Gary Knoch explores the origins and activities of a migrant African criminal society that has operated in and around South Africa's gold mining compounds.

Since the late 1940s, a migrant African criminal society, known as the Marashea has operated and around South Africa's gold mining compounds. Comprising thousands of members involved in extensive criminal networks, the Marashea were more influential in the day-to-day lives of many black South Africans than were the agents of the apartheid state. These gangs remain active in South Africa. Much has been written about the problems of violent criminality and the historical roots of South Africa's urban criminal culture. In We Are Fighting the World: A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947?1999 Gary Kynoch points to the combination of coercive force and administrative weakness that characterized the apartheid state. As long as crime and violence were contained within black townships and did not threaten adjacent white areas, township residents were largely left to fend for themselves. The Marashea's ability to prosper during the apartheid era and its involvement in political conflict are critical to an understanding of the violent crime epidemic that today plagues contemporary South Africa.Highly readable and solidly-researched, We Are Fighting the World is critical to an understanding of South African society, past and present. This pioneering study effectively challenges many of the orthodoxies that have guided social history research on resistance, ethnicity, urban spaces, and gender in South Africa. Kynoch's interviews with many current and former gang members gives We are Fighting the World an energy and a realism that is unparalleled in any other published work on gang violence in southern Africa.Gary Kynoch is an assistant professor of History at Dalhousie University. Heis the author of numerous articles on crime, policing and violence in urban South Africa.