“Hadeel. Hadeel is nine. Hadeel was nine…And who will tell Hadeel’s mother, busy baking bread and za’atar, that the doves will not fly over Gaza again? The doves will not fly over Gaza again. God died at her feet. Hadeel is gone and her brother Ahmed lost his sight. Hadeel! Every prayer I remember, and half remember, won’t bring you back. As you wrap yourself in stories of Palestine, gather the other children to cry while waiting restless for the next soldier to knock down your door…”
These are lines from the poem Hadeel by Rafeef Ziadah, a Canadian-Palestinian spoken word artist and activist. It is dedicated to the memory of a 9-year-old Palestinian girl whose death in the hands of Israeli soldiers was met with the cruel indifference that the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians often are. Of this, she says: “They smile and regret death as a casual accident; and regret how Palestinian children die in a collective torture chamber: Gaza”. Her debut CD, Hadeel, a traditional Arabic name that means the cooing of doves, is dedicated to Palestinian youth, who still fly kites in the face of F16 bombers – American single-engine supersonic multi-role fighter aircrafts that the Apartheid State of Israel has historically used in its bombing campaigns in Gaza. Ziadah speaks of these children, who still remember the names of their villages in occupied Palestine, and still hear the sound of the cooing of doves over Gaza. It is a powerful collection of poems that shed light on the horrors of violence in Gaza – what it has taken from Palestinians, at the heart of which is the many children who have died.
This past week, I have found myself listening to Hadeel on repeat as I thought not only of the children of Gaza, but of those closer to home in the Western Cape. I have been thinking specifically about Keisha Samuels, an 18-year-old girl who was gunned down last Friday in Mitchells Plain. She was one of the more than 110 people killed in the said province in the past eight days – a significant number of them children and teenagers below the age of 18. Reports indicate that this wave of violence is driven by gang warfare and extortion-related killings. But Samuels, like so many who die in the violence, was not a member of a gang. She was just a girl who was walking to a store near her home to buy some food. A stray bullet hit her in the back, killing her instantly. The police told her mother, Wendy Samuels, that the shooters were targeting someone else at the shop. Her child, who loved netball and had her whole life ahead of her, was at the wrong place at the wrong time.
She was, as Ziadah describes what murdered Palestinian children are referred to by the Apartheid State of Israel in the poem Shades of Anger, simply “collateral damage”.
The carnage in the Western Cape, like the genocide in Gaza, is not a recent development. It has been a fact of life for decades, and traces its roots to early 20th century segregated prisons in South Africa. The forced removals during apartheid became a catalyst for the rapid spread of gangs. The apartheid state forcibly uprooted vibrant, diverse communities such as the now gentrified District Six and shifted “non-White” residents to the desolate periphery that we now know as the Cape Flats. Implementing the policy of separate and uneven development, these newly created townships lacked basic economic infrastructure, employment, and social safety nets. Stripped of traditional family and community networks and under constant threat of state brutality, young people formed neighbourhood defence units and male subcultures to reclaim identity and security.
This gave birth to what is known as the Robin Hood era, a period during the 1980s and 1990s when powerful street gangs on the Cape Flats, most notably the Hard Livings and the Americans, gained immense community support by positioning themselves as social benefactors and getting involved in the anti-apartheid struggle.
Faced with the cruelties of the apartheid regime and extreme poverty, local communities often viewed these heavily armed syndicates as the lesser of two evils. And it makes sense when you consider that in areas that were heavily neglected by the apartheid government, gang bosses funded community sports tournaments, distributed school uniforms, and even provided street-level dispute resolution. Gangs were effectively an alternative state. In exchange, families maintained an ironclad wall of silence, acting as human shields against police raids, hiding contraband, and even allowing their teenagers to be recruited into the gang ranks.
As we entered the new dispensation, pushback began to grow against these gangs.
It was led by organisations such as the People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD), whose own violent and brutal methods only worsened an already volatile situation. The bombing campaign of PAGAD, lasting from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, is well documented. It claimed hundreds of lives, including not only gang bosses and criminals, but also judges, police officers, moderate Muslim leaders and civilians. Children and teenagers were not spared. The tragic case of 7-year-old Christelle Abrahams, who was brutally killed during a shootout between PAGAD and gangsters in Ocean View, paints a picture of how gang violence in the Western Cape, and militant opposition to it, does not spare the lives of innocent children. As I have argued here many times, from Gaza to Sudan, Iran to the Cape Flats, children are always casualties of war.
I did not write this article to proffer solutions to the crisis of gang violence in the Western Cape. I wrote it because it matters that we do not forget who is dying in the violence.
It matters for Keisha Samuels in Mitchells Plain, and many other children in the Cape Flats, that we say their names.
Ziadah insists on this towards the end of the poem when she says: “…Hadeel is gone forever. Gone. No final words, just a void in her mother’s heart. They say “Don’t cry for martyrs, don’t cry for martyrs, carry on the fight, carry on the fight”. But for Hadeel, give me a moment of silence. Give me a moment of sincere resistance, so we can hold on to the bit of dignity we have left – for Hadeel”. We could replace Hadeel’s name with that of Keisha, of Christelle, of every child who has died in gang wars in the Western Cape, and the profundity remains.
Malaika is a researcher and geographer. She is a PhD in Geography candidate at the University of Bayreuth in Germany.
Malaika Mahlatsi
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