‘Cutting off the head of the snake’ sees a return to calm
● You don’t have to be chicken to live in Worcester’s Kuiken Street, but it helps you to survive.
In three years of gang warfare between the Corner Boys and the Junior Cisco Yakkies, 40 people lost their lives in the 750m-long street in the suburb of Avian Park. Steel sheets cover windows, walls bear the pockmarks of bullets and hundreds of residents of a nearby informal settlement fled the area to avoid the crossfire.
But this month the sound of gunfire has been replaced by a peacefulness more in tune with the surrounding snow-capped mountains and lush valleys where grapes and fruit flourish. It follows the uprooting of the Corner Boys by the police anti-gang unit, which acted as the scalpel to “cut off the head of the snake”, according to two veteran Avian Park police officers, Const Lizelle Heyns and Capt Arthur Wiese.
“We gave all the intelligence we gathered over the years to the anti-gang unit. We gave them all the information about the two groups and who was involved,” said Heyns.
Once a month, unit members arrived from Cape Town to gather more intelligence.
“We would go and do our own observations without anyone knowing who we were,” said a unit member, who asked to remain anonymous.
“We speak to complainants and victims, do our own crime analysis and identify the gang leader. Once we’ve identified you, we shake you out of your religion.”
Heyns and Wiese chipped away at the low-level gang members before the antigang unit arrested the leader earlier this month. “Once they cut off the head of the snake by taking out the gang leader, the local police could go back into the community and win them back,” said Heyns.
In Kuiken Street, dozens of houses where rival gang members lived have been razed. Half-complete government homes are riddled with bullet holes. Contractors pulled out due to the fighting.
Residents still step into their yards and the street with hesitation, because while the Corner Boys are gone, the Junior Cisco Yakkies are now unchallenged. But they, too, are in the police’s crosshairs.
According to Heyns and Wiese, police lose the fight against gangsterism when they lose their communities to the authority of gangs. “If a community stands together, the gangsters feel like outcasts, and that is what we want.”