Awkward Entanglements: Kinship, Morality and Survival in Cape Town’s Prison–township Circuit

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore how townships and prison are linked in South Africa among criminalised populations. While the two are often described – also by residents – as belonging to radically different moral worlds, the article shows how they are entangled in often awkward and difficult, yet necessary ways. We show this by paying acute attention to kinship structures and how kin are disavowed, allowed and sometimes denied as residents find their way to prison and out again. The empirical basis of the article is long-term fieldwork in and engagement with Cape Town’s townships and their residents, many of who have experiences with prison as (former) inmates, as family to inmates, or through constant circulation of prison stories.

KEYWORDS:

• Cape Town
• prison
• kinship
• morality
• township

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 According to the International Centre for Prison Studies, South Africa globally ranks ninth with a total prison population of 159,000 and thirty-third place in relation to prison rate. These figures obscure huge regional and racial differences where the larger urban areas send more people to prison and where especially the group known as the coloured are over-represented by a factor two. While the numbers have declined since the mid-2000 as an indication that the crime wave that seemed to engulf South Africa after the fall of apartheid has abated, we cannot deduct the impact of prison on township life from such generic numbers.

2 For elaboration on the local understanding of respectability, see Jensen (2008); Salo (2003) and Ross (2010).

3 In this article, we use the term ‘coloured’ well-aware that it is a contentious concept. Suffice it to say that it is commonly used by the people it interpellates and by most of people in South Africa. For a critique of the term and its critics, see Jensen (2008).

4 While there is no doubt that townships are high-risk areas in terms of crime and violence, it is inherently problematic to associate too closely the townships with crime. As Wacquant (2008) correctly asserts, we cannot understand the troubled areas (of USA, France or South Africa) as disconnected from the larger post-apartheid urban economy. As we have argued elsewhere, locating crime and violence in the townships legitimise specialised interventions there (Jensen 2010). However, the townships – and the violence there – are connected to and constituted by the larger urban economy historically, in social terms and through modes of governance (Standing 2006; Samara 2011). At the same time, we should not underestimate the effects of violence. The Western Cape Province accounts for 33.2% of cases of Drug Related Crime in South Africa with Manenberg no. 3 on the list for worst affected precincts for Drug Related Crime in 2014/15. Murder accounts for almost a fifth of all murders in the country (17.9%), with 85% of all police stations in the province under-resourced (Plato 2015). In 2013, Western Cape Premier Cape Helen Zille pleaded with President Jacob Zuma to deploy the military to Manenberg as 16 schools were closed down due to gang fighting and shooting (Zille 2013), something that has happened before and since, affecting all families in the area.

5 Poca (the Prevention of Organised Crime Act) gang cases in court for the first time throughout 2014, included the first-ever prosecution of imprisoned gangsters – an attempt to dent the firmly established gang structures in Western Cape prisons and a testament to the permeability we describe form a different angle in this article.

6 As da Cunha notes (2008), the notion of the homeboy has its point of departure in the prison–township circuit where it denoted the relations between inmates in pre-carceral neigbhbourhood. This history was lost on the Homeboys: ‘It’s just a cool name, we thought’, as one of them noted to Steffen.

7 Wally was arrested during a period of intense violence on the Cape Flats in early 1999. We will not go into more detail about the details and context of the case. These have been elaborated in Jensen (2008: 70–99). Here we focus alone on the awkward entanglements involving kinship relations, morality and survival.

8 Money passes more or less freely into the prison from the outside. One way is illustrated by the case of Ronaldo, visited by co-author Karen in 2009. Ronaldo asked if she had any money on her. After an affirmative answer, Ronaldo asked her to please give it to him. Confused she stated that she couldn’t give him money as he was inside the prison, and she was outside. Ronaldo gestured to Karen to hand the money to a beautiful young lady next to her. Karen looked at the woman and she looked back, expressionless. Looking around for the guards, Karen handed the money, and watched as the inmate she was visiting, took out money from a large sports bag sitting next to him, filled with money, handed it to Ronaldo and resumed his conversation with the young lady. It was all over in a moment.

9 For an elaboration of the prison gangs, their practices and their ideologies, see Steinberg (2004).

10 This was clearly not the case for all. As Western (1996) documents, the forced removals from the inner-city of for instance Mowbray (from where he drew his sample) led to what he terms a ‘geography of disadvantage’. While the deprivation certainly was real for some, those living in the huge squatter camps surrounding the city or in extreme urban poverty in the inner-city arguably felt differently. See Jensen (2008) for an account of the forced removals and the construction of the townships.

11 These discussions are part of a long and tortuous history of race in Cape Town where racial stereotypes are both internalised and contested and practices of passing for white both common and frowned upon. For elaboration on practices of race and stereotypes in Cape Town, see Adhikari (2006); Jensen (2008); Norval (1996); Salo and Moolman (2013); Erasmus (2001); and Ross (2010).

12 The case is extremely complex and we cannot cover all aspects of it. Suffice it to say that it is unproblematic to talk to the police, albeit generally loathed, if it is part of a conflict with another group, family or section of the township. However, while it is not uncommon, it is generally not acceptable to implicate one’s own family.