Guns and Gang Spaces in South Africa

Politeia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Godfrey Maringira
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Gang Members ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Black Township

The gun is not just an object and or a weapon; it has particular, deep relations with those who carry and possess it. The gun is embedded in the mentality of the man who uses it. Once gun life is inculcated in the mind, it is difficult to leave it behind. In post-apartheid South Africa, gangs and the use of guns have continued unabated. Despite this continued relationship between gangs and guns, studies have skirted around the ways in which guns are experienced and embodied in a context which is imbued with violence. Guns define the gang members who carry them in their everyday lives, as well as the spaces in which gangs operate. Importantly, understanding the spaces of gangs, such as the streets, is critical to understanding the ways in which they help gangs to forge a particular relationship with guns. This article is based on an ethnography of the black township Gugulethu in Cape Town, South Africa.

Gangs: Spatialities and Socialities in South Africa

Politeia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Godfrey Maringira
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Emotional Support ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Gang Membership ◽  
Gang Violence ◽  
Gang Members ◽  
Social And Emotional ◽  
Black Township

The “making” of gang relationships has remained at the periphery of research, yet it is critical in understanding the continuity and sustainability of gangsterism in different contexts. This paper examines the ways in which young men involved in gang violence forge and sustain their relationships in the streets of a black township in South Africa. I argue that the “making” of gang relationships is never easy; rather, it is characterised by violence within and outside gang membership. The article asserts that, within gangs, violence is a technique which sustains their relationships, as it acts as a source of social and emotional support—especially in a context characterised by fractured families as well as social and economic marginalisation. The paper draws from an ethnography of walking the township streets, being in gang streets, talking to gang members, engaging with and observing young men involved in gang violence.

scholarly journals Making Place, Making Home: Lesbian Queer World-Making in Cape Town

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Holland-Muter
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Women's Narratives ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Black Lesbian ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

Abstract: Two dominant, contrasting, narratives characterise public discourse on queer sexualities in Cape Town. On the one hand, the city is touted as the gay capital of South Africa. This, however, is troubled by a binary framing of white zones of safety and black zones of danger (Melanie JUDGE, 2018), which simultaneously brings the ‘the black lesbian’ into view through the lens of discrimination, violence and death. This article explores lesbian, queer and gay women’s narratives of their everyday lives in Cape Town. Their counter narratives reveal how they ‘make’ Cape Town home in relation to racialized and classed heteronormativies. These grey the racialised binary of territorial safety and danger, and produce modes of lesbian constructions of home, notably the modes of embedded lesbianism, homonormativity and borderlands. These reveal lesbian queer life worlds which are ephemeral, contingent and fractured, making known hybrid, contrasting and competing narratives of the city.

‘No effort, no entry’: Fashioning Ubuntu and becoming queer in Cape Town

Sexualities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 1125-1145
Author(s):  
Joseph Bryce Mann
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Survey Data ◽  
Gay Men ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Multiple Scales ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Gay Identity ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Black Township

This article presents data from five years of research on fashion, gay identity, and post-apartheid democracy in Cape Town, South Africa. Through interviews, observations, and survey data on the experiences of young “black” and “coloured” gay men, it shows how admission standards at nightlife venues in the city’s “Gay Village,” De Waterkant, police patrons’ clothing and institutionalize essential models of raced and classed gay belonging that complicate the multicultural “Ubuntu” promised by the state. The article troubles the multiculturalism coincident with tourism media, which frames De Waterkant as “Africa’s Gay Capital,” and instead argues that participants’ understanding and use of clothing in city and black township nightlife present aesthetic anomalies through which the becoming of Ubuntu can be productively rethought. Contributing to geographies of sexuality work, the article shows how classed-race exclusions in De Waterkant help fashion Ubuntu at the junction of multiple scales of spatiality, and by applying Women of Color Feminism and Queer of Color Critique to African Studies, how everyday spaces, and the clothed bodies therein, can reveal the mutually constitutive becoming of Ubuntu and queerness.

Time and Latitude in South Africa

1972 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 27-38
Author(s):  
J. Hers
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Astronomical Observations ◽  
Royal Observatory ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Astronomical Determination ◽  
Limited Accuracy ◽  
Better Than

In South Africa the modern outlook towards time may be said to have started in 1948. Both the two major observatories, The Royal Observatory in Cape Town and the Union Observatory (now known as the Republic Observatory) in Johannesburg had, of course, been involved in the astronomical determination of time almost from their inception, and the Johannesburg Observatory has been responsible for the official time of South Africa since 1908. However the pendulum clocks then in use could not be relied on to provide an accuracy better than about 1/10 second, which was of the same order as that of the astronomical observations. It is doubtful if much use was made of even this limited accuracy outside the two observatories, and although there may – occasionally have been a demand for more accurate time, it was certainly not voiced.

Knowledge about Newborn Discharge Follow-up in Cape Town, South Africa

PEDIATRICS ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 137 (Supplement 3) ◽  
pp. 393A-393A
Author(s):  
KaWing Cho ◽  
Jean P Milambo ◽  
Leonidas Ndayisaba ◽  
Charles Okwundu ◽  
Abiola Olowoyeye ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Cape Town
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