Awkward Entanglements: Kinship, Morality and Survival in Cape Town’S Prison–Township Circuit

Ethnos Journal of Anthropology

ISSN: 0014-1844 (Print) 1469-588X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/retn20

Awkward Entanglements: Kinship, Morality and Survival in Cape Town’s Prison–township Circuit

Karen Waltorp & Steffen Jensen

To cite this article: Karen Waltorp & Steffen Jensen (2019) Awkward Entanglements: Kinship, Morality and Survival in Cape Town’s Prison–township Circuit, Ethnos, 84:1, 41-55, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2017.1321565 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2017.1321565

Published online: 18 Dec 2018.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 156

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Citing articles: 1 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=retn20 ETHNOS 2019, VOL. 84, NO. 1, 41–55 https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2017.1321565

Awkward Entanglements: Kinship, Morality and Survival in Cape Town’s Prison–township Circuit Karen Waltorpa and Steﬀen Jensenb,c aAarhus University, Denmark; bDIGNITY Danish Institute Against Torture, Denmark; cAalborg University, Denmark

ABSTRACT In this paper, we explore how townships and prison are linked in South Africa among criminalised populations. While the two are often described – also by residents – as belonging to radically different moral worlds, the article shows how they are entangled in often awkward and difficult, yet necessary ways. We show this by paying acute attention to kinship structures and how kin are disavowed, allowed and sometimes denied as residents find their way to prison and out again. The empirical basis of the article is long-term fieldwork in and engagement with Cape Town’s townships and their residents, many of who have experiences with prison as (former) inmates, as family to inmates, or through constant circulation of prison stories.

KEYWORDS Cape Town; prison; kinship; morality; township

This article takes as its point of departure the large number of people, especially young men of colour, who move and are moved between prison and townships on the Cape Flats.1 As we move closer to the townships and begin talking to people, we realise that prison is an ever-present element in many people’s lives. In fact, it sometimes seems that prison and township cannot so easily be separated and that we may think of the two as linked and entangled in complex ways or in the words of da Cunha (2008: 326), ‘life inside and outside […] become inextricably linked’. Furthermore, it also seems clear that while the walls around the prison are permeable towards the townships, for many residents the invisible walls to mainstream Capetonian society outside the townships are far more difficult to scale. This suggests that what we here call the prison–township circuit is actually a world of confinement apart from mainstream society. We shall return to this larger conceptual question below. For now, and in line with the Introduction to this Special Issue, suffice to say that this implies that we need to understand how people navigate the prison–township circuit in everyday life rather than assuming what life can be lived based on the institutional form of prison and ghetto. We need to ask how people survive as they enter the very violent prison

CONTACT Steffen Jensen [email protected] © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 42 K. WALTORP AND S. JENSEN and what it entails for their families. Here, respectability – ordentlikheid – is central as an encompassing local understanding of what constitutes morality: religion, education, work, and socially conservative values.2 Yet, the loyalty to one’s local network is a part of this overall moral structure, making it inherently complex and often paradoxical as what this loyalty instils is in opposition to the conservative discourse of a moral, right- eous, middle-class citizen. In this sense, we may reformulate the question as how does one maintain one’s moral standing in a situation where respectability is central at the same time as sizeable sections of residents go to jail, implicating the family and (kin) relations directly or indirectly? To answer these questions, we revisit field material from two coloured townships3 in Cape Town, Manenberg and Heideveld in which we did long-term fieldwork over a span of twenty years, between 1995 and 2002 (Heideveld) and 2005 and 2015 (Manen- berg). Coloureds, and especially those of the townships, have historically had a long and tortuous relationship with the prison system in South Africa. This relationship was fuelled by and in turn reproduced rather hostile stereotypes around inherent coloured criminality. As a consequence, during apartheid, coloureds were four times more likely to go to jail than Africans even if the latter were subject to pass laws and influx control (Jensen 2008). In fact, in those days coloureds were among those most frequently imprisoned globally. While this ratio has gone down to twice their share of the population, especially because the African share has increased, prison is still a pervasive element in township life, not least because criminality is seen as an inherent element of life in Cape Town’s townships.4 In order to grasp the intimate relationship between prison and township, thus echoing the Introduction to the special issue, it is useful not to distinguish too rigidly between the inside and the outside of the prison. Seen from the townships, the prison walls are rather porous and permeable. People, food, clothes, drugs, weapons as well as stories and narratives pass the prison walls in osmotic flows where certain items are allowed through the walls in some instances, while other things and people pass through at other times.5 At the same time moral narratives persist which posit the prison and the township as absolutely separate. We will discuss this seeming paradox of the entanglement between the prison and the township. It is not that the prison resembles the township. Rather, it is that for many people on the Cape Flats the two merge into one social world. In the words of Loïc Wacquant, a ‘deadly symbiosis’ is created when prison and ghetto (in the U.S.A.) ‘meet and mesh’ (Wacquant 2001). It is this ‘deadly symbiosis’ that we want to explore in this article from the point of view of township residents, especially the families of those that go to prison. What is the moral weight of the symbiosis for those implicated on either side of the prison walls? How does one ensure the respectability and security of those left on the outside and the survival of those on the inside? Our basic argument is that while prison is an ines- capable part of life on the Cape Flats, it does need to be negotiated and it carries a high toll on the respectability of those that remain. We introduce the concept of ‘awkward entanglements’ as a way to explore these complex forms of relations where morality, survival, and everyday life co-exist in necessary, yet near-impossible ways inside the prison–township circuit. ETHNOS 43

We organise our argument in three sections. First, we look at the genealogy of the awkward entanglement between prison and townships, drawing in historical accounts as well more theoretical arguments to develop an understanding of the nature of the social world of prison and township. Secondly, we follow the attempts from the township residents’ side to cope with the sudden arrest of a young man to allow him to survive the violent world of the prison. In the third section, we hone in on the moral deliberations inside an extended family to emerge as respectable people (ordentlike mense) in the face of incarceration of several family members over time. In the ﬁnal section, we revisit our argument to conclude on how the awkward entanglements are negotiated by people who are touched by it. We argue that an analytical focus on the various trajectories of members of the extended family (or kinship relations) and not only individual trajectories, allows us to discern patterns and dynamics of on-going struggles for morality and survival in the everyday life of the prison–township circuit.

The Everyday Life of an Entangled World Pollsmoor Prison, just on the outskirts of the Cape Flats, provides one iconic node of the prison–township circuit. Few families are without stories from Pollsmoor. This is expressed rather succinctly by Moubin, in 1999 a young 19-year-old man with a brief history with one of the many gangs on the Cape Flats. On the interviewer’s assertion that the latter would not survive Pollsmoor, Moubin explains,

It is a little easier on us [coloureds in the townships] because, you know, it’s almost part of our life outside. You are told here outside by ex-convicts that ‘you mustn’t do this and you mustn’t do that’. It is almost like they prepare you to go and to survive when you come there. Everyone knows what you must do and what you mustn’t do. Together with the statistics provided above Moubin’s explanation reveals the level of entanglement between the township and the prison. While there are clear narratives of ‘going’ and of separation – and how to act in the likely situation that one will go – it is not a strange and unknown world. This is so for the young men, who are preparing to go, and it is so for many families that often with acute sense of sadness see their young boys off. With some drama one interlocutor expressed this when she said, ‘Today people hope to get girls because they will not be so much trouble.’ She made this comment as we were frantically trying to locate her nephew in a police detention facility somewhere on the Cape Flats. These examples point to the intricate entanglements between prison and township where the one does not exist separately from the other. Many scholars have explored this in detail, especially in the U.S. but also in South Africa. One famous attempt to understand this relationship is Angela Davis’ analysis of what she calls the ‘prison industrial complex’ (1998), in which humans are disappeared and often, through nooks and crannies, put at the service of capitalist interests in the form of prison labour. By following the money, so to speak, she shows that confinement exacerbates wealth inequalities by moving resources from poor to rich. The same links can be clearly identified in Cape Town where an elaborate system of reform schools, schools 44 K. WALTORP AND S. JENSEN of industry, work camps and forced prison labour has been established as an integral part of ‘reform’ and rehabilitation (Badroodien 2001). This kind of analysis draws on and feeds into a Foucauldian analytics of prison and confinement as part disciplining and part exploitation. While we are sympathetic to and share this kind of analysis, it tends to focus very strongly on the side of the system of exploitation and disciplining at the expense of understanding and exploring how those that are caught in the ‘deadly symbiosis’ (Wacquant 2001) of prison and ghetto experience, navigate and live it. This focus on the lived experience resonates with Andrew Jefferson’s insistence that we take seriously the ‘lives, situations and experiences’ of those caught in the entangled relationship, drawing on his work on prisons and a poor urban neighbourhood in Free- town, Sierra Leone (Jefferson 2014: 45). It is when we begin honing in on this relationship that we appreciate how fraught with tension it is. Two ethnographic accounts provide useful insights to our analysis. Firstly, in their analysis of different modalities of domesticity in poor, urban African-American families, Das et al.(2008) argue that the domestic sphere ‘encompass the flows between the house, the prison and what many respondents call “Drugville”’ (Das et al. 2008: 352). In the analysis of one respon- dent George, they show how, through the telephone, the prison makes it all the way into the home, belying any clear distinction between the home and the prison. A parallel to the townships of the Cape Flats is the oft-used trick of calling up family members from hidden away mobile phones, and convincing them to put in ‘air time’ on that phone number, which can be done from the outside. Scared of what will happen to their loved one, if not they do not comply, many cave in to the (never-ending) requests. In Das, Ellen and Leonard’s empirical material, their informant George constantly needs to ‘defend’ himself against the demands from both prison and Drugville, a navi- gation which ‘indexes how criminality and kinship are folded into each other’ (Das et al. 2008: 356) in the creation of what they refer to as different modalities of domesticity. Secondly, da Cunha (2008) provides equally useful insights as she suggests that in some poor, urban neighbourhoods the frequency with which residents are imprisoned belies any attempt to separate the two worlds as it often happens in prison and for instance gang studies (da Cunha 2008: 326–329). Based on her fieldwork in urban Por- tugal, she talks of closed circuits in which kinship and neighbourhood are constantly present both inside and outside prison. She notes, ‘the confined populations are now often traversed by networks of kinship and neighbourhood, that is, clusters of pre- prison ties which transport and re-enact relational circles behind bars’ (da Cunha 2008: 326). The insistence on the importance of intimacy and kinship in both analyses, as also pointed out in the Introduction to this issue, resonates well with our analysis below. However, in relation to Das, Ellen and Leonard, it seems as though their respondents most often ‘defend’ the notion of the home against the disruptive forces of prison and drug world. While we also note this attempt to maintain a moral core of the home in our material, it appears to us that this ‘defence’ is rather ambiguous. For instance, as we see below, the presence of a known criminal and gangster in prison may act as a protective shield against predatory street practices, simply because his ETHNOS 45 reputation reaches across the prison walls into the township. Hence, while the existence of a known gangster challenges respectability, he also provides safety. Da Cunha’s analysis insightfully explores how the kinship and neighbourhood ties are re-enacted inside prison and she dispenses of the unhelpful distinction between the social worlds of prison and neighbourhood for certain areas with high levels of incarceration. However, while the worlds are entangled, our informants in Cape Town also desperately attempted to separate them, as the world of the prison is morally contaminated qua its association with drugs, crime and violence. It is in this sense that we talk about an awkward entanglement – one that is simultaneously improper and necessary; destruc- tive and productive of kinship, respectability and survival. This suggests that kinship relations are not permanent or objective, and the permanent tension between aspects of local morality in between ordentlikheid, local embeddedness and loyalty (translated in kinship terms such as auntie and boetha – uncle) and survival. Such an understanding of kinship echoes approaches to kinship, or as Carsten (2000) calls it, ‘cultures of relatedness’, where kinship relations are seen as not only bound in ‘nature’ as objective structures. Rather, we must understand kinship as temporal processes, being reproduced or severed depending on circumstances and context. As we show, kinship relations as objective categories based in nature are central, but we cannot assume anything about how they are central at particular moments in time (Wagner 1977; Carsten 2000). The ambiguity of what constitutes kinship relations, we show, is radicalised in the prison–township circuit where some relations are downplayed, activated and change character over time and with events, which our 20 years of research in the area point to. With these words, let us go to the Cape Flats where we start with the sudden arrest of Wally as part of the gang wars in the late 1990s.

Kinship, Morality and Survival – Inside (Outside) the Prison Wally, member of the emerging group/gang, the ‘Homeboys’,6 was arrested on a trumped up attempted murder charge and sent to Pollsmoor Prison.7 Three days after Wally had been taken to Pollsmoor, the first opportunity to help him from the outside presented itself. Armed with telephone cards (to call the lawyer and stay in contact with the outside), clothes, food and some money, Auntie Mavis (the mother of one of the other Homeboys and related to Wally in kinship terms and through proximity rather than biology), the parents of Wally and the fieldworker drove off to Polls- moor, some 20 kilometres from Heideveld. On the way, the three deeply concerned and troubled adults explained to Steffen, what each of the items was for, and how Wally would need them in prison. When we got to the prison, only the mother registered to see him. Wally’s father, a long-term ex-convict, registered to see one of his friends. Auntie Mavis registered to see her brother, and Steffen registered to see another informant, Sayeed, who had been re-imprisoned for a brief period. When the guards brought Wally, the arrangement for visiting more people proved its value. As Pollsmoor is huge, Wally had not known anybody in his cell and he had had to sleep without a mattress on the floor. Suddenly two inmates connected to people he knew from the outside were present in the same room as him, and could be persuaded 46 K. WALTORP AND S. JENSEN into protecting him. For a small bribe to the guards,8 Wally was allowed to change cells and be in the same cell as Auntie Mavis’s brother, Broertjie. Broertjie had joined the 26- gang, one of the infamous prison gangs present in every single South African prison, during his last stay in prison.9 As such he was perfectly situated to take care of Wally. When we left, both his mother and Auntie Mavis were greatly relieved, because now, as Mavis put it, ‘Wally is protected from all the robies that wanted to take his stuff. Broertjie will look after him.’ Broertjie did take care of him and Wally was saved, but it came at a price. When Wally left Pollsmoor one month later, free of all charges for the crime he obviously did not commit, he had become a ndota (‘man’ in isiZulu), a 26-gangster, someone to be reckoned with. His visitors could hardly have acted differently. In order to save Wally on one level, their actions perpe- tuated the problem of his criminalisation. As auntie Mavis commented with acute sadness, ‘Wally speaks a different language now. I don’t know what he is saying.’ In Auntie Mavis’s parting remark, prison and township are constructed as two separate worlds in which one holds the potential for respectability while the other does not. As Wally is freed he has nonetheless been contaminated with the horrors of the prison. But the case also features a number of other possibilities that bear upon our discussion of awkward entanglements. Firstly, the visit and how it was conducted was clearly informed by past, similar experiences. It was only when asked that the strategy became explicit. In that sense, this was an example of embodied knowledge of how to reach across the wall to affect the world on the inside of the prison. Secondly, during months of fieldwork auntie Mavis had not mentioned her brother, Broertjie, except for a parting remark of how much of a disappointment he was. Despite this, it was clear from observing them that they were indeed close and it was with fondness in her voice that she concluded that Wally would be safe now that Broertjie took care of him. This suggests another kind of relationship than the one described by Das et al.(2008) where those in prison are only a burden to those on the outside, a burden that needs to be managed. It also suggests that kinship relations on the outside are absolutely crucial for survival inside, whether that be extended families (between Wally and auntie Mavis who lived next to each other) or direct family relations (between Broertjie and Mavis). The case also illustrates that outside kinship relations are indeed sometimes re- sutured, even when they were broken by outside structures, because of prison, at least temporarily. In the car, both of Wally’s parents were present. As it is often the case on the Cape Flats, Wally’s mother and father did not live together. As we have argued elsewhere (Jensen 2008; see also Salo 2003), while this does not necessarily endanger respectability, as multiple households on the Cape Flats are centred on several generations of women who have mothered children with different men who might never have stayed in the household, it is also not conforming to strong ideals of how a respectable family should look. Wally’s father stayed in the adjacent block to Wally and her mother. At the time of Wally’s birth, both blocks were part of ‘Terrible Pipe Killers’s’ area (one of the more notorious Heideveld gangs, Jensen 2014). However, in 1999 the two blocks were dominated by, respectively, the ‘Junior Mafias’ and the Homeboys. It was in relation to the conflict between these two gangs that Wally was arrested and which consequently featured different male off-springs from the original ETHNOS 47 gang. Wally’s father had hence fathered sons on both side of the conflict. However, on this day, the family was back together despite the disruptive influences of township lives. This suggests that while kinship relations may lay dormant, be severed or be the result of unrespectable relations, they can be activated in particular precarious situations such as the imprisonment of a son. In the next section, we further elaborate on the awkward kinship relations in the prison–township circuit. While this section focused more on the relationship between kinship, survival and morality across the prison wall, the next section addresses how prison impacts the moral kinship economy on the outside.

Kinship, Survival and Morality – Outside (Inside) Prison In Manenberg, a township adjacent to Heideveld where Wally and Mavis stayed, four generations of the Arendse family live and have lived since the early 1980s. On photos from back then, we see the beautiful and happy Martha, married to Eugene, ready to begin their life together. We can almost sense the hope and belief in the future emanat- ing from the old pictures. In those days, getting a house or a flat and moving out of the squatter camps, surrounding Cape Town into the newly built townships was often perceived as a real advancement by some residents.10 Since then, Manenberg has developed into one of the most violent townships in Cape Town, not least because of the omnipre- sence of gangs (Waltorp & Vium 2010). Parallel to the decline of Manenberg and the dashing of hopes, the Arendse family has borne their share of decline and the burden of the gangs in the form of death and imprisonment. Hence, at the time of writing six of its members have been or are still in Pollsmoor. On this background, we ask how the Arendse family and especially the matriarch Martha maintain claims to morality or ordentlikheid – respectability – as a set of inherited world views on social and sexual relations, education and work ethics, often in direct opposition to everyday life in Manenberg and in the Arendse family. How is this impossible endea- vour of balancing paradoxes pursued through strengthening some kinship ties and relations at times, while downplaying and ‘suspending’ others? To explore further how this is done over time, it is useful to outline the kinship relations of the Arendse family (Figure 1). As we note in the chart, Martha and Eugene had five children, Dollars (street name), Bernice, Peter, Nicole and Chandre. Of these, Dollars ended up in prison after having made a name for himself in Manenberg’s gangland as a drug dealer and the brains behind several armed robberies. Dollars was known for never taking the drugs he dealt or dirtying his hands. In her younger days Bernice dealt in drugs and engaged in ‘trick prostitution’. She later in life developed into a respectable woman and grandmother. Peter, the middle child of Martha and Eugene, lives in a trailer in Marthas front stoop. He fathered 15 children with different women, and is not in a conjugal relation with any of them. Yet he supports his children, and is well-respected in Manenberg for striking that rare balance between being respectable and being ‘local’: Drinking and being sociable the whole weekend, yet on time for his job as driver for a municipal office on Monday morning, never missing a beat. 48 K. WALTORP AND S. JENSEN

Figure 1. The Arendse family – Kinship diagram.

Nicole and Chandre are among the minority who have managed to leave Manenberg and establish ‘respectable’ lives with working husbands and two children each. While Nicole and Chandre have left Manenberg and seldom visit, they are important as they, in the minds of the matriarch Martha and township residents, represent the other extreme in moral and respectable terms from the criminality and deplorable behaviour of other family members at different times. Dollars had three children. Mariam, Laylaa and Zaadiq with Ayesha who later died. The couple never lived together with their children. Ayesha’s family is well known in Manenberg for being unruly or chaotic captured in the Afrikaans term deurmekaar. Ordentlikheid and deurmekaar exist as emic terms at different ends of a moral continuum in Cape Town’s townships where deurmekaar (literally ‘through each other’) signals lack of control and chaotic lives. However, being too proper is also problematic with denotations of basmaanskap and of ‘keeping one white’ as people in the townships would say. Being ‘local’,offered as the right attitude, is therefore about attaining an almost impossible balance of not being deurmekaar or wanting to be white.11 Returning to the Arendse family and some of the family members who pull the extended family in the direction of the deurmekaar due to their proximity to drugs, ETHNOS 49 crime and the prison of Pollsmoor: Of Ayesha and Dollars’ three children, Zaadiq and Laylaa still live with Martha along with Mariam’s two children. Mariam got fed up with the strict household of Martha’s, and ran away to live with friends and be independent. She was no longer welcome in the house after that: the favourite grandchild had rebelled and left the house for the attractions of the street, which at some point led her to Polls- moor. While Martha took a stance against her granddaughter’s life style, she nonetheless took Mariam’s children in, and after a while she allowed Mariam to come to the gate, exchange greetings or a plate of food, and eventually enter the house again. Once out of Pollsmoor, Mariam stayed with her aunt Bernice whom, we might specu- late, could sympathise with Mariam’s choices. Bernice’s own child, Owen, had been taken in by Martha at a young age, as Bernice and Owen’s father had both engaged in criminal activities and drug abuse. However, Martha had not been able to keep Owen away from the gangs. As we argued elsewhere (Jensen 2008; Waltorp 2010), survival for young men on the streets of the township almost invariably entail relations to, or accommodations with, the local gang. At an early age, Owen got his first gun and soon he was on a familiar Capetonian path through the reformatories to prison (Badroodien 2001). His relationship with his own family played no small part in this journey:

My granny [Martha] and uncle [Peter] used to hit me but their hitting made me tougher for the street. But it’s through my uncle Dollars that I became a gangster. He chased me around. My uncle is one of the biggest drug dealers in the Western Cape. He specializes in armed robbery. Right now, he’s serving a 15 years sentence for a warehouse robbery. He blamed me for a lot of stuﬀ I didn’tdosohe’d chase me around with a few guys, shooting at me. So I joined the Clever Kids and they gave me a gun. Dollars thought it necessary to discipline his nephew, despite his own criminal activities. Owen’s choice was not unsurprising in the context of the Cape Flats: he joined a gang. During his own stint in Pollsmoor, he ‘went and got his Number’ by joining the 26 Numbers prison gang, to the dismay of his father, a 28 Number gang member. Owen contemplates his immediate family.

I’m the second youngest of 15 children. Two of my brothers are stabbed dead. My father is full of nonsense, him and [Bernice] my mother are the same; still like small children, still developing their brains, really. My mom’s getting the hang of it now, but he still wants to be like me, 23. That’s the way he wants to move! Bernice, whom Owen suggests is ﬁnally growing up to assume some kind of responsi- bility, takes care of Owen’s three children, which he has fathered with Lizelle. While Owen would probably excuse himself by referring to his young age, the fact that his mother takes care of his children arguably puts into perspective his remarks about his own father. Lizelle, the mother of the children, is not well-considered in the Arendse family, as the couple do not bring the best out in each other, as Martha states. The domestic violence spills into the street, where it crosses the line and becomes too much of an unwanted spectacle. Something you might enjoy watching when it is other families, but do not wish your own family to engage in – it is deurmekaar. However, in Lizelles own perspective, the endangered moral standing should be blamed on Owen: 50 K. WALTORP AND S. JENSEN

When Owen was still young, he was a gangster and their gang went to go on a shoot-out, and they shot this little girl in a drive-by, by accident, it was on the radio, news, newspapers, everything. So, that time he was 14 years old, and he phoned home that day and he asked Martha what must he do and they just told him: talk the truth. He told the truth and since then it’s a big case from Manenberg. This was the incident that saw Owen leave Manenberg for a witness protection pro- gramme, a different ‘break’ from township life than the various reform schools he had been sent to. Yet, similarly, not with any exposure to a different network he could forge. When he thus returned to Manenberg, he partnered up with Lizelle, who, in her own words, knew little about life on the street and consequently blame all her subsequent troubles on the Arendse family and Owen:

I’ve tried not to blame it on Owen, but he took me out of my mother’s house and he must look after me. Now why can’t he do that for me? I would defend him. I never left him. I never knew anything about jails and courts. We weren’t that kind of people. I was brought up going to church – not with jail and prison. When I met him, everything changed. At the time of the interview, Lizelle seriously doubted the commitment of Owen and how he would react if he suspected how she felt. She ruminates,

I don’t even know if he loves me but I just keep strong. I think of my children, about the last break-up we had. Then he came and said he can’t go on without me. My children also need him and I need him. I cannot cry, because if he comes in and he sees me like this, then he wants to know why and he’s gonna hit me! That’s why I never really cry, ‘cause when I cry and he beats me, Kay [the eldest son, 5 at the time] comes and he says, ‘Don’t cry Mommy! Everything’s gonna be ﬁne. Dada’s gone’. What emerges from this brief account of the Arendse is a rather harsh glimpse into some township family relationship in Cape Town and it has a disturbing circle of ‘reproduction’ when Kay comforts his mother and perhaps himself against the violent excesses of his father, Owen, who harboured similar feelings towards his uncle, Dollars. However it also points to the ability and readiness to forgive unforgivable behaviour over time and maintain fraught kinship relations (as was also seen in the case above of Wally’s parents). There are also a number of other points important to our analysis of kinship, morality and survival. In many ways, Lizelle is blamed for jeopardising the moral standing of the Arendse family while she notes that it was in fact the former that brought her into disrepute. In this way, moral problems – or the deurmekaar – is passed around as a buck from oneself to others. It is here the focus on kinship relations proves important. Through the chart above, we are able to follow the buck as it is being passed around to diﬀerent parts of the family. When Mariam is refused entry into her grandmother’s house, Martha thereby safeguards the moral standing of the family by demonstratively performing to the neighbours and her own family that such behaviour is not accepted in this house. The same goes for the ostracising of Lizelle. However, for Martha it is not only about excluding un-respectable behaviour; it is also about including respectable behaviour, which acts almost as a counter-weight to the deurmekaar practices of some family members, often in their youth. It is here that Martha’s two remaining ETHNOS 51 daughters, Chandre and Nicole, become central. While they never or seldom make it to Manenberg, their impeccable respectability and their goeie meisie (good girl) practices can still be counted in the overall moral economy of the family. They have married well, experienced upward, socio-economic mobility, and this lifestyle and societal position, balance the reputation of the family. Neither of their husbands stems from Manenberg, and none of the families lives in Manenberg or wishes to. They live in a ‘proper house’, not a block (court) like the majority of people in Manenberg. They have jobs, their husbands have jobs, and their children are all receiving education in private schools. Save for the occasional visits and holidays, they remain out of sight of the township, but they keep the balance of the Arendse being seen as a respectable household in Manenberg overall. Indeed, due to the social stigma attached to wanting to be white as referred to above (local idioms include ‘keeping white’, being ‘perfume shitters’, ‘pass-whites’ or ‘coconuts’), the problematic side of the Arendse family in fact maintain a balance between deurmekaar and ordentlikheid – respectable and local. Hence, we cannot reduce the moral standing of any one person to the individual him or herself, or even to the family/household unit at a given point in time – in this case, Martha, Peter, Zaadiq, Laylaa and three children. Rather, we need to include the entire kinship structure portrayed in the chart to understand the complex relationship between kinship and morality. Maybe this balance is epitomised in Marthas statement, that she would never want to leave Manenberg for a more ‘fancy’ address, even if she could:

Everyone knows me here, everyone greets me, ‘hello Ma – how are you?’ When Chandre wants me to move to them there in Table View, I say ‘no’, I would be so bored there. They live in their own houses and never greet their neighbours, you know. Here, something always happen in the street. I like a good fight. Not with guns and that. Just a good fist fight. As we can gauge from the narrative of the Arendse family, and especially the treatment of both Owen and Mariam oscillating between exclusion and incorporation, prison questions the respectability of ‘family’ as an empirical and abstract entity. This feeds into the construction of the binary division of prison and townships – demeurkaar and ordtenlikheid, immorality and respectability. However, as the ostracisation of Lizelle suggests, the perceived moral problem lies less with the imprisonment of Owen but that Lizelle is seen to provoke Owen to public and hugely embarrassing dis- plays of violence, subject of much skinner stories (gossiping) in the neighbourhood. The moral ambiguity of prison and township – what we refer to as the awkward entanglement – is even clearer in relation to Dollars, the son of Martha. At the end of fieldwork in 2011, Dollars was serving a long-term prison sentence for armed robbery. According to the discourse that posits prison as inherently problematic Dollars’ relationship with the family is far more complex. While he is a drug dealer and a known criminal, he has often assumed the role of the family disciplinarian, indeed the patriarch of the family. This was what Owen faced when Dollars chased him. It was also what Mariam experienced when Dollars came out of jail and beat her up to ‘set her straight’, as he put it. The beating was severe and Mariam’s sister, Laylaa, wanted to act and report Dollars to the police to protect her sister from further punishment. She acted in defence of her sister, 52 K. WALTORP AND S. JENSEN but in spite of local loyalty ideals and without taking family hierarchy into consider- ation. Despite the public nature of the beatings, the family rallied behind Dollars to reproach Laylaa for contemplating what they regarded as treason.12 In this way, Dollars was authorised to intervene to protect the moral standing of the family. The public disciplining of Mariam became, like Martha’s refusal to let Mariam in, a per- formance of family respectability and order. In this way, the criminal practices of Dollars were made invisible to render him the moral agent and protector of the family name. However, the moral economy is more complicated than simply making the criminal practices of Dollars invisible; part of his ‘qualifications’ as the patriarch of the family is his criminal networks and reputation, the power he exerted which serve to give him even more respect as he has redeemed himself and become a good citizen in prison. He is simultaneously a respectable man and a local, ‘made man’ who has proven that he has what is referred to as sterk bene (strong bones, capable of with-standing prison and the life in the township, see Salo 2003; Jensen 2008; Waltorp 2010). This is what gives him the fortitude and legitimacy to act as the family patriarch. However, the reputation of Dollars is also tied to issues of survival locally. Martha, Zaadiq, Laylaa and the children are, in many ways, vulnerable in the violent township. The family relation they have with Dollars is what protects them from the predatory practices of gangs more than anything. In this way, Dollars was able to exert control and protection across the prison wall, paradoxically guarantee- ing safety and exerting violence on his offspring and nephew Owen. These practices of protection sit uneasily – awkwardly – with the construction of the prison as inherently problematic. They need to be visible and invisible at the same time, an inherent paradox.

Awkward Entanglements Revisited In this article, we explore how kinship, respectability as a local form of morality, and survival are entwined in what we have referred to as awkward entanglement in the prison–township circuit in Cape Town. Our basic argument and contribution to this special issue is that kinship relations cannot be deduced from objective structures, and the prison–township entanglements radicalise the ambiguities of relations in families. In fact, the very notion of family is constantly discussed and debated. While prison and township are seen ideologically as opposites on a moral continuum between respectability and being deurmekaar by our interlocutors on the Cape Flats, these constructions are constantly undermined by the porousness of the walls between prison and township, to the extent where we might discuss the entanglements as part of one social world, or in da Cunha’s term, part of a ‘carceral continuum’ (2008). In this article we have presented two case studies, which serves to complicate the easy distinctions between inside and outside. In the ﬁrst case, the family and neighbours of Wally reaching (successfully) across the prison walls to make Wally safe by drawing on kinship relations, even to the point where the severed kinship relations in the township between Wally’s parents were, temporarily, re-sutured as was the relationship between Auntie Mavis and her brother, Broertjie. In the second case study, we explored the ETHNOS 53 complex temporal kinship relations in the Arendse family over time and across four generations. While family respectability was challenged by numerous accounts of imprisonment, the respectability of the family could still be performed through the public ostracising of its wayward members who could subsequently reform (and be for- given and thus included in the family and household of the matriarch Martha, as the keeper of moral standing), and not least through including members who had made it out of the township in the overall moral economy of the family. Furthermore, the imprisonment of the son Dollars actually added to the safety of the family as his reputation reached protectively out across the prison wall. This was not least sustained by the ideological weight of prison gangs, their power and their discipline (Steinberg 2004). This suggests that the entanglements must be simultaneously visible and invisible, known but not mentioned, the paradoxes in the entwinement of deurmekaar, ordentlikheid and loyalty locally only ‘works’ when they are not ‘called out’.Thisspeakstothecon- stitutive awkwardness of both the entanglements of prison and township, and of kinship relations. This illustrates the point made in the Introduction to this Special Issue, that they do not exist as objective, natural structures but are maintained, severed and reproduced depending on the context. Hence, and in relationship to the debate on kinship, while the biological structures are clearly important – Martha and Mavis both stressed their importance – the process of severing and maintaining kinship links between the exigencies of respectability and survival are pivotal in a harsh world where both are signiﬁcantly and continually challenged in the prison–township circuit.

Notes 1. According to the International Centre for Prison Studies, South Africa globally ranks ninth with a total prison population of 159,000 and thirty-third place in relation to prison rate. These figures obscure huge regional and racial differences where the larger urban areas send more people to prison and where especially the group known as the coloured are over-represented by a factor two. While the numbers have declined since the mid-2000 as an indication that the crime wave that seemed to engulf South Africa after the fall of apartheid has abated, we cannot deduct the impact of prison on township life from such generic numbers. 2. For elaboration on the local understanding of respectability, see Jensen (2008); Salo (2003) and Ross (2010). 3. In this article, we use the term ‘coloured’ well-aware that it is a contentious concept. Suffice it to say that it is commonly used by the people it interpellates and by most of people in South Africa. For a critique of the term and its critics, see Jensen (2008). 4. While there is no doubt that townships are high-risk areas in terms of crime and violence, it is inherently problematic to associate too closely the townships with crime. As Wacquant (2008) correctly asserts, we cannot understand the troubled areas (of USA, France or South Africa) as disconnected from the larger post-apartheid urban economy. As we have argued elsewhere, locating crime and violence in the townships legitimise specialised interventions there (Jensen 2010). However, the townships – and the violence there – are connected to and constituted by the larger urban economy historically, in social terms and through modes of governance (Standing 2006; Samara 2011). At the same time, we should not underestimate the effects of violence. The Western Cape Province accounts for 33.2% of cases of Drug Related Crime in South Africa with Manenberg no. 3 on the list for worst affected precincts for Drug Related Crime in 2014/15. Murder accounts for almost a fifth of all murders in the country (17.9%), with 85% of all police stations in the province under-resourced (Plato 2015). In 2013, Western Cape Premier 54 K. WALTORP AND S. JENSEN

Cape Helen Zille pleaded with President Jacob Zuma to deploy the military to Manenberg as 16 schools were closed down due to gang fighting and shooting (Zille 2013), something that has happened before and since, affecting all families in the area. 5. Poca (the Prevention of Organised Crime Act) gang cases in court for the first time throughout 2014, included the first-ever prosecution of imprisoned gangsters – an attempt to dent the firmly established gang structures in Western Cape prisons and a testament to the permeability we describe form a different angle in this article. 6. As da Cunha notes (2008), the notion of the homeboy has its point of departure in the prison– township circuit where it denoted the relations between inmates in pre-carceral neigbhbour- hood. This history was lost on the Homeboys: ‘It’s just a cool name, we thought’, as one of them noted to Steffen. 7. Wally was arrested during a period of intense violence on the Cape Flats in early 1999. We will not go into more detail about the details and context of the case. These have been elaborated in Jensen (2008:70–99). Here we focus alone on the awkward entanglements involving kinship relations, morality and survival. 8. Money passes more or less freely into the prison from the outside. One way is illustrated by the case of Ronaldo, visited by co-author Karen in 2009. Ronaldo asked if she had any money on her. After an affirmative answer, Ronaldo asked her to please give it to him. Confused she stated that she couldn’t give him money as he was inside the prison, and she was outside. Ronaldo gestured to Karen to hand the money to a beautiful young lady next to her. Karen looked at the woman and she looked back, expressionless. Looking around for the guards, Karen handed the money, and watched as the inmate she was visiting, took out money from a large sports bag sitting next to him, filled with money, handed it to Ronaldo and resumed his conversation with the young lady. It was all over in a moment. 9. For an elaboration of the prison gangs, their practices and their ideologies, see Steinberg (2004). 10. This was clearly not the case for all. As Western (1996) documents, the forced removals from the inner-city of for instance Mowbray (from where he drew his sample) led to what he terms a ‘geography of disadvantage’. While the deprivation certainly was real for some, those living in the huge squatter camps surrounding the city or in extreme urban poverty in the inner- city arguably felt differently. See Jensen (2008) for an account of the forced removals and the construction of the townships. 11. These discussions are part of a long and tortuous history of race in Cape Town where racial stereotypes are both internalised and contested and practices of passing for white both common and frowned upon. For elaboration on practices of race and stereotypes in Cape Town, see Adhikari (2006); Jensen (2008); Norval (1996); Salo and Moolman (2013); Erasmus (2001); and Ross (2010). 12. The case is extremely complex and we cannot cover all aspects of it. Suffice it to say that it is unproblematic to talk to the police, albeit generally loathed, if it is part of a conflict with another group, family or section of the township. However, while it is not uncommon, it is generally not acceptable to implicate one’s own family.

Disclosure statement No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the authors.

References Adhikari, Mohammed. 2006. ‘God Made the White Man, God Made the Black Man …’: Popular Racial Stereotyping of Coloured People in Apartheid South Africa. South African Historical Journal, 55:142–164. ETHNOS 55

Badroodien, Azeem. 2001. A History of the Ottery School of Industries in Cape Town: Issues of Race, Welfare and Social Order in the Period 1937–1968 (PhD thesis). Faculty of Education, University of Western Cape, Cape Town. Carsten, Janet. 2000. Introduction: Cultures of Relatedness. In Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship, edited by Janet Carsten. pp. 1–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. da Cunha, Manuela I. P. 2008. Closed Circuits: Kinship, Neighborhood and Incarceration in Urban Portugal. Ethnography, 9:325–350. Das, Veena, Jonathan M. Ellen & Lori Leonard. 2008. On the Modalities of the Domestic. Home Cultures, 5(3):349–371. Davis, Angela. 1998. Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex; What is the Prison Industrial Complex? Why Does it Matter? Colourlines, 1(2):1–5. Erasmus, Zimitri. 2001. Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identites in Cape Town. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Jefferson, Andrew. 2014. Conceptualizing Confinement: Prisons and Poverty in Sierra Leone. Criminology and Criminal Justice, 14(1):44–60. Jensen, Steffen. 2008. Gangs, Politics and Dignity in Cape Town. London: James Currey. ———. 2010. The Security and Development Nexus in Cape Town: War on Gangs, Counterinsurgency and Citizenship. Security Dialogue, 41(1), 77–97. ———. 2014. Intimate Connections: Gangs and the Political Economy of Urbanization in South Africa. In Global Gangs, edited by Dennis Rodgers and Jeniffer Hazen. pp. 29–48. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Norval, Aletta J. 1996. Deconstructing Apartheid Discourse. London: Verso. Plato, Dan. 2015. Statement by Dan Plato, Western Cape Minister of Community Safety – Crime Stats 2015 – Violent Crime is Highest Where SAPS is Most Under-resourced. http://www.gov.za/ speeches/crime-stats-2015-%E2%80%93-violent-crime-highest-where-saps-most-under-resourced- 8-oct-2015-0000. Ross, Fiona. 2010. Raw Life, New Hope: Decency, Housing and Everyday Life in a Post-Apartheid Community. Claremont: University of Cape Town Press. Salo, Elaine. 2003. Negotiating Gender and Personhood in the New South Africa. Adolescent Women and Gangsters in Manenberg Township on the Cape Flats. European Journal of Cultural Studies,6 (3):345–365. Salo, Elaine & Benita Moolman. 2013. Biology, Bodies and Human Rights. Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity, 27(4):3–9. Samara, Tony Roshan. 2011. Cape Town after Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Standing, Andre. 2006. Organised Crime: A Study from the Cape Flats. Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies. Steinberg, Jonny. 2004. The Number: One Man’s Search for Identity in the Cape Underworld and Prison Gangs. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. Wacquant, Loic. 2001. Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh. Punishment and Society, 3(1): 95–133. ———. 2008. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. New York: Polity. Wagner, Roy. 1977. Analogic Kinship: A Daribi Example. American Ethnologist, 4(4):623–642. Waltorp, Karen. 2010. Uddannelse & Opposition. Tidsskriftet Antropologi. ‘Skole’, 62:127–151. Waltorp, Karen & Christian Vium. 2010. Manenberg – Growing Up in the Shadows of Apartheid.58’ Ethnographic Documentary. Copenhagen: DR International Sales/Royal Anthropological Institute. Western, John. 1996. Outcast Cape Town. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zille, Helen. 2013. Gang Violence: Western Cape Government and City of Cape Town Intervene. https://www.westerncape.gov.za/news/gang-violence-western-cape-government-and-city-cape- town-intervene.