‘Light in this darkness’: communities push back against Cape Town gang culture

Volunteers are working to carve out safe spaces in townships with initiatives such as football training and dance classes In 2015, Deniël de Bruyn moved almost 300 miles to Cape Town, to live with relatives and try to overcome a drug problem. Nine months later, he was dead, shot in what gangsters in the township of Wesbank claimed was a case of mistaken identity, according to De Bruyn’s cousin Lindy Jacobs. The shooting was witnessed by Jacobs’s 12-year-old son Zunadin. “My son’s life was nev...

By Rachel Savage in Cape Town. Photographs by Tommy Trenchard