At least 200 people were murdered in South Africa’s notorious Cape Flats in a three-week period. Civil Society group Action Society SA has denied the lack of a police response, with its Public Safety consultant Ian Cameron commenting on X: “Almost 200 people have been murdered on the Cape Flats alone in the past 2-3 weeks with ZERO response from the Minister of Police or Justice. Politics in the international arena, but for South Africans there is nothing. Disgusting to say the least. The state has turned its back on its own people.”

According to Action Society SA, at least seven people under the age of eighteen have been shot since Monday, with two dying from their injuries and a fourteen-year-old girl in critical condition after being shot in the head. The shooting took place between Mitchells Plain and Elsies, two gang crime hot spots.

Many children who have been injured or killed in shootings in the Cape Flats are not targets themselves, but become victims of stray bullets.

The details:

The communities spanning the Cape Flats have been labelled as some of the most dangerous areas in South Africa, with locals referring to these areas as ‘no-go zones’. This is due to extreme levels of poverty, high levels of gang membership, proximity to Nigerian and Congolese gangs, and the free flow of high-power weapons through established arms smuggling routes.

In 2019, the national defence force was deployed to the Cape Flats after 73 murders were committed in a single weekend in May. However, the violence backfired with the military’s departure.

Academics estimate the existence of approximately 100 000 gang members affiliated to 130 different gangs in the Cape Flats alone, with the city of Cape Town home to a population of just 4 million.

Shootouts in broad daylight are not uncommon in these areas, especially between the apartments’ most established gangs – the Americans, the Hard Livings and the Junky Funky Kids (JKF).

Contributing to the problem is the police’s involvement in the arms smuggling trade, with Colonel Christiaan Prinsloo of the South African Police convicted in 2016 on ’20 charges ranging from racketeering, corruption and money laundering in relation to the smuggling and trafficking of deadly weapons worth about R9. million with Cape Town gangsters”.

Prinsloo’s conviction came after the family members of those killed by ‘Prinsloo guns’ started a class-action lawsuit against Prinsloo and the South African Police.