Nothing moved in the ganglands of Elsies River apart from clothes flapping on washing lines. Dozens of eyes were on the street as we passed in the shadow of four apartment blocks, the home to four rival gangs, the air taut with tension. We were there with community leaders to walk through the streets where the gangs rule.
“Don’t point and don’t talk,” one of the community leaders instructed. “Even an auntie in a bib could be listening.” Silently we passed a street where some six suspected tik dealers run operations.
Nine of the 20 police stations with the highest murder rate in South Africa are in the Western Cape but Elsies River is not one of these hotspots, despite regular reports of gun violence and killings.
“A shooting is only an ‘incident’ if someone dies,” says Imraahn Mukaddam, the co-founder of community organisation Inspire Network and radio station. Not if a bullet breaks your living room window as happened to Elsies River resident Hamish Arries. “I was at home in the January holidays chatting to my daughter when bullets flew past my face," he says.
Death is a breath away and Elsies River feels like a war zone residents say. Vrygrond, near the surfing mecca of Muizenberg, is also not a hotspot — but 14 people were shot dead there in as many days during April.
Shifting patterns of gun violence
Gang violence in Cape Town goes back generations but the patterns of gun violence have changed here — and across South Africa — for the worse. “For more than a decade murders have increased year on year and only last year they started to stabilise,” says Gareth Newham, head of the justice and violence prevention programme, at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS).
Brazen shootings in public places, multiple shootings (leaving four or more dead) — including in rural areas — and execution-style hits have become more common, researchers and activists report.
Deadly shootings related to taxi violence have also surged recently. This week a taxi owner was shot dead in Cape Town on Wednesday and a taxi owner – who took over her murdered husband’s business – was killed in a hail of bullets in her car in Germiston on Monday.
Gun Free South Africa director, Stanley Maphosa, says: “We have seen an increase in multiple shootings and the number of women being killed in public spaces. Another change is the increase in killings by police.”
Nowhere is safe anymore says Lorraine Moko, a social worker and trauma counsellor on the Cape Flats, who has been caught in crossfire. “You are not safe at home. You are not safe in the community: five patrollers were shot dead in Soshanguve [north of Pretoria]. You are not even safe in court.” A man was shot dead inside the Wynberg regional court in Cape Town last week.
Over the past decade the explosion of illegal firearms and ammunition and the proliferation of organised crime — which multiply each other — are driving murders up. Mark Shaw, director of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, says public shootings are a show of power by organised crime and gang bosses.
Focusing on firearm crime would reduce violence, says independent researcher David Bruce, noting that up to half (43%) of murders and two-thirds (65%) of attempted murders currently are gun-related.
Using crime data to map areas where firearm crime is concentrated is among the recommendations in his ISS policy brief Targeting Firearm Crime Will Make South Africa Safer. A flood of illegal guns and ammunition has fuelled mass shootings. “In multiple killings, like Mdlalose tavern in Soweto, a lot of the victims are incidental,” say Bruce.
Sixteen people were killed and seven were wounded in the tavern massacre on July 10 2022 and the leader investigator of the case has since been gunned down. In the Eastern Cape, six community policing forum members were gunned down in Qumbu on October 6. On September 27, 17 people, many of them women and children, were killed in Lusikisiki.
Of the provinces, the Western Cape, Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal have the highest risk of murder and specific areas of the Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga also have high rates says Bruce.
“I’m on several [crime] groups in the Western Cape that have alerts for killings and serious injuries,” says gun control advocate Adele Kirsten, explaining that a code blue, red and orange system has been adopted by some. “Most alerts are code blue, which means the mortuary van. Usually (the fatalities are) one-one-one but often there are more people,” she says. The alerts stream through 24/7.
Guns escalate deadly conflicts
Even children as young as 11 who are in gangs are getting guns, says Llewellyn MacMaster, chair of the Cape Crime Crisis Coalition, and firearms escalate deadly conflicts. “What used to be a fist fight over a girl is now a gunfight which ends in a murder scene,” Mukaddam says.
A gun is a status symbol in the gang world and beyond, says Wits psychology professor Malose Langa. “You can have your BMW or GTI but once you have a gun, you are a real gangster.”
Young black men are both the biggest victims and the biggest perpetrators of gun-related crime, says Langa who wrote the seminal book Becoming Men: Black Masculinities in a South African Township. Young, middle-class black men are a growing market for licensed firearms to protect themselves, he suggests.
Fellow Wits psychology prof Brett Bowman has researched “what factors predict whether you are likely to be murdered in a robbery in South Africa”. One collaborative study of robbery-homicides - which analysed 68 801 robberies reported between 2003 and 2014 using data from the SAPS Crime Administration System (CAS) - found that “white males over 45 years old, who were armed, had an increased odds of being killed during a robbery event”, he says.
“Seven men die for every one woman in homicides [not restricted to shootings],” Bowan says.
Arries, a community policing forum leader who has been patrolling the streets for 30 years, has seen this. The Cape Flats is “caught in a vice grip of lawlessness,” he says of gangsters who don’t fear the police or prison. MacMaster buried a 29-year-old man recently whose killer was known to be boasting: “Eh het vir Piet uitgehaal.”
“The breakdown in the moral fabric of society goes back to apartheid and broken dignity over generations,” he says.
His brother died in his arms, his son in his wife’s
An Elsies River resident John (not his real name) lost his 18-year-old son to gunfire in 2022, 25 years after his older brother was shot dead. “My brother died in my arms when I was in matric,” says the community activist.
His wife held their oldest son’s head in her lap as he was dying, while the boy's siblings, then 13 and 10, watched. “For two years after our son died the older one stayed in his room, except for school, and he is filled with anger if he sees a skollie,”
Before his death, the boy ran his father's spaza shop. John had left the city’s library services after 20 years to open the business, which has since been forced to close.
He says: “I’m looking for a job. I always try to look at life positively.” Yet some children run towards gunfire when they hear shots instead of hiding, says Moko. “One 9-year-old I counselled only felt safe in her bed at home, where a fatal shooting had taken place. There she slept fine. If you moved her to another place, she could not sleep for fear.”
Western Cape MEC for police oversight and community safety, Anroux Marais, says the province — together with the City of Cape Town — is deploying joint initiatives such as LEAP (Law Enforcement Advancement Plan) to improve safety.
LEAP officers are doubled up in six hotspots around Cape Town — Delft, Khayelitsha, Phillipi East, Nyanga, Mitchells Plain and Gugulethu — where murders have decreased by 15,5% since 2020. New technology such as the shot spotter, drones and dashcams are helping, she says.
Mchunu said: “We have signed co-operation agreements with all the metropolitan municipalities throughout the country and we are fighting crime together. We know the Western Cape is plagued by gang violence and we are decisively dealing with that, together with the city.”
Action to reduce gun violence gets results
Gun violence and security experts advocate the adoption of innovative tech but emphasise that its deployment must align with clear priorities and measurable outcomes.
Police minister Senzo Mchunu said in reply to queries that murders, curbing illegal firearms, organised crime and gender-based violence/femicide are being prioritised and a “number of measures have been implemented to deal with these crimes, including the deployment of specialised skills to certain provinces”.
“Improving and using technology, capacitating and strengthening Crime Intelligence and improving the forensic services” will help fight crime he said.
Gun Free South Africa supports tighter control on firearms. With more control between 1999 and 2009, femicides dropped from 3,793 to 2,363: “We have done it before and we can do it again,” says Maphosa.
Newham says: “We know what works: to focus policing resources on the relatively small proportion of people who commit most of the serious crime ... and SAPS needs to strengthen its detective and intelligence capabilities. However, between 2012 and 2024, the detection rate for murder dropped by 65%.
Experts in gun violence and public safety are encouraged by the actions and attitude of the minister of police, Senzo Mchunu
"While there are 150,000 trained SAPS members, only about 29,000 are detectives. It is detectives that ensure criminals are linked to crimes and can be put in prison. We need to rethink our policing model.”
Between January 2009 and December 2011, Gauteng SAPS implemented an intelligence-driven aggravated robbery strategy says Newham. In the first six months, the cases sent to court increased by 30% and convictions by 15%.
Shaw recommends targeting gang bosses, interrupting the recruitment of youngsters — by tackling the socioeconomic exclusion they endure — and stamping out police corruption as among measures to stop gun violence.
The Central Firearm Registry needs to be digitised and fixed urgently, all experts insist. Stellenbosch University criminologist Dr Guy Lamb says most firearms used in firearm-related crimes were originally owned by licensed firearm owners.
In the 2023/34 financial year, 8,452 civilians and private security companies had licensed firearms stolen or lost. Proposed amendments to the private security industry firearms regulations aim to tighten control of such weapons. The DA has launched a petition to oppose them, issued by Ian Cameron, chair of the portfolio committee on police in parliament.
The Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority (PSiRA) — representing some 600,000 private security officers with about 127,000 firearms — says it welcomes engagement on the amendments, with the chance to comment by April 25. “There is no ban on the use of firearms by private security personnel,” PSiRA spokesperson Bonang Kleinbooi said in response to the outcry around the amendments.
Change under Senzo Mchunu
Experts in gun violence and public safety are encouraged by the actions and attitude of the minister of police, Senzo Mchunu. “We have seen a sea change over the last year or so with more engagement,” says Newham, welcoming the first multisectoral national policing summit last week.
Mchunu said the summit had “laid the foundation towards the type of policing envisaged by the ministry: an efficient, effective, professional and responsive police service”.
“South Africa has 27,500 murders last year but we do not have 27,500 murderers. Less than 20 of people commit the most violent crime,” says Newham. “If we get to those 5,000 people, it will make a massive difference.”
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