55 SA Crime QuArterly No. 57 • SePtemBer 2016 Book review Don Pinnock, Gang town * Elrena van der Spuy is attached to the Centre of Criminology, Faculty of Law, at the University of Cape Town. Elrena van der Spuy* Elrena.Vanderspuy@uct.ac.za http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3108/2016/v0n57a1365 In Gang town, Don Pinnock once again brings his skills as journalist, photographer, criminologist and youth justice activist to bear on a field of study, which he, as much as anyone in South Africa, has helped establish. The style of the book reflects Pinnock’s long career as a journalist. At the same time his strong foothold in academia has enabled him to produce a work that displays a grasp of much of the strictly academic studies that have appeared since his own seminal book on gangs, Brotherhoods, was published in 1984. 1 Later, in Gang rituals and rites of passage (1997) he explored the role that Cape Flats gangs played in providing poorly educated, young coloured males with a sense of belonging and purpose in an environment characterised by family dislocation, poverty and violence. 2 And, after a 20-year hiatus, Gang town could perhaps be viewed as completing a gang trilogy, a summation and updating of Pinnock’s work on this topic. The South African literature on gangs is relatively well established. Historical inquiries, sociologically orientated explorations of both street and prison gangs, and more recent political analyses of the links between local gangs and global organised crime networks Title: Gang town Publisher: Tafelberg, Cape Town, 2016 Price: 312 Pages: R196 Availability: Published ISBN: 9780624067894 Gang town, so promises the back leaf, ‘tells a tale of two cities’. The front cover juxtaposes the two cities – Cape Town and gang town. The outline of Table Mountain beckons in the distance. Superimposed onto that world heritage emblem of the city is the body of a young man. A crude tattoo is visible on his naked torso. The arms of the body are stretched outward. The hands clasp a handgun. The torso, the tattoo and handgun signify ‘the gangster’. He hails from gang town. The gangster subject is not without agency. The body is tilted in anticipation of the deadly velocity of the gun. But that agency, we know, is painfully circumscribed by the debilitating conditions of social exclusion that characterise gang town. So it is with anticipation that one turns to Pinnock’s account of the interplay between structure and agency and gangs.