Terror is the word that best describes Horatio “Voudie” Solomon’s reign as leader of a gang known as the Terrible Josters.
Six members of the gang, including their feared leader, were sentenced to life in prison by the High Court in Cape Town on Monday. A state indictment in a second case, due to be heard in the same court, alleged that the gang used children, driven by hunger and a need for acceptance, to commit some of its most heinous crimes in Cape Town.
“The gangs have an easy job recruiting kids. The poverty is at its worst now. When you come home from school and your parents are at work, you get hungry and you want something to eat, but there’s nothing … You wander around in the streets looking for anything to eat,” Ceasefire gang violence intervention programme director Craven Engel said this week.
The suburb of Delft is a product of apartheid spatial planning and post-apartheid urban development. The official 2011 census counted 152,000 residents, but leaders such as ward councillor Xolani Ndongeni have estimated the number to be closer to 500,000 if shack dwellers living in the backyards of government housing were counted. It is fertile ground for gangs like the Terrible Josters.
“For the gangs it’s easy. Guys going to go buy a Gatsby [sandwich] come along. You haven’t even been with them for two days, and when you open your eyes, they’ve indoctrinated you, and they put a small tattoo on your arm with the gang initials and say, you’re with us now. You think it’s cool. Every day you go and get something to eat with them,” said Engel.
Engel said designer clothes were second on the hierarchy of children’s needs in poor communities like Delft – another benefit of joining a gang. Delft’s schools are incubators of the gang culture.
Getting ready for school to the backtrack of a radio station is a common childhood experience in SA. But in Delft gunfire adds a unique sound to the milieu. In Hanover Park, another Cape Flats neighbourhood, where Ceasefire is based, a child is likely to hear 10 gunshots a day on average.
“Here a kid hears an average of 350 gunshots a month. They could witness … murders and many attempted murders. By the time they go to school at six years old, they’ve seen it all,” said Craven.
Craven and his team try to get to the “buffers” – boys used by gangs as gunmen. And the “stem members”, young men such as Mustaqeem Titus, who through violence made their debut into gang life.
A lengthy abatement in gang shootings in Delft coincided with the arrests of Solomon and 11 others, as well as the arrests and incarceration of another 20 alleged Terrible Josters members accused of a string of murders in another trial that was due to start on Monday after Solomon’s sentencing but was postponed. Titus is among the 20 accused.
The state alleges he murdered four people in vicious shooting incidents before his 17th birthday in 2016. He is among thousands of youngsters who community workers say get involved with gangsterism through a combination of their home and school environment.
Being a prisoner held for murder and associating with the Terrible Josters, a gang that falls under the flag of the 28s prison gang, grants Titus certain privileges. He is able to post pictures, in one wearing designer clothing making a gang sign, to Facebook from inside Pollsmoor Prison, where he has been held since 2016.
Reformed gang member Albert Matthews had no one who cared enough to warn him against the seemingly innocuous act of speaking in gang language or making a hand sign to show his gang affiliation. In fact he was born into it. “My mother was an alcoholic, my father was smoking drugs and he was part of a gang. I grew up with parties at our house. No one could tell me not to join a gang,” he said. He joined a large gang and became a target of multiple stabbings.
“When you are a kid earmarked for recruitment by a certain gang, you are going to have a very tough time at school. You either make the choice that you won’t give in, but it’s going to be a challenging time for you because they’ll take your schoolbooks, you will be beaten up, they will bully you severely. Then you have the option to give in, and if your parents can, they’ll make the choice to take you out and put you into a different school,” said Matthews.
“It was easy for them to identify me, My dad was on drugs, my mom was an alcoholic, they would come up to me and give me a pair of new tekkies. Some of the kids have a violent nature, and because of your violent nature you are also earmarked as a shooter. It’s easy to hand you a gun and to tell you to go and shoot someone because you already have that violent nature,” he said.
The gangs do not discriminate based on gender and girls play an equally important role in gang structures.
When his friend was shot 14 times in front of him, he decided to take the only path out of a gang that does not involve being murdered or going into witness protection – he became religious and joined Ceasefire.
The community in Delft were elated by Solomon’s sentencing, which struck a blow to the gang’s strength. But the danger posed by the gang is far from over. The names of the two detectives responsible for both cases were redacted from a police press statement on Monday following credible threats to their lives after six of the 12 accused in the Solomon case, alleged to have committed 12 murders and four attempted murders, were acquitted two weeks ago, including the gang’s alleged boss in the Belhar neighbourhood.
Rival gangs from other neighbourhoods such as Elsies River, seizing on the expectation that the case would go in the favour of the state, have already started fighting over turf occupied by the weakened Terrible Josters. Combined with the move to less stringent lockdown rules, there has been an escalation in gun violence in Delft.
The Terrible Josters’ stronghold is in Delft, but their activities stretch across several municipalities from Paarl to towns such as Kleinmond and Hermanus, along the abalone smuggling route so crucial to SA’s illicit drug economy.
Western Cape premier Alan Winde and community safety MEC Albert Fritz walked through Delft’s Terrible Josters territory with police last week. Winde said the schools were crucial to the fight against gangsterism, but when schools and their surrounding environment were not safe, gangs were able to disrupt learning.
“The problem is it actually already starts even younger than high school. You can speak to little kids in the street and they’ll already tell you what gangs they associate with. That’s why the safety plan is not only about policing, it’s also about the violence prevention side,” said Winde.
The Western Cape government’s safety plan launched late last year is focused on the “first 1,000 days” of a child’s life.
“The violence prevention is a much longer plan, but it’s a much more important plan because you deal with the causalities,” said Winde.
• This is the second in a series of features about children and gangs in the Western Cape. Read our second story here.
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