Rising Cape Town Gang Violence Is Yet Another Legacy of Apartheid

While Cape Town is South Africa’s top tourist attraction, few of its 1.7 million annual foreign visitors venture beyond the iconic areas around Table Mountain to the Cape Flats, a mishmash of sandy, windswept neighborhoods filled with low-rise apartment blocks and shacks designed by the apartheid regime to keep the city’s black and mixed-race residents out of view. Decades of government neglect and high unemployment have contributed to a proliferation in gang activity there. Police estimated in 2013 that there are 100,000 gang members in the city of 4 million people.

Just 12 miles from Cape Town’s beaches, five-star hotels, and internationally lauded restaurants, gangs fight for turf in the area’s rapidly expanding drug trade. The conflict has led to 900 murders in 2019, more than the annual total for 2018, in a country that already has one of the world’s highest murder rates. The root cause of the bloodshed lies in the five decades of apartheid social engineering, during which the Cape Flats were starved of funding, quality education, and police resources. Despite 25 years of democracy, that legacy has persisted.