular features, a beautiful physique 
and the confidence that went with it. He wore two gold 
earrings in one ear and one in the other; he had a gold 
chain round his neck and ten gold rings on his fingers, 
seven on one hand and three on the other. He wore black 
corduroy trousers and a fawn-coloured leather jacket and 
he carried a gun on his right hip, but inside the waistband 
so that it wasn't immediately obvious. His short hair was 
slicked back with oil. He was ever alert, his eyes constantly 
roaming over the assembled company. From time-to-time 
Staggie would ask him for the English equivalent of an Afrikaans 
word and he would give it without hesitation, but 
always a little modestly, playing down his embarrassment 
of riches. His companion, by contrast, was a big bruiser of 
a coloured man with a surly expression who appeared to 
be asleep most of the time the interview was taking place, 
his hands rammed into the pockets of his trench coat and 
his legs stretched out before him. I never saw him smile 
once, either then or afterwards, and by the end of the day 
I thought him the more dangerous. It was something in his 
look, a sense of dispassionate violence, as if cutting your 
throat would be just like slicing a melon. I didn't see a gun 
on him and perhaps he didn't need one. 
Staggie, for his part, merely repeated what I had already 
read ad nauseam in the local press, i.e. that the Nigerian 
gangs were entirely responsible for the cocaine problem 
in the country, and that some police officers in Cape 
Town were corrupt. The French interviewer seemed pleased 
enough with what he was told, which I found rather surprising. 
He might have asked, for instance, whether we 
were supposed to believe that a foreign gang from the other 
end of the continent could just march in and usurp Staggie's 
authority without so much as a by-your-leave, and that 
Staggie himself, to say nothing of his bodyguards, would 
take the matter lying down. In fact I knew perfectly well that 
the Nigerian gangs worked hand-in-glove with the coloured 
gangs and even depended on them for distribution networks 
because some of the many Nigerians in Cape Town 
who knew about the less-than-salubrious activities of their 
compatriots told me so. 
The interviewer, a tall, angular man in early middleage, 
had allowed himself to be seduced by the glamour of 
the event and showed how much on the way out by asking 
the bodyguard if he could see the gun. The bodyguard 
obliged, nestling the big black chunk of metal in the palm 
of his hand. He had beautiful hands, with long slender 
fingers and manicured nails. Outside, where it was still 
threatening to rain, they all posed for the group photograph. 
They were joined by a third gangster whose name I 
never discovered, a neat, dapper coloured man about fiveand-
a-half feet tall with silver collar studs and silver sleeve 
braces and he favoured stripes: striped shirt and striped trousers 
and a striped tie. His short hair was neatly parted to 
<GLENDOCA REVIEWxAfrican Quarterly on rhe AnsxVOH@Uol> 
<20>
one side, and when he squatted on the grass verge between 
Staggie and Lapepa, the three of them directly facing the 
departed triumvirate immortalised on the garish mural, he 
took the precaution of hitching up his trousers to avoid spoiling 
the creases. He had brought his wife along, a pretty 
young coloured woman in her twenties who sat quietly in 
the brand-new BMW nursing a new-born baby. 
We waited for the best part of an hour but the threatened 
rain never came and nobody seemed to mind the 
sudden gusts. The vegetable seller across the way called 
out his wares - potatoes, cauliflowers, onions, tomatoes, 
peppers... - in a sing-song Afrikaans, sweeter on the ear 
than the way the boere spoke it. For someone who had lost 
his legs he couldn't seem to stay still. He kept limping up 
and down the street, this way and that, and you could hear 
the creaking of the tightly-packed newspapers even from 
where we were. By and by two coloured girls of sixteen or 
thereabouts came out of one of the houses and started 
across the patch of green. Half-way along they suddenly 
realised who was around and became flustered but the 
gangsters ignored them. The girls strolled to the end of the 
green, loitered a moment, then re-traced their steps. The 
gangsters were glamorous, all right, more glamorous, certainly, 
than their parents eking out a living - no money for 
this, no money for that - in the little boxes the white man 
had shoved them into. 
From time-to-time a car would pull up and disgorge 
two or three foot soldiers. They included a pair of twins, 
eighteen or so, fair-skinned with close-cropped hair and 
perfectly round faces. They were dressed identically in faded 
blue denims, white pumps and long-sleeved orange shirts, 
everything spick and span. Another foot soldier, a middleaged 
coloured man with a woollen hat pulled tightly over 
his head, also with the regulation jeans and pumps, interested 
me because he was older than the others. He was in 
fact Staggie's contemporary (and mine) but obviously hadn't 
made it beyond the lower rungs, still taking orders alongside 
men half his age in a world of men where brute force 
counted. He never said anything to anybody, either then or 
later, and after it was all over he split by himself, his hands 
rammed deep into the pockets of his leather jacket. 
Presently, a white mini-bus arrived and we were set to 
go. The gang leaders went in their own cars with their bodyguards; 
I went with the others in the mini-bus. We pulled in 
first at a petrol station to fill up, and then I spent the next 
hour thinking that I was going to die in a ghastly road accident. 
The driver, a short man who had to sit right up against 
the steering wheel in order to manipulate the pedals, obviously 
thought that his honour depended on overtaking everything 
in sight, even uphill on a bend. Going downhill 
was worse because the faster we went the harder the vehicle 
was rocked by the sudden gusts. My companions didn't 
seem the least bit concerned, perhaps because they were 
already careless of their lives, or perhaps because they were 
observing the code. For the most part they sat in silence 
watching the scenery speed by. Occasionally, one of them
••I 
AJBL i_ 
^ • • ^ ^ ^ ^ • 1 East Rand 
would turn to his neighbour and mutter something and his 
neighbour would grunt in reply, but otherwise they kept 
whatever thoughts they might have been having to themselves. 
None of them took the slightest interest in me. At 
one stage, Lapepa drew level with us in his blue Ford coupe 
and pretended to race us for a few miles, now hanging 
back, now surging forward, his powerful engine responding 
effortlessly to the slightest pressure on the gas pedal. 
And then, suddenly, he looked straight at me and laughed 
in a way that I hated, smug and vicious at the same time. 
He was mocking me, telling me that I would never find out 
anything about him, and that everything we read in the 
newspapers was bullshit. 
The meeting was held in the community hall of a village 
called Hawstonia. Everybody was seated by the time we 
arrived. There were about seventy people present altogether. 
The three members of the Olympic Bid Committee, all of 
them white, sat at a wooden table in front facing the rest of 
us; Staggie, Lapepa and stripes distributed themselves 
among the masses, one to the left, one in the centre, one to 
the right. The meeting, which was conducted in Afrikaans, 
was opened by the local priest, Father Arrison, who led the 
prayers, and then everybody was welcomed to the 
Hawstonia Inn by Mr Bucchianeri, the principal of a local 
coloured school. The discussion proper was kicked off by 
Ivan Waldeck, a reformed gangster who claimed to have 
had a 'holistic revelation' while serving ten years for murder 
and now worked as a social worker in the coloured 
ghettoes. He said that he had come to the meeting to state 
Core's objectives because gangsters had a place in the 
community and should not be turned away. He said that he 
'felt strongly that gangs should co-operate in order to stop 
drug's and not be sent away'. He was then followed byWillem 
Sampie, a member of the Olympic Bid Committee, who 
started by wishing all the mothers present a Happy Mother's 
Day and said that he felt it would be 'a good thing' if the 
Games could take place in Cape Town. He was then followed 
by Rashied Staggie, who said that everybody was different 
and that he, personally, was a 'champion of peace' 
and in favour of the Games, and that 'nobody was born to 
be a gangster' so that 'people should have faith'. He added 
that 'wisdom and insight were needed for forgiveness' and 
that the community 'had to tell the gangsters to stop their 
gang activities but they should not turn them away'. He 
opined, finally, that 'honesty was the most important aspect 
of the Olympic Bid'. 
Staggie was followed by Mr Nel, another member of 
the Committee, who felt that 'violence had various causes', 
including poor housing and 'too little development'. He 
also said that the purpose of the Olympic bid 'was to develop 
sport and the people'. He was then followed by Father 
Arrison, who said that 'people had to be honest' and 
that he would undertake to get the help of the Church. He 
was followed by Mr Bucchianeri, who said that he knew of 
at least four girls in his school who smoked dagga on a 
regular basis, and that he was hereby extending an invitation 
to all the members of the Committee to come to the 
school and address the students. He was followed by Ivan 
Waldeck, who said that the entire community should 'stand 
together' and 'not only the people present here'. He was 
then followed by Staggie, who said that the police should 
also be involved 'in order to drive out drugs and smugglers' 
because the gangs 'were not the only ones causing 
trouble'. He said that there should be 'prayer action' to 
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Quarterly on the ArtS><V0\i@Ho\ >
solve the problems in the community. 
Another member of the Committee, Mr Kees, said that 
he was 'a champion of love and peace' and that Cape 
Town should be developed 'in order to attract tourism'. He 
was then followed by someone called simply Richard, who 
demanded to know what had happened to the question of 
illegal liquor sales by the gangs, which had been discussed 
at the previous meeting. A policeman, Superintendent 
Albertyn, said that a raid had recently been carried out at 
one of the shebeens 'and that several cases had been submitted 
to the State Prosecutor'. He was followed by another 
gangster, Ernest 'Lastig' Solomons, formerly of the prisonbased 
28 Gang and currently with the Firm, who said that 
'people should stop their gossiping', and that one of his 
friends had been assaulted during the raid. He added, 
however, that he 'did not wish to cause trouble', and that 
'he wanted peace'. He was then followed by Staggie who 
said that Mr Solomons should go to the police with the 
problem because 'a person who did wrong should pay for 
his deeds'. He also said that he himself had 'lost trust in the 
police', although recent developments, which he didn't 
specify, 'had brought about an improvement'. Mr 
Bucchianeri then requested a proposal for the next meeting, 
which was fixed for the second Sunday in July. Ivan 
Waldeck closed the meeting with a prayer 
It was twilight outside when we left the Inn although it 
was barely six o'clock. The gangsters gathered in groups 
around the entrance of a general store nearby. A dozen or 
so local coloured girls sashayed to and fro but nobody 
paid them any mind. I wasn't sure why we were waiting. An 
hour passed. Staggie, who had been inside the store talking 
to the proprietor, came out and passed directly in front 
of me, glancing at me as he did so. This was my cue to 
accost him but I let the opportunity slip. Why? Partly because 
I had expected Lapepa to introduce me when we 
were still at his club but he didn't and then the moment was 
gone; and now, with the dark settling around us and the 
cold wind blowing through my flimsy jacket, the glamour 
that had earlier seduced all of us, not just the French crew, 
didn't seem so glamorous now, just intimidating. Presently, 
they all started trooping through a side door that led up to 
a night club, which also turned out to belong to Lapepa. I 
followed them in but sat on my own. I was tired of all this 
gangster business and just wanted to go but I was dependent 
on them for transport back and first we had to eat. 
Two middle-aged coloured women appeared with a big, 
three-legged cooking pot which they put down in the middle 
of the floor. Another woman came with paper plates and 
plastic forks. Everybody queued up for their dollop of meat 
stew with rice. 
The drive back wasn't as nerve-racking as the drive 
down, perhaps because there was less traffic on the road, 
or perhaps because it was dark and I couldn't see how fast 
we were travelling. Lapepa was already back at base when 
we arrived. He and some of his henchmen, including 
Ricardo, were huddled against the cold in the partitioned- 
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off section. Four cellular phones were being recharged on 
top of one of the refrigerators. All the gangsters had cellular 
phones, as if they were regular businessmen, which in a 
way they were. Lapepa beckoned me in and insisted that I 
have a beer. He seemed very cheerful. He asked me how I 
had enjoyed the day and I said that it had been very useful. 
He said that I should come back again on the last Friday of 
the month, which was my last week-end in Cape Town, for 
the formal opening of the club. I could even stay the weekend, 
he added. I promised to phone him and then he detailed 
another young man, Angelo, to run me back. We 
had barely gained the motorway when Angelo asked if I 
knew how to drive because he didn't have a licence. 
Before we parted Angelo said that I must call him on 
the coming Friday and he and Ricardo would fetch me and 
take me around the night spots, where I could meet some 
nice coloured women. I said that I would but in the event I 
didn'i call either him or Lapepa, although I did manage to 
speak to Ricardo once more by phone before I left Cape 
Town. It was difficult tracking him down and he sounded 
subdued when I finally got through. He said that he was at 
a different place now and he seemed anxious that we should 
meet, but it was expensive getting there by taxi and I was 
advised against the trains as being too dangerous because 
of the coloured gangs that prey on lone commuters.GR 
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