Femme Fatales: Girl Gangsters and Violent Street Culture in Cape Town

• Author: Dariusz Dziewanski
• Published date: 01 October 2020
• Date: 01 October 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1557085120914374
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085120914374

Feminist Criminology

2020, Vol. 15(4) 438 –463

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/1557085120914374

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Article

Femme Fatales: Girl

Gangsters and Violent

Street Culture in Cape

Town

Dariusz Dziewanski1

Abstract

This article examines the ways that 21 girl gangsters perform violent street culture

in Cape Town, South Africa. It examines their participation in the city’s township

gangs, with a particular focus on female involvement in gang-related acts of aggression

and violence. Research looks to move beyond portrayals of girl gangsters in Cape

Town as either victims or accessories. It shows how they leverage street cultural

performances in reaction to intersectional oppression, and in an attempt to empower

themselves. Young women in this study joined gangs and took part in violence for

many of the same reasons that men do—protection, income, status, and so on—as

well as due to threats of sexual violence faced specifically by females. But street

cultural participation for females in Cape Town also often perpetuates cycles of

violent victimization, incarceration, and substance abuse that keep girl gangsters

trapped in a life on the streets. In this way, females in this study broke from the binary

view of girl gangsterism as either totally liberating or totally injurious, embodying

both simultaneously.

Keywords

Gangs, street culture, females, violence, Cape Town

Introduction

This article examines the ways that female gang members in Cape Town, South Africa,

participate in violent street culture. Most of the city’s gang violence takes place on the

“Cape Flats”: the expansive sandy periphery where many non-White residents

1School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK

Corresponding Author:

Dariusz Dziewanski, School of Oriental and African Studies, 721 Bossi Place, London WC1H 0XG, UK.

Email: dariusz_dziewanski@soas.ac.uk

914374FCXXXX10.1177/1557085120914374Feminist CriminologyDziewanski

research-article2020

Dziewanski 439

struggle to access incomes (City of Cape Town, 2014), security (University of Cape

Town, Centre of Criminology, 2015); policing (O’Regan & Pikoli, 2014); justice

(Gould, 2014); and housing, infrastructure, and services (Ehebrecht, 2015). While

gangs in Cape Town’s Black townships are generally small and unstructured (Roloff,

2014), those in colored1 areas have evolved into organized criminal enterprises

(Hagedorn, 2008).2 Thus, given their prominence in the city’s social ecology of crimi-

nal violence, colored gangs are the focus of this article. The growth of these gangs

took root in the social disorganization created by apartheid3 (Lambrechts, 2012) and

flourished as postapartheid South Africa opened its borders to the world. This allowed

local gangs to grow and professionalize their operations through connections made

with transnational crime syndicates (Standing, 2006). However, it is the failures of

urban renewal following the end of the apartheid regime that are perhaps the most

robust drivers of gangsterism in Cape Town.

Today, the state concentrates its resources on fortifying capital assets in the affluent

and largely White downtown center and its surrounding suburbs, and by and large,

neglects the insecurity and poverty of the Cape Flats (Samara, 2011). Gangs are left to

fill the resultant gaps in governance and development (Standing, 2006), offering their

members opportunities for protection (Jensen, 2006) and income (Samara, 2011),

among other advantages. Murder statistics speak to the unambiguous disparities

between living—and dying—in central Cape Town and its periphery. In 2019, just

seven murders were reported to the Cape Town Central police precinct that covers the

city’s high-priced real estate, fancy restaurants, and fashionable shops (Institute for

Security Studies [ISS], 2019).4 By comparison, those precincts serving the Cape Flats

communities where this research project was carried out had exponentially more; for

that same year, 86 murders were reported to police in Philippi, 57 to Manenberg police,

148 to Mitchells Plain police, and 247 to police in Delft. Police statistics indicate that

about one third of murders in the city and its surrounding areas are gang-related (South

African Police Service [SAPS], 2018).

The most popular image of Cape colored gangsterism is that of a brash and belliger-

ent young man agitating for dignity (Jensen, 2008) and pride (Cooper, 2009). In con-

trast, colored women are usually rendered through maternal and matriarchal stereotypes

(Jensen, 2008; Ross, 2015; Salo, 2003). In the context of gang research in Cape Town,

women and girls are represented either as accessories to violence or as victims of it

(Pinnock, 2016; Shaw & Skywalker, 2017). Yet, there have been examples of powerful

gangster women in the city. For example, the Mongrels gang has had a number of

women in leadership positions (Pinnock, 1987) and Katie-Ann Arendse reportedly

rose to become a leader in the Firm (Joseph, 1999). Such women subvert classic con-

structions of matriarchal and maternal respectability, confirming that females can join

gangs in Cape Town and hold power in the city’s criminal underworld. Local under-

representation of females in gang writings follows similar tendencies in international

criminological and gang scholarship that tends to focus on males (Hughes, 2005).

In general, international writings on female gang participation have been dichoto-

mized as a function of either “exploitation” or “liberation” (Batchelor, 2009; Curry,

1998; Hagedorn & Devitt, 1999; Miller, 2001). The former perspective sees females as