Dear DM168 readers,

On 17 October one of the members of South Africa’s judiciary stuck his neck out and in a judgement warned of alleged police corruption linked to hitmen, the taxi industry and gangsters in the Western Cape.

Judge Daniel Thulare’s unprecedented judgment, delivered in the Western Cape high court, revealed how rotten cops — right up to the upper echelons of power — collude with murderous drug lords and gangs, risking the lives of prosecutors and state figures who are clamping down on gangsters.

Daily Maverick crime reporter and author Caryn Dolley sent me a WhatsApp this week saying her phone has been beyond busy about really unsettling details, which have hitherto not been published, from this judgement and I did not hesitate to say “Yes, please let’s do it for DM168 this week”.  

The details are truly unnerving and speak to the heart of darkness that makes Cape Town one of the most violent cities in the world. 

While many locals from my neck of the woods in Gauteng leave the big smoke for the chocolate-box idyll of Table Mountain and False Bay, the surrounding Hex River mountains and Winelands, the reality that lies in the underbelly of our Mother City is much more malevolent. 

Gangs have been a part of the inner city since before World War 2, but they became more violent and lethal after the forced removals of the 1960s to the barren Cape Flats.

My parents lived in the then low-income inner-city areas of Salt River and Woodstock from the 1930s to the 1950s and I recall the stories they told us about gangsters who hung out at the bioscope but were very protective and would not let anyone touch the kids from their streets.

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I lived in Cape Town in the late eighties and early nineties when I studied for a Higher Education Diploma at UCT and later taught at schools in Khayelitsha and Steenberg, near Lavender Hill. 

I saw first-hand how young boys boxed in concrete courtyards with nothing to do, surrounded by violence and the echo of gunshots and screams everywhere, joined gangs and the drug trade for a sense of security, belonging, identity, purpose and income. I also saw and heard how very talented young girls were pushed around, assaulted and sexually abused.

One of the worst horror stories I heard was from a young boy who tried to leave the gangs after a particularly bloody turf war involving hundreds of rival gang members where he watched as his best friend’s head was hacked off and left to roll down an open veld.

This is the other side of that Cape Town chocolate box that has made me never want to reside in the city of my parents’ DNA again. 

Caryn’s story has been affirmed by Western Cape Premier Alan Winde, who announced this week that the police ombud’s investigation into Judge Thulare’s judgment has shown it to be probably true and a fragment of a much broader problem.

“What is clear is that this infiltration likely extends far beyond this particular case, and also that dangerous forces are at play here,” he said.

He is more than right and it is high time that the top brass at SAPS catch a wake-up and stop trying to downplay the rot that creeps all over the crooked blue line that is our police force. Lives have been lost and many more lives will be lost as collateral damage in the drug turf wars. 

So much needs to be done. Orange overalls for crooked men and women in blue and their mobster friends. And then, the difficult and complex issue of making gang life unviable for the next generation of boys on the Cape Flats. 

Tell me what you think by writing to me at [email protected]

Yours in defence of truth,

Heather

DM168

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper which is available for R25 at Pick n Pay, Woolworths, Exclusive Books and airport bookstores. For your nearest stockist, please click here.