“I love mommy,” he says, slouching forward, a knife peeking out his shorts.
Tattoos mark him as a gangster.
“My mother is my everything.”
The feeling is mutual.
“He’s my baby,” his mother says.
Despite the drugs, the decades of jail time, the knife fights and his 30-year life of crime, she remains proud of her son.
She sits upright on a hard-backed chair, her legs crossed, her hands clasped in her lap.
He sits next to her slumped on a couch.
“This is a product of growing up in a township,” his mother says, pointing at him.
She had high hopes for her son, who dreamt of becoming a pastor or lawyer.
Instead, this Lavender Hill mother watched her youngest child transform from an obedient alter boy into a hardened criminal, feared gangster and drug addict who has a string of convictions.
He is 46 and he’s been convicted 46 times.
“My mom has had to see me fighting with swords, knives and pangas. I was one of the first people to start shooting guns here. She saw this… but my mother is my everything,” he says softly.
She nods at him and reaches to take his hand.
They have asked not to be named as he is still an active gang member.
About a week before this article was published he was arrested for tik possession.
He was brought up in a strict yet loving environment.
His mother never imagined she would one day be the parent of a criminal.
She is from a tightly-knit family from District Six.
After falling pregnant as a teenager, she relied heavily on her relatives. But in the early ’70s, her family was torn apart when they were forced to leave District Six in terms of the Group Areas Act.
She ended up in Lavender Hill when her son was about five.
“He loved it in District Six.
“He was such a good child there. But things changed when we got here. There was nothing. Just sand and bush.
“He was brought up like I was brought up: in bed at 6pm and with manners,” she says.
Her son said when he got to Lavender Hill, none of the other children spoke English.
“They spoke Afrikaans. When I got here I couldn’t speak Afrikaans properly. They thought I was stuck up because I spoke English. They started fighting with me and I fought back. That’s when all this started,” he says.
When he was 15 he and a group of friends broke into a house in Salt River and stole money.
Then they went to a bank and stole money from a man’s suitcase.
He was arrested.
It broke his mother’s heart.
“I’ll never forget that day. He was sent to prison with the big guns,” she says, her eyes widening.
She worried about her son as she watched him turn to drugs and crime.
“I didn’t quite know what to do. I wasn’t like that. And this was my child. I spoke to him but I also let him be,” she says with a sigh.
She acknowledges her son is a gangster and that he is addicted to drugs, but turns a blind eye to this and no longer talks to him about his addiction.
Other gangsters often come to her house to visit him.
“I’m not nervous about it anymore. I had fear but it’s okay now,” she says.
But it does unnerve her that she has come to accept him and his lifestyle.
She looks at photographs neatly positioned on shelves in her sitting room and shakes her head when she recalls her family life in District Six compared to now.
Her son says since his first conviction, he has executed countless break-ins.
He has been involved in a number of gang fights and shootings and has collectively spent about 30 years in prison.
“I built a career of being in prison.”
He is unapologetic about the crimes he has committed.
Like his mother, he never thought his life would follow such a path.
“It’s so sad to think what a well-structured family we came out of. People are so weak. We just accept our lives,” he says.
Asked how he feels about how his actions have affected his mother and family, he pauses for a second and says slowly: “I’m over that guilt. I love them.”
He believes his life would have been different had he stayed in District Six.
“I wanted to become a pastor or lawyer. Those dreams are gone. From day one when you’re born here, in Lavender Hill, you’re affected by the place…
“There are drugs on every street corner. Children play gang-fight gang-fight. Children don’t want to go to school,” he says bitterly.
Despite being a gangster, he tries to dissuade youngsters from taking the same route.
“It’s all that I can give back, the truth,” he says, his head in his hands.
Both he and his mother agree drugs and gangsterism are the two main crippling factors in Lavender Hill.
“But these problems start in the home,” his mother says softly, staring at her son.
*Read the Cape Times tomorrow for Part 2 of the Drug Abuse Report by Caryn Dolley.
[email protected] - Cape Times