| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Gary Kynoch. We Are Fighting the World: A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947–1999. (New African Histories Series.) Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. 2005. Pp. xv, 200. Cloth $44.95, paper $22.95.
As this review is being written, urban South Africa is rocked daily by violent and horrific crimes, especially against women. What are the roots of this disregard for human life? Gary Kynoch's well-researched, provocative book provides one answer.	1
In this study of the Marashea, an ethnically based urban gang in South Africa, Kynoch pleads for the liberation of southern African social history from the limiting frame of African resistance against the colonial and apartheid states. He argues that the complexities of the lives of black South Africans call for much wider studies of their historical options and daily choices. Thus, for example, the violence described in this book did not emanate from the death squads of the apartheid state, but from an urban gang. This violence was tolerated by the state, true, but it developed and flourished, according to Kynoch, within a completely different register than that of social protest and resistance. By implication, African urban activities cannot all be automatically conceptualized as heroic.	. . .

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