cheap labor brought Africans from throughout the subcontinent to work in the mines and associated industries. Between 1887 and 1899 Johannesburg was transformed from a mining camp with a population of three thousand into a metropolis with over one hundred thousand inhabitants.3 In a rough environment where criminals of all population groups plied their trades, successive white governments worked to bring white society under control. Legislation designed to eradicate organized criminal activity was introduced and hundreds of white gangsters were imprisoned and deported between 1898 and 1910.4 In contrast, the densely populated, impoverished, and ethnically diverse black settlements that had mushroomed on the fringes of mine properties and white neighborhoods enjoyed no such protection. As long as violent crime was contained within the townships and posed no threat to whites, it was not a police priority.
In the first half of the twentieth century, a succession of migrant gangs, most with close ties to the mining industry, dominated the criminal landscape.5 The Zulu-based Ninevites on the turn-of-the-century Witwatersrand terrorized the inhabitants of urban black locations.6 In early-twentieth-century Durban, attacks on unsuspecting individuals by gangs of migrant “kitchen boys” known as Amalaita “remained a ubiquitous feature of suburban labouring life.”7 The Rand mining compounds of the 1920s and 1930s were plagued by the Mpondo Isitshozi gangs, which “established a reign of terror on the paths leading to and from the mines.”8 A resident of Johannesburg’s Western Native Township, reflecting back on the early 1930s, recalled, “The most dreaded gang in those days were the [Pedi-dominated] Amalaitas. . . . They used to beat up people mercilessly.”9 After its emergence in the late 1940s the Marashea soon became the dominant migrant gang on the Rand.
Young thugs, known as tsotsis, formed street corner gangs in the 1940s and 1950s, following the waves of massive black immigration to urban centers that occurred during the Second World War. The tsotsi phenomenon took root as large sections of the rapidly growing population of urbanized youth turned to violent crime. Indeed, Clive Glaser claims that by the 1950s “the majority of permanently urbanized black youths in South Africa’s key urban conglomerate, the Witwatersrand, was involved, to a greater or lesser extent, in tsotsi gangs.”10 In Cape Town’s District Six, before the population removals of the 1960s and 1970s, extended family gangs “ordered the ghetto through their connections, intermarriages, agreements, ‘respect’ and ultimately, their force and access to violence.”11 Tsotsi gangs such as the Black Swines and the Pirates established a strong presence in Soweto in the 1960s, while the Hazels reigned supreme in the 1970s.12 And although it seems that many Soweto gangs were thrown on the defensive by politicized students following the 1976 uprising, they reemerged in the form of the “jackrollers” of the 1980s and 1990s. In the Cape Peninsula, the relocation of Coloured communities to the Cape Flats spawned several different types of criminal syndicates that have survived to the present day. Many gangsters and their gangs, like Rashied Staggie of the Hard Livings Gang, have become household names.13
The impact of policing designed to serve white needs can be traced to the early days of the Rand. The Ninevites dispensed their own rough brand of justice in Johannesburg because for Africans it was “a town without law.”14 John Brewer summarizes township policing in the 1950s: “Passes and documents were checked, raids for illicit liquor conducted and illegal squatters evicted, all while murder, rape and gangsterism flourished.”15 A 1955 report on youth crime on the Rand recorded that gang members boasted openly that police were so intent on liquor and pass offenses that tsotsis had little to fear from them.16 The police campaign against township youth during the 1976 Soweto uprising marked a turning point in community-police relations as increasing numbers of township residents turned against the SAP.17 With protest against the apartheid regime mounting throughout the 1980s, the police focused almost exclusively on political offenders. Hence, the Diepkloof Parents’ Association’s 1989 complaint: “There is a growing feeling in the community that the SAP is quick to act against anti-apartheid activists and their organisations but they do nothing to stop the criminals presently terrorising us.”18 During the final decade of apartheid, the SAP was deeply implicated in the violence that engulfed so many townships across the country.
Just as the absence of adequate policing and social control provided an incentive for township gangsters, the lack of state protection necessitated the formation of vigilante movements as communities organized to protect themselves and punish suspected offenders. Neighborhood policing initiatives known as Civilian Guards were formed in the 1930s on the Rand, and township residents consistently supported such movements for the next fifty years. ANC supporters established street committees and people’s courts in the 1980s and 1990s and vigilantism and popular courts continue to play a prominent role in many townships.
A HISTORIOGRAPHY OF VIOLENCE
Within the sizable South African literature dealing with violence, only the more recent episodes of civil conflict have inspired integrated analyses that investigate the manner in which various police forces, criminal gangs, vigilantes, political groups, and localized struggles interconnected to fuel the cycle of conflict.19 Despite widespread recognition that endemic violence is almost always the product of a combination of circumstances and forces, South African historical accounts tend to treat criminal gangs, vigilantism, and policing as separate phenomena. Furthermore, very few analyses explore township violence over a protracted period to identify trends and turning points.20 Thus, the historical literature focusing on urban crime and violence constitutes a collection of isolated case studies that are still largely mired in the resistance-collaboration framework.21
Tim Nuttal and John Wright recently observed that South African historians have long been “in one way or another, to a greater or lesser degree, caught up in the deep and narrow groove of ‘struggle history.’”22 Many leading South Africanists came of age in apartheid South Africa and identified with the struggle against racist oppression. Not only did this result in the categorization of a multitude of different acts and behavior as resistance, but groups that cooperated with the authorities or who came into conflict with liberation movements have typically been classified as collaborators. Attempts to provide more subtle and nuanced interpretations of the struggle still tend to view resistance as the definitive South African story. For example, in their call to expand the category of resistance, Bonner, Peter Delius, and Deborah Posel argue that “the resistance and opposition which confronted the governing authorities was far more wide ranging and amorphous than has been revealed by the conventional focus on national political organisations. Countless individual or small-scale acts of non-compliance proved more pervasive, elusive, persistent and difficult to control than more formal or organised political struggle.”23
Here we have the tendency to conflate survival with resistance and to imbue a wide range of prosaic activities with subversive dimensions. Frederick Cooper explains the allure of this approach: “Scholars have their reasons for taking an expansive view. Little actions can add up to something big: desertion from labor contracts, petty acts of defiance of white officials or their African subalterns, illegal enterprises in colonial cities, alternative religious communities—all these may subvert a regime that proclaimed both its power and its righteousness, raise the confidence of people in the idea that colonial power can be countered, and forge a general spirit conducive to mobilisation across a variety of social differences.” However, as Cooper points out, such a sweeping interpretation of resistance undermines an appreciation of the complexities of colonial societies and reduces the lives of the colonized to participants in the struggle against colonial oppression. As a result, “the texture of people’s lives is lost; and complex strategies of coping, of seizing niches within changing economies, of multi-sided engagement with forces inside and outside the community, are narrowed into a single framework.”24 Following Cooper’s lead, Africanist scholars have increasingly abandoned the basic oppressor-resistor axis in favor of a more multilayered understanding of the relationships that comprised the colonial process. Nancy Rose Hunt argues, “Social action in colonial and postcolonial Africa cannot be reduced to such polarities as metropole/colony or colonizer/colonized
