But does this latest ceasefire signify an end to the conflict? Or is this the calm before yet another deluge of violence - an opportunity for gangs to regroup during the month of Ramadan before resuming their relentless competition for supremacy of the criminal economy? And is the Cape destined for a repeat of an all-out war between the gangs and revived movements like PAGAD, who through their reprisals between 1996 and 2002, struck fear into the hearts of the so-called untouchables?

In this second part of Cape of Wars, Special Assignment investigates efforts to stop the cycles of drugs, deaths and retribution through community-based initiatives focussing on youth empowerment. After all, this is the most susceptible generation for recruitment into the gangs and into a vortex of criminality from which few emerge unscathed.

Gangs have been endemic to the Cape Flats prior to the apartheid-engineered removals of coloured communities from District Six to the dormitory suburbs positioned on the fringes of the city. But the forced removals of the 1960s created extreme social stress, as the foundations of community, with a solid core of adult role models, fell apart.

Youths, particularly juvenile males, have a need for rituals marking their passage to manhood. If society does not provide them they will inevitably invent their own. For the dispossessed, angry and alienated youths of the Cape Flats, therefore, gangs represent a ghetto family - for a sense of identity, belonging, respect, and as an attempted defense against personal pain.

But today, street gangs have become the operational fronts for organized crime syndicates. The youths do their bidding, sell their drugs and kill in order to graduate up the ranks. It stands to reason, therefore, that in order to reduce the lure of the gangs for disaffected youths, viable alternatives - positive rituals and role models - have to be provided. Yet to date, despite rhetoric about youth empowerment and socio-economic upliftment, this has not happened on the scale required to transform the lives of those still oppressed by poverty, crime and despair.

Watch the first of the two-part programme by Special Assignment on Thursday, 23 August at 21:00 on SABC3.