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Swines, Hazels and the Dirty Dozen: Masculinity, Territoriality and the Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1960-1976
During the 1960s and early 1970s, the youth gangs of Soweto, like their predecessors throughout the Witwatersrand in the 1940s and 1950s, developed a sense of masculine identity intimately linked to their territories. There was a great deal of cultural continuity between these exclusively male urban gangs and rural age grades: groups of male adolescents separated off from established households to experiment with their sexuality, hone their fighting skills and assert their independence. The social mobility of most city-bred black youths, however, was blocked and much of their masculine dignity was invested in their ability to dominate their local streets. Gang identity depended on an overlap of personal and spatial familiarity, which took time to develop. Gangs therefore usually emerged in fairly settled neighbourhoods. While there was relative continuity in gang formation in the older parts of Soweto, especially Orlando, gangs took longer to cohere in the newly resettled parts of Soweto like Meadowlands and Diepkloof.
From as early as the mid-1930s there has been a consistent presence of youth gangs throughout most black residential areas of the Witwatersrand. These gangs, from the 1930s through to the 1970s, were almost exclusively male and fiercely territorial. Although many urban youth gangs mugged and robbed ordinary residents, probably the majority were not engaged consistently in serious property-related crime. Rather, the most common manifestations of gang violence involved sexual coercion and inter-gang feuding. The most visible gangs, which became the subcultural role models, had names and clearly recognisable leadership and territory. But not all gangs were large and distinctive. Virtually every street had its small defensive neighbourhood gang; many were nameless, with oscillating and amorphous membership. Under certain conditions, which will be addressed in this paper, these smaller gangs cohered, or were incorporated, into bigger and more distinctive, usually more aggressive, entities.
These territorial street gangs should be distinguished from a number of essentially migrant gangs which were also common in urban South Africa by the 1930s and 1940s. The street-based youth gangs, which asserted a distinctively urban identity, came to be known as tsotsi gangs by the mid-1940s. The gangs with a strong migrant identity included the amalaita, indlavini and...