Contributing Author Dickson Igwe
This Community Servant attended a seminar on gangs recently that had him thinking. Yes, afterwards, with chin on fist, he took on the posture of thought.
Now, as these things go, he usually takes the panoramic perspective on an issue, before homing in on the more specific: macro precedes micro in his writing style.
And that is how he will begin and end this narrative on a growing problem in these paradisiacal Antilles.
Ok! Gangs, or more specifically delinquent gangs, have been part of Western society and culture for decades; and one thing gangs have in common is the fact that overwhelmingly, they tend to operate outside the parameters of the Rule of law or social legitimacy. Sometimes they use the law for their own nefarious purposes, but almost always, gangs and their members consider themselves above the law, or simply outside of it.
Gangs operate within their own self created and self regulated framework, and are usually oriented towards the illegal and illegitimate. However, the key issue with gangs as they relate to the rest of community is one of ambiguity, in that it can be difficult identifying or defining a gang member, gang, or gang culture, and observing how it metamorphoses from a harmless set of relations, like a group of friends in a cycling club, into something ugly and nasty.
Not to become too academic on the issue, it must be remembered that in Nazi Germany, in the early 1930s, Hitler’s rise to power owed much to various gangs operating in Berlin and Munich that supported the NAZI party, gangs of beer drinking thugs who ultimately came together to form the genocidal SS and the Gestapo. Apparently, harmless associations in the beer parlours of German towns and cities led to mass murder and world war. In many parts of the world, politicians are symbiotically connected with gangs for power purposes, especially in places like Jamaica and Haiti.
The Black Panther Party
In the early 1900s, US immigrants: Italians, Jews, the Irish, Russians, and East Europeans, then later Puerto Ricans and Cubans, all possessed a type of gang culture that eventually became foundational to the much larger, and more violent groups that became an underworld of crime and illegality. These gangs fed on society, operating in the nooks and crannies where the law could not prevail, the grey and even black areas, or rather, where the law of the jungle ruled.
bad bwoy Snoop Dogg
The Black Panther Movement of the 1960s saw violence as a means of winning power for blacks. The Black Panthers believed that the Civil Rights Movement of non violent protest was not enough to win blacks their much deserved right to be equal with whites. Black Power was a progenitor of the modern day gang in black community. In Northern Ireland, the fight against British Rule was carried out essentially by the Irish republican Army for decades. The IRA was in essence a very violent group of gangs that terrorized Britain until very recently. To be continued next week…
