“Die ou ballie is net so ‘n naai soos ons” : race place and gangs in a Durban township

Abstract: There are many aspects of any community’s collective life that are difficult to penetrate. Gangs are one of them. This is exacerbated when one is trying to interview gang members in the midst of violent conflicts fuelled by age old feuds and the trade in illicit drugs. Police are on high alert and gang members particularly edgy. It helps if a researcher is already known in a community and has established networks. In the case of Wentworth, my primary work over the last year has been to construct family histories concentrating on the question of racial identity. In the midst of this research, there was a burst of gang violence that resulted in two murders. I spent a long time talking, debating and interviewing gang members, relying on old style ethnographic fieldwork that involves, as Mintz reflects, “the same willingness to be uncomfortable, to drink bad booze, to be bored by one’s drinking companions, and to be bitten by mosquitoes as always” (2000: 170). The more information I collected, the more I started to reflect on Walter Benjamin’s idea of the destructive character. It is typical Benjamin, full of nuance and subtlety, and I used it as a basis to understand the gang members’ sense of themselves, their mission and how they viewed their defence of “their” turf. This latter aspect emerged time and again in many forms, with Wentworth seen as both a place of danger and place of refuge. The theoretical underpinning for this article is the notion of space as a social creation rather than the “passive locus of social relations” (Lefebvre, 1991: 11, 26) and that our task is to understand “by what social process(es) is place constructed?” (Harvey, 1996: 261)