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Migrancy, crime and faction fighting: the role of the Isitshozi in the development of ethnic organisations in the compounds

1990; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03057079008708224

1465-3893

Keith Breckenridge,

African history and culture studies

Abstract During the Twenties the prison‐compound complex that had spawned Jan Note's Ninevite gang produced another organisation that structured crime amongst the migrant population on the Rand. The Isitshozi exemplified organised African crime on the Rand during the Thirties. The gang began as an organisation of Mpondo migrant workers that existed either within or on the edge of the compounds. By the end of the Thirties the Isitshozi had begun to move out of the compounds into the nearby urban communities. The two centres of its organisation —the compounds and the prisons —had, from the beginning, infused different types of members into the gang. Young Mpondo migrants were recruited in the compounds where the gang was strong and hardened urban criminals entered the gang through the prison network. By 1940 the gang's interaction with the urban African communities along the Rand had exposed it to the growing number of marginalised urban youths. This combination, of organisation and marginalised membership, produced a phenomenon that presaged the tsotsi gangs of the Fifties.