The Era of the Jackrollers: Contextualising the Rise of Youth Gangs in Sowetho

The Era of the Jackrollers: Contextualising the rise of youth gangs in Soweto


Seminar No. 7, 1991
Presenter: Steve Mokwena, former CEO of the Youth Commission.
Date: 30 October 1991;
Venue: University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Introduction

At 2:10am on Christmas Day 1990, a gang of approximately twenty to twenty-five boys broke into the Salvation Army Girls Home in Killarney, Soweto. After attacking the night-watchman they broke the doors of the home and proceeded to make their way to the girls' dormitories. Brandishing an assortment of dangerous weapons, the boys threatened to kill the matron who they then stabbed with a sharp instrument. Amidst the turmoil and the panic, the boys selected their victims, who were then taken to various venues where they were raped.

For the first time the "Zebra Force"[1] became known beyond the confines of its immediate neighbourhood. Until then the gang was but a group of delinquent boys operating in the Meadowlands / Killarney area. This was one of the more conspicuously horrific forms of youth violence which aroused fear and revulsion in the people of the township. This was adolescent bravado run riot, but still it was one incident amongst many equally horrendous acts of violence committed in the township streets.[2]

There has been a rapid increase in the levels of violence in black communities like Soweto. It is arguable that the black "youth"[3] have been depicted as central protagonists in this tragic social drama.[4] A more popular tendency has been to speak of a "youth crisis" or "problem", and sometimes even a "lost generation". This approach fails to locate the structural and historical problems rooted in apartheid. On the other hand the political role of the youth has been covered extensively by academic writers[5] and it is no wonder that the youth have been identified as having been in the forefront in the making of South Africa's political history. These works, amongst others, have raised some major questions which have been placed on the agenda of the scholarly and social debates in recent years. Bundy, following Manheim,[6] attempts to provide an explanation for the role played by this generation of youth in the South African context. Like Hyslop,[7] he points out that the crisis of capitalism has led to disaffection and has spawned a fervent youth movement of the 1980s. The arguments go on to point out that the social conditions afflicting the youth were indeed the fuel behind the radicalism of the youth-based political movement. Hyslop in his study of the development of education policy and its political consequences, touches directly on the crisis of capitalism and its implications for the developing student movement.

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