Two lives were added to the growing list of deaths in a Durban community after Cape Town’s notorious Hard Livings gang moved into town and started a drug war with a local gang.
People of the area are looking straight at the police in their absence to control the chaos in the Sydenham area and a series of eye-for-an-eye type murders.
The latest victims of the gang violence are Larvice Nashiville and 24-year-old Roberta Sing, who were gunned down on Sunday by five men, as IOL reports.
Roberta was pregnant and a mother of two other children. She was shot in the back of her head according to her father.
Her father, in expressing grief over the loss of his daughter also communicated anger: “People are literally dying over R30 worth of drugs.”
The ‘Kaapies’ or Hard Livings gang members initially came to Durban following the suit of kingpin Rashied Staggie who was killed in Salt River in 2019.
Hard Livings is one of the prominent gangs in Cape Town, alongside the Americans, Terrible Josters, Fancy Boys, Junior Mafia, 28s, Horrible, Terribles and the Mongrels, as Daily Maverick highlights.
Gangs hold massive power in the Cape, and not only for control through violence. They are something of alternative governance in previously segregated areas, especially where the police are not involved as Criminologist Irvin Kinnes indicates in his thesis.
Over the years, the loss of life and livelihoods have gotten to a devastating point with the weekend’s deaths in seeing something of a breaking point.
Although the police station is right down the road in Sydenham, community members have reported that their actions are few are far between, if present at all.
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