What if SA’s rate of repeat-offending could be cut from 80% to zero with nothing more than faith and coffee?
That’s what’s happened at the Gangstar Café’s two branches in Cape Town, which are staffed by ex-convicts who met missionary group The Message Trust behind bars.
The story of Xola Dingiswayo, now barista and manager of the Mowbray branch, is typical. He joined a gang at 14 and started smoking tik and preying on his neighbours in the sprawling shack community of Samora Machel, in Philippi.
By the age of 22 he was serving his second prison sentence and realised he was “living life as if I don’t care. I was living a life of drugs and gangsterism. I was thinking about all of these things I have done, how I let myself get to this point.”
Dingiswayo, now 30, started attending church services — he admitted his main motivation was to look at the female missionaries when everyone’s eyes were closed for prayer — then joined The Message Trust, which runs a job-readiness programme at Drakenstein prison in Paarl.
When he was released in 2015, Dingiswayo started working at an ice-cream stall as part of The Message Trust’s reintegration programme. “The thing that encouraged me a lot was seeing how people looked at me, not seeing the Xola that I was,” he said.
“They listened when I spoke to them. I saw the love they had for me. Even when some of them heard that I was in prison, they never judged me. They accepted me back and encouraged me to keep on doing what I was doing.”
R140,400 - Annual cost of housing a prisoner, according to Gangstar Café
45% - Extent of overcrowding in Western Cape prisons
100,000 - Estimated number of gang members in the Western Cape
— tHE
Dayne Miles, Gangstar Café communications manager, said the Mowbray and Durbanville shops were sustainable businesses that had found a way of rehabilitating prisoners not only practically but in “absolutely every element of their lives”.
“We found the combination of coffee plus the stories these guys are able to share in this relaxed and casual setting works so well.”
When the Sunday Times visited, a group of people celebrating a birthday were listening to Dingiswayo’s story. “It’s about hope. We all need hope. We are all impacted by crime regularly,” said Miles.
“To hear there is an opportunity for young people to change their lives and to turn away from gangsterism is a story of hope that’s quite powerful.”
When Dingiswayo returned to Samora Machel, eager to preach his new-found faith, he found three of his former gang comrades had been killed by the community in mob lynchings. Another was addicted to drugs.
Now he has reconciled with his mother and sisters, works as a mentor at a halfway house for troubled young men and last March married a woman he has known since his youth.
“She knows my past, knows the very beginning. I’ve been trying and she’s been ignoring me because of the life that I was living, and at last she maybe saw that God was working in my life,” he said.
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