Plasma gangs: How South Africans’ fears about crime created an urban legend: A tale of criminality, magic, violence and fear offered a way to foreground the contradictions that come with living in a township
. Depending on which story one heard, the gangs were either nyaope addicts themselves or professional dealers of the drug.in South African cities. It is extremely destructive and the subject of a large body of urban mythology. Experts generally agree that it is comprised of a mix of substances, usually a base of cheap heroin with additions like asbestos, rat poison, milk powder, bicarbonate of soda and even swimming pool cleaner.
Concerns about drug users and dealers played powerfully into the plasma gangs narrative. The nyaope connection is part of what set this story aside from “normal, everyday” crime and helped it morph into an urban legend that continues to be disseminated as one of the risks of living in South Africa.residents’ narratives about their own precarity are both hypermodern and related to globalised and transnational anxieties about status, consumption, belonging and identity.
The fact that plasma gangs are not empirically ‘real’ is almost beside the point. The story condenses fears about security and crime, drug dealers and drug users, police failures and corruption, dangerous foreigners, unruly youth, the intersection between crime, witchcraft and technology and the insecurity and visibility of township life. It illustrates the way in which certain South Africans develop and transmit stories and rumours that helped them to make sense of the world they live in.
In considering the plasma gangs we can see how myth, uncertainty, rumour and strangeness inform South African cultures of fear: crime is not just frightening in and of itself but also because it connotes the presence of hidden forces that undermine the predictability of everyday life. This kind of “crime talk” is endemic in South Africa but oddly quiet in academic literature, which often associates fear of crime with whiteness and wealth.
This is an edited extract from the author’s book Worrier State: Risk, anxiety and moral panic in South Africa
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South Africa: Plasma Gangs - How South Africans' Fears About Crime Created an Urban LegendAnalysis - Around the middle of 2013 a series of stories appeared in the South African press about a new phenomenon called 'plasma gangs', presented as the latest iteration of the country's crime crisis. Journalists, broadcasters, police and government spokespeople, social media users and local residents shared tales online and in mainstream media of the frightening exploits of these gangs, said to be located in Alexandra (Alex) township in the north of Johannesburg.
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Plasma gangs: how South Africans’ fears about crime created an urban legendThe theft of flat-screen TVs for a white powder to make woonga shows how myth and uncertainty help cultivate fear
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South Africa: Plasma Gangs - How South Africans' Fears About Crime Created an Urban LegendAnalysis - Around the middle of 2013 a series of stories appeared in the South African press about a new phenomenon called 'plasma gangs', presented as the latest iteration of the country's crime crisis. Journalists, broadcasters, police and government spokespeople, social media users and local residents shared tales online and in mainstream media of the frightening exploits of these gangs, said to be located in Alexandra (Alex) township in the north of Johannesburg.
Read more »
Plasma gangs: how South Africans’ fears about crime created an urban legendThe theft of flat-screen TVs for a white powder to make woonga shows how myth and uncertainty help cultivate fear
Read more »