Terugskiet (returning fire): Growing up on the street corners of Manenberg
The ‘coloured’ community of South Africa suffers the highest rates of homicide in the country and is the focus of this study on the involvement of children and youth in organised armed violence in South Africa. This chapter focuses on criminal street gangs in the primarily coloured communities of the Cape Flats area of Cape Town, in Western Cape province. Criminal street gangs, who have a high incidence of youth involvement, have been a feature of coloured communities there for over fifty years, and are aligned to prison gangs. Unlike the gangs of other population groups, coloured gangs have an independent institutional identity and some have been controlling the same turf for generations.
