Cape Town café helps former prisoners brew a new life

The Gangstar Café in Mowbray opened in 2017 and has provided employment to many former prisoners. Photos: Alice Scott

• The Gangstar Café opened in 2017 and has trained and employed many former prisoners and helped many others to prepare for life outside prison.
• The café provides a supportive environment for people leaving prison.
• We spoke to some baristas who say the training and employment at the coffee shop has changed their lives for the better.

Lungiswa Sidukwana was in prison when her two-week-old son died in 2011. She was unable to attend his funeral. It was then that she realised things needed to change, she says.

It took almost another decade before Sidukwana was at last able to break a cycle of drug use, shoplifting and prison stints. She had been unemployed and struggled to find a way to stop her drug use.

Life in prison at times seemed easier, Sidukwana says.

In 2019 she was arrested and sentenced to three years, but was released in 2020 because of overcrowding in prisons during the Covid pandemic.

The following year she made the difficult decision to move out of the home she shared with her husband and mother-in-law in Mitchells Plain to live with her sister in Delft, where she was supported to stay away from drugs.

She had a mentor who would regularly check in with her each time she left prison. This person suggested that she apply for a training course that got her the job as a barista at Gangstar Café in Mowbray.

“Once I started working here, I got a full salary,” says Sidukwana. “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.”

From behind bars to barista

For almost ten years, Gangstar Café has been training and employing former prisoners as baristas. The café was opened by The Message Trust, an organisation focused on youth at risk, both in and out of prison. The coffee shop was one way to help ex-offenders get employment.

Naomi Engelbrecht, chief operations officer at The Message Trust South Africa, said there are many challenges for former inmates re-entering their communities.

Estimates of how many former prisoners reoffend range from 55% to 95%, but South Africa has no reliable figure, according to academic research reported by The Conversation.

“The biggest thing is they need employment,” Engelbrecht said. “They need to be able to eat, and gangsterism and crime can offer them that. Employers often don’t want to give people with criminal records jobs, which then brings you back to them reoffending.”

When Gangstar opened in 2017, The Message Trust was offering courses for prisoners in Drakenstein Correctional Centre in entrepreneurship, life skills development and job readiness to prepare them for life outside prison. Many of these students became employees at Gangstar.

Engelbrecht said their programme includes a job readiness course covering CV writing and mock interviews, run by the organisation Common Good, and a barista training course by the Red Band Barista Academy.

Once students complete the training, Gangstar employs them at the Mowbray coffee shop or helps connect them with popular 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,” she said.

Naomi Engelbrecht, chief operations officer at The Message Trust South Africa, speaks with Gangstar barista and operations assistant Lungiswa Sidukwana at the Mowbray café.

Engelbrecht said people who completed the training have gone on to work as managers of coffee shops across Cape Town, and as an instructor at the Red Band Barista Academy.

One of Gangstar’s most effective ways of providing jobs to trainees is through catered events, according to Engelbrecht.

“Generally, a church or a business or an organisation contacts us to hire a barista and a coffee shop for their event. We do events at Mowbray, but then we also have a coffee trailer that we take to events,” she said.

Unam Lumka, who has worked at Gangstar for 18 months, said he worked at several of these catered events.

He lived in Khayelitsha, where he was involved in a gang which he joined when he was 14 for safety and protection, he said. Lumka said he started selling drugs and breaking into houses and robbing Uber drivers. Many of his friends were shot and killed.

At 18, Lumka was hospitalised for two weeks after an accident involving a stolen car. He realised then that he wanted to leave the gang and return to school.

But getting out was not easy. “Those guys wouldn’t let me just go,” he said.

It wasn’t until several members of the gang were killed that Lumka was finally able to leave. He returned to school and completed matric in 2022. Lumka said he battled to find work and had to fight the temptation to return to crime in order to survive.

Working at Gangstar has now offered Lumka 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. I feel like it’s not something that I just love doing, but it’s something that I’ve been called to do.”

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