Leaving Gangs in Cape Town: Disengagement as Role Exit

First Doubts

Role exit theory conceptualizes “first doubts” (Ebaugh 2013, 41) as the creeping questions and reservations about commitments to old roles; desistance from delinquency and offending, for example, can start with doubts from cognitive shifts in thinking or maturation (Carson and Vecchio 2015). This study found that, for many, disenchantment with gangs resulted from reservations about the inconsistencies and contradictions of gang ideologies and lifestyles, a finding that also echoes other studies (Carson and Esbensen 2016; 2016; Padilla 1992; Decker, Pyrooz, and Moule 2014). Experiences in prison also proved to be major contributing factor to raising doubts about gangs; incarceration can stoke people’s fears of being separated from family and society (Berger et al. 2017; Moloney et al. 2009). But the most frequent doubts surfaced around violence and the threat of violence, as has been noted elsewhere too (Decker, Pyrooz, and Moule 2014).

Even amongst those research participants that had previously led lives of considerable brutality, violent acts targeted at them or their loved ones often engendered misgivings about gang life. Emmanuel ⁹ (male, 24 years old), for example, had been a member of the Playboys for eight years, and was a known as a predator in his neighbourhood’s criminal social ecology. Though the working-class suburb of Athlone that he resided in was relatively well-off and secure when compared to neighbouring communities like Hanover Park and Manenberg, he had participated in and been targeted by numerous assaults, stabbings, and shootings, having been arrested and sent to prison multiple times. Yet, Emmanuel had little desire to disengage for much of his time as a Playboy. Eventually, however, concern for his personal safety created doubts. “I thought I was going to die. It was déjà vu; I was already shot [before], and I didn’t know if they shoot me this time if I’m going to die”, he explained. This is not to say that violent victimization automatically prompted a reconsideration of gang life. Emmanuel had been shot multiple times, and none of these incidents made him sceptical about being a Playboy. Indeed, after showing me scars from entrance wounds his on arm, chest, and side from a shooting that led to a six-month hospital stay, he exclaimed: “when I got out of hospital, I went to go shoot the guy that shot me”. The long-term effects of violence amassed, but took time to resonate with Emmanuel, mixing over time with deeper disquiet about the well-being of his family and vicarious experiences with death via fellow gang members that had been killed:

Friends of mine were dying all over. And I saw how their mommies were crying and pulling their hair out because of their children that’s gone . . . I just thought to myself: what would my mommy do if I was lying there? How would she be? How would she live?. . . I started thinking about my family. I must keep them safe. And my sisters, what are they going to do? If I’m not here, who is going to look after them [in the neighbourhood]? My father is on the sea and all of my brothers are away from the house. I’m the man of the house and I thought: I just have to slow down a little.

The quote above makes clear that Emmanuel’s notions of insecurity extend beyond fear for his own life. More important for him — and many other study participants — was the emotional and financial stress that one’s death might create for family members. So, Emmanuel began to consider leaving the Playboys out of concern for his family. But he could not simply exit. Neither his out-of-gang transition, nor those of others captured in this study, occurred through a quick and neat step-by-step process. First doubts were usually animated by the cumulative long-term interaction of inter-gang violence, intra-gang rivalries, long prison sentences, etc. For those gang members that were targeted by violence — or saw their family, friends, and fellow gang members targeted — seeds of doubt planted and grew into increasingly robust reservations about gang participation. These then cued up future leaving behaviours:

I couldn’t stop just so. I couldn’t just stay away then. They would come fetch me by my house. . . Like on a Sunday, we use to sit in die kring ¹⁰ and everybody use to take their knives and guns out and tell what are the wrongs you did [against gang rules] during the week. If you did wrong they would hit you and that how you would learn your lesson not to do for the next week again. So, I if didn’t obey the rules, by being more active [in gang activities] I could get beaten too. . . or my family will be hurt, maybe.

Therefore, while violence was the force motivating Emmanuel’s wish to get out of the Playboys, it was also the thing that threatened his exit. Violence too ultimately opened a window for disengagement:

I just started slowly staying away, and telling some of the friends I don’t smaak ¹¹ for this life anymore, and that stuff. They would say: you can’t leave my bru, they’re going to shoot you or kill you . . . Then eventually some of them died. The other [newer] Playboys didn’t bother with me so much.

The typical way of seeing gang violence is as deadly and debilitating. But Emmanuel’s case illustrates that it can also have surprisingly liberating effects, prompting him to consider disengaging, and giving him the freedom to depart as the Playboy’s old guard was killed off.

We thus start to see that transitioning from gang roles is not an event, or even a set of easily identifiable stages. It is rather a blend of helping and hindering events and processes that, when taken together, are manifested as disengagement. Considerable time was generally required for respondents’ first doubts to align with transition opportunities, and even more was needed for these to yield an enduring exit. Since exit decisions are constrained by objective barriers to quit gangs and start new identities, subjective transformations do not automatically alter life conditions. Emmanuel’s apprehensions about membership and his desire to disconnect from the Playboys were compulsory — yet insufficient — conditions to do so. He could not pull out of the Playboys until he felt it was reasonably safe to do so. We should note that, although he finally disengaged without being ‘jumped out’ or attacked, Emmanuel’s exit was not without peril. In addition to the threat he felt from fellow Playboys, he was also later repeatedly accosted by the rival Stoepa Boys. Let us then view with caution research citing the ubiquity of non-violent separation (Bolden 2013), as it may not account for the insecurity and distress that lies beneath ostensibly ‘peaceful’ gang exits. Indeed, former gang members in this study were unanimously wary of harassment and threats of the sort that Emmanuel faced – or worse.

Alternative Socializations

The second step in role transition is alternative socialization, which usually involves a period of investigating and comparing different social opportunities (Ebaugh 2013). Exploring new possibilities means understanding what they are, so that they can be evaluated against the already-known rewards and costs of present roles. Prison and rehabilitation programmes were important locales of socialization. By far, the most important alternative roles that research participants considered were those related to profession, spirituality, parenthood, and family. Most were aware of these alternative roles, but had little opportunity to practically pursue them, as being enmeshed in gangs usually undermines other social bonds in a way that impedes alternative socialization (Pinnock, n.d.; 2016; Pyrooz, Sweeten, and Piquero 2013).

For example, Jerome (male, 31 years old) says he cut ties with his parents for much of the decade he spent as a gangster in Mitchells Plain’s Eastridge — an impoverished part of Cape Town’s second-largest township that is especially hard hit by gang violence. He explained that “there is always a weakness in any gangster. If it’s not his family, it’s a woman. . . So you follow them and you get him”. Jerome avoided his loved ones because he equated human connection with vulnerability. But because human interaction is also a conduit for socialization, eschewing such connections inevitably limited his disengagement options. Instead he remained disconnected from family, and persisted in the solitude of the streets throughout his twenties:

And I like wanted to stop, because of my family, and such. And it’s like I would say, I’m more matured now. . . a person gets older man, and not younger. And I would think such things and really mean it, and think enough is enough. But I did not feel I could get out.

Role exit theory presents the weighing of social alternatives as a mostly rational process; though it concedes somewhat that “circumstances, unexpected events, feelings, and intuitions were not as important in shaping the process as deliberate calculations” (Ebaugh 2013, 87–88). In Jerome’s case, there was a swelling, and almost imperceptible, wave created by cumulative interactions with is mother, an increasing longing for family, a growing dissatisfaction with the streets that impelled him back to his family and away from gangs:

Okay, there are some incidents — not coming out [of the gang] — but [incidents] that softens my heart. Like, my mother, on my birthday, she phones — somebody else answer pick up [the phone] — and she just tells them: tell Jerome that I say happy birthday. So things like that bring me back a little [to family].

The calls and other small gestures were “like drops of water going on a dry heart”. Over the six years Jerome was away from his mother and father, these familial overtures permeated him to slowly accumulate in a reservoir of homesickness. Despite the fact that he would actively “try to dry it out again” to dispel the vulnerability he associated with family connections, Jerome admitted that “the small drops that softened my heart. . . made me miss my family”. Homesickness amplified the doubts he already had about the “self-gain” and “unfairness” associated with the gangster lifestyle. Other researchers have shown that internal doubts can produce shifts in long-term decision-making that afterwards inspire changes in external environments and the pursuit of more pro-social roles (Bushway and Paternoster 2012). Certainly, many other interviewees in this study also stated that contact with family, even if sporadic, underpinned initial doubts that eventually helped draw them away from gangsterism. But this usually occurred only after many years in the streets, and in a way that was almost always punctuated by some type of turning point.

For Jerome, he managed to reconnect with his parents, and even to start a family, but was still caught up in gangs. It took a dispute with the powerful Hard Livings gang to definitively trigger his exit. Jerome had never backed down from such threats before, and through the years had built his street credibility with acts of wild bravado ¹² . Yet, he was now backing down from the Hard Livings because conflict threatened new pro-social connections with his parents, girlfriend, and new-born daughter that he could not countenance killing off:

I thought this will be very dangerous towards the family that I now have, and at that time it was crucial making my decision. . . I have stirred up a lot of hatred again, so will I be responsible for more murders? So I would then be responsible for that? My decision was then to retreat.

That same week he stopped doing drugs and joined a church, further reinforcing his new non-gang identity. “This gangsterism makes you believe you’re strong. [But] you are alone. . . So, for me to change from there, it was really a family and spiritual thing that happened with me, to show what things are [really] valuable”, said Jerome. His turning point was bolstered by the growing appreciation for the emotional and social abundance found in family and faith. When bonds to the gang become less stable, other social connections can be reconsidered as alternatives. Family was an essential alternative socialization for almost all study participants, as well as a modality for creating an ex-role. The same is true of religion, both as a practice and a community. Getting work was another important practical and social factor supporting successful transition. But finding consistent employment was a difficult and lengthy process for the majority of respondents, meaning that many were forced to rely heavily on family for financial and social support.

Jerome, for example, was a once formidable criminal that had returned home to an almost-childlike version of himself. At the time of our interviews he was living with his parents, working part-time, and giving all of his earnings to his mother to manage on his behalf. The symbolism of this return was noteworthy because it touches on the influence of Jerome’s pre-gang identity. This is a consistent theme that emerged among a portion of the study sample: looking back to childhood and adolescent family-based identities as way of framing their exits. Self-identification with one’s pre-gang self was used in two ways: as a motivation for leaving gang life, and as a way to personally distance oneself from roles linked to criminality and trauma. Importantly, these pre-gang socializations could reinforce personal changes by helping motivate and make sense of gang exit, as described by Jerome here:

I would say what kept [me] soft was the upbringing of my parents. I would say that really, that was the thing. Because deep down in the heart I had an upbringing to be fair. . . So what happens is that upbringing and fairness then stays and comes back [to you]. . . I felt lonely a lot of times [in gang]. All [gangsters] is crooks, which means now they crooking on each other, and it means you cannot be friends. There’s no friends there.

For Jerome, values and principles acquired during his childhood and adolescence underscored creeping disillusionment with the gang lifestyle, converging with his desire to return to family life. Of course, others also noted the negative socializing experiences of their childhood and adolescence, pointing to family influences that valued the criminality and aggression respondents then found in Cape Town’s gangs.

This is further evidence that finding and succeeding in alternative social roles is not easy for an ex-gangster. Social roles must be negotiated relative to other people. Jerome had survived his conflict with the Hard Livings, and still he confronted intimidation and harassment from other gang members. He described, for instance, an incident with a rival he had badly assaulted just prior to his withdrawal:

When this guy [I beat] came, he says: Jerome, we forget what happened in the past. But I need a ZAR 10 ¹³ now man. . . then we call it square. I just said: I do not do negotiation with you, simple. . . Then a few guys ask: are you really done with the world? Then I said ‘ja’, and then one of them — a few of them — told me like a threat: you must remember Jerome, when you close the gate, it’s closed. And then I told him exactly that [it’s closed], and then I move. So, there was lots of tests. But you just keep showing you have changed, until people believe it — until you believe and you’re [also] comfortable with the new pattern of your life.

For Jerome, and for all others in this study, newly socialized roles were tested and threatened by violence, joblessness, social isolation, and the like. The socialization stage is the part of transition when pro-gang and anti-gang pushes and pulls become strongest, and where disengagement likely succeeds or fails (Decker, Pyrooz, and Moule 2014). Because it is a vulnerable stage for reengagement with gangs, it is also the point at which targeted interventions can be effective. One strategy could be to support the reunification and reconciliation of gang members with family and help connect them into community groups until their turning point finally arrives.

Turning Points

A turning point emerges as an “event that mobilizes and focuses awareness that old lives of action are complete, have failed, have been disrupted, or are no longer personally satisfying” (Ebaugh 2013, 123). As with all in-gang experiences, turning points differ depending on the person and his or her experiences in gangs ¹⁴ . The disengagement experiences of most people in this study involved motivating events like going to prison, spiritual awakenings, having a child, or getting into a rehabilitation programme. Events like these can act as catalysts that alter or redirect long-term life trajectories (Elder 1985). They first change some pattern of psychological functioning, which persistently then alters personal development in a way that is different from development before the turning point (Rutter 1996). For instance, when Alfred (male, 43 years old) was almost shot and killed during a gang war, it made him reconsider the cycles of violence that had until then animated his day-to-day life in Hanover Park. The poor coloured community has a reputation as one of Cape Town’s most gang-affected areas. “Today they shoot us one dead, tomorrow we shoot one dead. . . They shot me [through] my head. Shot me six times, [but] only two they get me”, he recalled, after acknowledging that he was “incredibly lucky” to survive a nearly fatal bullet that went through this skull and out of the roof of his mouth. But this was not his first confrontation with dying. Alfred points to what he described as “five death spots” on this body: places where he was shot and stabbed while a long-time member of the Scorpions, and later Cape Town’s largest gang — the Americans.

It is easy to imagine how a near-fatal experience from a gang shooting, stabbing, or assault might result in a re-examination of one’s life choices. In some ways the violent ‘turning point’ is a misnomer though. Getting shot (or shooting somebody) was typically described as something lived out over-and-over in the minds of participants through anger, fear, memory, conversation, introspection, and trauma; violent behaviour itself was often also described as a non-isolable part of the broader dynamics of retaliatory violence. As Sampson and Laub note, for instance, it might be thought of “not as a singular turning point but as a potential causal force in desistance that operates as a dynamic, time-varying process through time” (2005, 35). For Alfred, his near-death experience blended with personal maturation and disillusionment with gangsterism to create the circumstances for a turning point:

I’m mos ¹⁵ tired man. It’s the fighting. . . My head was just swelling [with stress]. All that stuff is on top of me. You got mos stress in your brains. . . It was too hot man. Other times were also hot — nah — but this. . . and with my age, you understand. . . It was a time in my life that I must take a boundary, to say this is finished now.

Because gang members are taught over the course of their lives to accept and expect terror and injury, even a near-death experience might not frighten a ‘street soldier’ hardened by many years on the battlefield (Garbarino 2000). This study found that surviving violence is usually just one ingredient in a cocktail of factors that mix to create change, and that the dynamics of a violent act ripple beyond the event itself. Alfred did not automatically long to leave the Americans after almost being murdered. He wanted vengeance. It is a reaction typical of those growing up in violent environments, who are programmed over time to react violently to confrontation (Bargh, Chen, and Burrows 1996). The week he spent in hospital following the shooting was used to plot revenge: “I planned again that I must ambush the whole family of them [that shot me]. . . we’re running into one of their houses, [to] shoot all the people dead in the house”. But the day the attack was to take place Alfred instead returned to the hospital that treated him, telling a counsellor: “listen here, I don’t want police here. I want you to help me because I want to go rest. . . I just want to go to a place to chill for a time”. It was then that he was connected with a rehabilitation centre, where he ended up staying for half-a-year as he disengaged from the gang.

The aftermath of violent encounters can serve as an important intervention point for speaking to people about getting away from gang life. Counsellors, community workers, police, doctors, nurses, and other professionals who are in contact with gang members at this time must be aware of the leaving possibilities that can arise at this time. Other researchers, for instance, have noted the hospital setting - after a violent incident - may have some potential venue for facilitating pathways out of violence (Hoffman 2014; Purtle et al. 2023). Prison was a setting where turning points were reported in this study. Many interviewees noted how incarceration played into fears of being separated from family and community and exacerbated frustration with lack of visits and financial support from one’s fellow gang members; of course, South Africa’s prison system — with its notorious prison gangs ¹⁶ — can also normalize gangsterism (Samara 2011). Though only a small number of study participants found their eventual exit in prison, most did indicate having doubts about gang life when in jail, even if the power of prison gangs made it too dangerous to disengage there ¹⁷ . Instead, interviewees generally remained prison gangsters while harboring their misgivings about it and pursuing alterative socialization through schooling programmes, training opportunities, support sessions, spiritual groups, and lectures and films. Such prison programmes introduced the idea that a non-gang future was possible, but did so in a way that respondents could only act upon the lessons they learned much later in their lives. In addition, there was a cluster of respondents who were helped to leave gangs through rehabilitation programmes outside of prison; let us note though that almost all of the respondents attempted such programmes at some point, and even those that succeeded generally only did so after multiple failed attempts. Overall, most people disengaged in their communities, as part of informal transition processes that depended on a number of interacting personal, social, and circumstantial factors that seemed to come together in the long-term, and manifest expectedly. Each out-of-gang transition is different and difficult to predict. Providing assistance to members trying to get out can only go so far. But understanding the potential places and points of exit and offering support there could help strengthen the transition process in a way that facilitates the development of ex-roles.

Creating the Ex-role

The final stage of the exit transition involves creating and adapting to an ex-role, in a way that successfully de-emphasizes self-perceptions and habits of the previous role, as well as the social norms, expectations, and obligations it entailed (Ebaugh 2013). New roles paralleled the key sources of socialization: family, religion, and work, for those that could get it. But this research project found that redefining relationships to the gang and its activities requires access to appropriate opportunities for security and socioeconomic empowerment. If the right exit opportunities do not exist, the pressure to go back to the gang can counteract the desire to get out, as evidenced by the frequent disengagement failures most interviewees reported before they successfully exited. The case study below shows in greater detail how a gang member’s circumstances affect opportunities to fully develop a role as an ex-gangster.

After thirteen years spent as an American gang member, Ibrahim (male, 37 years old) told me: “Now I want to just show them [in the Americans] that I am trying to be just with my family and going to mosque, just to show that I am like a normal guy.” Because work is difficult to come by for poor coloured and criminalized ex-offenders like Ibrahim, he and others noted family and religion as essential to both the personal consolidation of new roles and to the social validation of these roles by fellow gang members, rivals, and community. Religion, for instance, provided him and other respondents: a source of personal strength, a sense of control, moral guidance, and a way of proving to others their new non-gang roles. Spirituality has elsewhere similarly been described as a key personal and social resource in the disengagement process (Brenneman 2011; Flores 2014; Rodgers and Jensen 2015). For Ibrahim, being a “good Muslim” was partly an act of faith, and partly a performance undertaken to indicate he is no longer a threat to the Americans. Like many other interviewees, he additionally indicated that being seen as a family man — a dedicated parent and a dependable spouse — is another way to validate role transition: “when people see I am just busy with my family life, maybe like they just let me be in peace”. Family also emerged as an important source of social and emotional support amongst respondents in this study. Because Ibrahim could not find a stable income, he too relied on his family for financial support in between jobs. About half of all respondents were likewise unable to find steady work, relying instead on family and friends, effectively showing that new role as non-gang is dependent on the economic and social ability (read: opportunity) to do so.

Ibrahim first started to have doubts about gangsterism while incarcerated at Cape Town’s notorious Pollsmoor Prison — where he served various sentences ranging from three to nine years. Although he was an active member of the 27s prison gang in jail, he participated in prison programmes as a way of passing these sentences. Ibrahim recalled a film that stuck with him: it depicted a gang member finding redemption after getting shot. This seemingly unremarkable and somewhat cliché depiction of life-after-gangs dovetailed his growing disillusionment:

If you are in prison then you would really see who is your brothers. So I never got visits. No people of my gangster buddies came to me besides my family. So when I saw this film this, picture came in my mind that I must take a better way out of this I did this for myself and for all the wrong things I do.

Like Ibrahim, others in this study also described how “minor” encounters with speeches, songs, and films in prison resonated with them and were later woven into their exit narratives and transitions.

Ibrahim’s final turning point out of the Americans followed a dispute with two fellow gang members. “The one who accuse me came in for the second shot [at stabbing me]. But at that time he came straight into my knife. I stab him straight into his heart”, he said, when recounting the incident. Police deemed it a case of self-defence and did not pursue prosecution in the courts. But adjudicating gang justice proved less straightforward. Although the Americans’ leaders agreed that Ibrahim was defending himself, the siblings of the man he killed — both also Americans — were not as forgiving. They vowed retribution. Ibrahim tried to move away from the working-class neighbourhood of Silvertown where he was based, but returned to live with his family after just a few months for want of consistent work. He now lives directly across from an American hideout, where a sibling of the American he killed also stays. Even if they “look every day in each other’s faces”, Ibrahim has little choice but to keep confronting his past. “I’m just doing what I must do, and nothing else”, he says. Despite the American flag that still dominates the wall of this tiny backyard shack, Ibrahim explained that he tries not to associate with the gang anymore, insisting that the stars and stripes merely offer cover during disengagement:

It’s a way of [fooling] brothers that think I am maybe turning my back [on them]. I don’t want to be involved. But it’s possible [they] think I can koppel ¹⁸ with other gangsters because I murdered an American, maybe. I think they [are] going to kill me. I can be some danger to them. This is only a way of showing them the flag is still here, but [really] it does not mean I am an American. . . So I can do my own thing.

Ibrahim wrapped himself in the flag as a type of ghetto camouflage that helps protect him in a dangerous environment. Enacting gang performances can help non-gangsters navigate the dangers of township life (Lindegaard and Zimmermann 2017). But sustaining this act requires a very fine balance. The strategy might keep Ibrahim alive, but it might also keep him partially embedded in his former gang role. If he does not maintain a safe distance from gang associations and activities, Ibrahim could be dragged back into the Americans. Yet, if he does not show the gang that “the flag is still there” he risks being killed.

Ultimately, moving out of Silvertown is not an option. So, Ibrahim settles for living peacefully with the gangsters around him. But even peaceful performances have their limits. Ibrahim is prepared to fight for the small island of freedom he has secured, returning to type violent “street capital” (Sandberg 2008, 158) he relied on as a gangster:

Don’t think that [because] I am trying to be a better person that I become not stronger any more. . . If anybody here disrespects me, I stand up. I hit him and kick him, and I tell him: do not forget who I was, and who I am. Just because of me trying to do the right thing, does not mean I am losing this power. I have it. I can still do what I have to do.

In an ideal world, Decker, Pyrooz, and Moule state that when “someone reaches the final stage, postexit validation, the role transition should be complete and the gang member of yesterday should be superseded by the father or mother, husband or wife, and employee or employer roles of today” (2014, 273). Ibrahim’s situation is unfortunately far from ideal. He cannot totally “knife off” (Maruna and Roy 2007, 106-109) his connections to the Americans or the possibility of participating in violence. His story demonstrates that declaring oneself an “ex” is not enough. While the vast majority of gang members were able to totally disassociate from gangsterism, they also indicated considerable challenges that included restricted movement, threats and security concerns from former rivals, histories of substance abuse, stigma from community, criminalization by police, and inadequate job prospects. Even as ex-gangsters, most are still coping with many of the same circumstances that originally pushed them into gangs. Their experiences are indicative of the problem facing researchers and others working on gang issues. Given the tangled mess of social, economic, political, and historical forces driving structural oppression in Cape Town, prevention and disengagement interventions will inevitably be limited without larger structural reforms (Standing 2006). It must be then that any gang disengagement program be part of comprehensive social and economic policies that redistribute wealth, decrease segregation, improve policing, and provide a meaningful empowerment to young people like Ibrahim trying to get out and stay out of gangs.