Revisiting PAGAD Machoism or Islamism?

Abstract

Two years after the first free elections in the history of South Africa, which brought the liberation movement to political power, a new twist was added to the seemingly ever-present violence of the gang-lands of Cape Town. A vigilante movement dominated by Cape Muslims, People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD), launched a series of assassinations of local drug lords and vowed to free the postapartheid townships of the scourge of crime and drugs. Since autumn of the year 2000, PAGAD's militant actions have ceased to pose a security threat in Cape Town. Most of the militants of the movement are behind bars. But even long after the movement reached its zenith and decline, academics have failed to reach a consensus over what the peculiar phenomenon of PAGAD actually represented.