ABSTRACT
The most common form of resistance to racialised bondage by both the enslaved and the enserfed of the Cape Colony was the act of desertion, that is, maroonage, whereby armed groups of runaways formed secreted communities along the mountainous peripheries of the colony. Known locally as drosters, the radically defiant maroons have largely been forgotten and erased in South African memory, yet they remain important figures in a contemporary period of hyper-incarceration. Today, the descendants of the enslaved experience the highest disproportionate imprisonment rates in South Africa. This chapter suggests that a tradition of fugitivity started by the drosters has been embodied and remains enacted by the modern Cape gang. By revisiting the links between colonial-era runaways and modern Cape gangs, the latter is reimagined as engaged in opacity-making - that is, the production of complex structures of density and unknowability against the epistemic violence of the colonial gaze.
