MUMS OF THE CAPE FLATS
- Thom Pierce
- Jun 30
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 2
Year: 2017
Location: Western Cape, South Africa
Partner: Daily Maverick
A selection of images from this series are available through W17 Gallery.
Less than 15km from central Cape Town, people are living in an undeclared war where young men are mowed down like Playstation game targets. Regularly, the Cape Flats and surrounds resemble a war zone with frightened people linked up via WhatsApp groups on their cellphones alerting one another about gang activity. Some days the only solution is to draw the curtains and bunker down. Those who live there tell you not a day goes by without gunshots ringing out.
In June 2019 the Western Cape government released mortuary statistics which suggested that a staggering 900 people had been murdered in gang violence between January and June 2019, figures which are almost double the previous year’s. By July, the national government decided to deploy members of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) to areas ravaged by gang violence. This has led to some reduction in a high murder rate, but most understand that in the long run it is simply putting a plaster on a festering sore.
However, while murders have been slightly reduced, there are many left behind who have to try to pick up the pieces of their broken lives. Hundreds of thousands flock to beautiful Cape Town to live, work and play, but many choose to look away from the communities, not far away, where mothers are burying the bullet-riddled bodies of their innocent children. Some of these mothers have formed a group, Moms Move for Justice, as a form of support and a way to talk to those “who understand”, but also to try to seek some form of legal justice from a system that is failing to deliver any form of justice or closure.
Read all of their full stories in the Daily Maverick by clicking the name under each image.
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