Faldiela de Vries, secretary, Manenberg Community Development Trust

It is regrettable that your newspaper has elected to once again label and stigmatise all residents in the areas of the schools covered at the event as living in “gangland” (“Gangland matrics praised for true grit”, Athlone News, January 30).

Your headline reflected a negative tone to an event that was received by all attendees to be a great occasion that inspired all.

No other area on the Cape Flats has taken such a bold step to celebrate their matric top achievers with such great honour and splendour.

Your headline was created to draw sensation and showed scant regard for the testimonies of those speakers who expressed such great pride of their achievements and overcoming many challenges.

Kedan Hendricks, a past top achiever and current resident, is now a qualified pharmacist; Professor Irvin Kinnes, a past resident, spoke with pride of growing up in Manenberg. His motivation to the learners: “We are not victims, and we must never see ourselves as victims’’.

Zaghrah Schwartz, one of the current matric top achievers, spoke with confidence and encouragement to other learners. Brian Jombe, a top achiever at Cathkin High, comes from a poor single-mother household.

To enable and capacitate the community to implement projects that would make a tangible difference to their lives, is one of the mission statements of the Manenberg Community Development Trust (MCDT). The event on January 25 was aligned to this mission statement. Your headline has tarnished a very noble action to dispel the negative image of our areas and its people.

You have stigmatised all those who live in the precinct to a connotation of gangsterism.

As the MCDT we demand a public apology to the organisation, the organising team, the top achievers and their families and the community at large.

• The purpose of this story was to demonstrate how far these matriculants have come and the odds they have beaten – the main one being chronic gangsterism in their community that has claimed countless lives over the years.

A headline needs to convey, in an honest, forthright and concise way the substance of a story.

In no way did our story or headline (and the one in this instance was written not by Athlone reporter Hazel Allies-Husselman) identify the children as gangsters. Had they done so, they would have referred to "Gangster matrics", not "Gangland matrics". There is a very key difference in that. What our story did, in fact, do was demonstrate the fact that circumstances don't define the kids who have overcome them.

We need to be honest about those circumstances, using plain, vigorous language otherwise we risk diminishing the achievements of those who defy them.

Violent crime, including the gang violence we witness and are subject to in our communities almost every day, is ugly, it is brutal and it is a heartbreaking truth we ourselves, as residents of the Manenbergs, the Bonteheuwels, the Makhazas and the Mitchell’s Plains of the Cape Flats, too feel.

And yes, it might not be nice to hear or to confront that our communities have become ganglands – a description that we have talked about; concurred with, and differed about in our newsroom as well as with a parent of one of the matriculants in a frank, thoughtful and respectful conversation since the article was published – but we cannot deny and thereby dismiss the many, many stories we have penned about children being killed by gangsters. Those children do not get to matriculate.

Would they be offended over the use of the term "gangland" to describe the place where their lives ended all too soon? Would the many people we have quoted in our stories over the years who have either used that word or others like it to describe the Apartheid-engineered legacy of violence and misery they and their loved ones have to endure? Or the police and community crime fighters who put their lives on the line daily to confront this reality?

We need to be honest about this very complex issue and the way we engage with it.

The personal and offensive remarks posted online and directed at our reporter since the article was published should be called out for what it is: vile and unacceptable conduct and by no means contributing to what we really need – a constructive and meaningful discussion.

– Simonéh de Bruin, editor, Cape Community Media

#violence

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