‘We must infiltrate the tsotsis’: school politics and youth gangs in Soweto, 1968–1976

Abstract

By the late 1960s, two major associative structures dominated youth culture in Soweto: the school and the gang. Despite secondary school expansion during the early 1970s, no more than a third of the teenage and adolescent population of Soweto attended school by the middle of the decade. Gangs, which offered a powerful alternative to schooling, attracted a large proportion of unemployed and non‐schoolgoing male adolescents. While the gangs were absorbed by localised competition, a political culture gradually took root in Soweto's high schools. Conflict mounted between high schools and gangs in the lead‐up to the 1976 uprising. It was an uprising of school students rather than ‘the youth’, a contemporary catch‐all category which often obscures deep cultural divisions. School and university‐based activists, recognising the political potential of gangs, made some attempt to draw the gang constituency into disciplined political activity but they were largely unsuccessful. Gangs participated spontaneously in the uprising but the Soweto Students Representative Council, in order to maintain credibility with a broader Soweto support base, distanced itself from all gang activity and even mounted anti‐gang operations during late 1976 and 1977.