A coffee shop in Mowbray, Cape Town, has spent almost 10 years training and hiring former prisoners as baristas. Gangstar Café was opened by The Message Trust, an organisation that works with young people at risk, both in and out of prison.
The café is one way the organisation helps people who have left prison find work. According to GroundUp, which first published the report, the café opened in 2017.
“The biggest thing is they need employment,” said Naomi Engelbrecht, chief operations officer at The Message Trust South Africa. “They need to be able to eat, and gangsterism and crime can offer them that.”
Engelbrecht said many employers do not want to hire people with criminal records. She said this pushes some of them back into crime.
Estimates of how many former prisoners commit new crimes range from 55% to 95%. South Africa has no reliable figure, according to academic research reported by The Conversation.
When the café opened, The Message Trust ran courses for prisoners at Drakenstein Correctional Centre. The courses covered entrepreneurship, life skills and getting ready for work. Many of these students later worked at Gangstar.
Engelbrecht said the programme now includes a job readiness course run by the organisation Common Good. It teaches CV writing and includes practice interviews. Students also do a barista course with the Red Band Barista Academy.
After the training, Gangstar either hires the students at its Mowbray shop or helps link them with well known coffee shop chains.
“This year our organisation has been involved in courses with over 70 graduations across both our barista and job readiness training in and out of prison courses,” Engelbrecht said.
She said some people who finished the training now manage coffee shops across Cape Town. One became an instructor at the Red Band Barista Academy.
Engelbrecht said catered events are one of the best ways the café creates jobs. Churches, businesses and other groups hire a barista and a coffee setup for their events. The café also has a coffee trailer that it takes to events.
Lungiswa Sidukwana is one of the people who found work through the programme. She was in prison in 2011 when her two-week-old son died, and she could not attend his funeral.
She said she spent years caught in drug use, shoplifting and prison stays. In 2019 she was sentenced to three years. She was released in 2020 because prisons were overcrowded during the Covid pandemic.
In 2021 she moved from Mitchells Plain to live with her sister in Delft, where she got support to stay off drugs. A mentor suggested she apply for the training course that led to her job as a barista at Gangstar.
“Once I started working here, I got a full salary,” Sidukwana said. “Two years later, I was promoted to operations assistant. Now, I’m able to rent a house. All those things make me not want to go back to prison.”
Unam Lumka has worked at Gangstar for 18 months and has worked at several catered events. He said he joined a gang in Khayelitsha at the age of 14 for safety. He said he sold drugs and broke into houses.
At 18, he spent two weeks in hospital after an accident in a stolen car. He said he then decided to leave the gang and go back to school. “Those guys wouldn’t let me just go,” he said.
Lumka was only able to leave after several gang members were killed. He finished matric in 2022 but struggled to find work. He said the job at Gangstar now gives him a stable income.
“The thing I love about being a barista is serving you,” Lumka said. “Because when I’m serving you, I’m serving you with love.”
Source: this article is based on reporting by Moneyweb. Image: Moneyweb. Written with the help of AI and published by the Tzaneen Voice Business desk. See our Editorial Standards.
Anelisa Nkuna covers business and money news for Tzaneen Voice. Anelisa reports on the rand, fuel prices, interest rates, jobs, Eskom, Transnet, farming and company results. The aim is simple: explain what the numbers mean for household budgets, small businesses and workers in South Africa.