Mafia Land: Inside South Africa’s Darkest Cartels
Kyle Cowan, Mafia Land: Inside South Africa’s Darkest Cartels (Cape Town: Penguin, 2025)
EITHER South Africa is already a full-blown mafia state; or it is fast becoming one. In the context of South Africa, the term mafia is used in a broad, generic sense. It reflects the complex connectivity of criminality, politics and law enforcement that enables organised crime using corruption, extortion and ultimately force; murder included. There is no doubt that our knowledge of this parallel economy would be limited were it not for the courage of whistleblowers and the persistence of investigative journalists.
Kyle Cowan tackles twelve systems he describes as mafias. He kicks off with the construction industry where representatives of self-described business consortia turn up at a major project demanding control of a third of subcontracted work (based on an interpretation of BEE law), a third of the total project cost, or straightforward protection. The most notorious is Delangokubona. Few contractors resist this pressure and it is now practice to cost in extortion. This has inflated costs significantly.
Then there is the taxi industry where classic mafia tactics are employed by owners whose control of routes is maintained by threat and force that sometimes results in small massacres. The taxi associations have a strong grip over long-distance bus services which often operate under limitations. And the taxi industry is able to call on a ready supply of hitmen from rural KwaZulu-Natal.
Other mafias control the flourishing illegal cigarette industry that was boosted first by Jacob Zuma’s evisceration of SARS and later by the ill-advised Covid-19 ban; and the lucrative water tanker supply business. There is circumstantial evidence that reticulation is sabotaged in some places to create a crisis that the tankers then address.
And there is the longstanding club protection racket, particularly in Cape Town and Johannesburg, which is notorious for violent turf wars. This about more than extortion and perhaps most importantly the supply of drugs. Babita Deokaran died trying to expose supply chain corruption at Tembisa Hospital which was comprehensively looted by three crime families (Govindraju, Maumela and Mazibuko) with the collusion of senior insiders.
But Cowan has been rather too free with his use of the term mafia. In several cases he is simply describing highly organised larceny. For instance, cash-in-transit and ATM robbery is simple violent crime; while the concept of a mafia suggests legitimate business reinforced by illegal and ultimately coercive means. Cash theft has branched out into kidnapping, but there is little indication of a mafia culture here either. Cowan’s Chancellor House and Krugersdorp mafias are no more than examples of ANC corruption.
His Kusile mafia is interesting, however. This was an in-house takeover of tendering processes that used supposed community liaison to agitate and create work stoppages to benefit specific rent-seeking interests. And it was economic sabotage that imperilled national security. But if there is a police mafia, it is nebulous. The Madlanga commission hearings suggest what has long been known: that the SAPS is a sump of incompetence, corruption, political and personal infighting and sheer indifference in which professionals neither prosper nor last long.
There is a curiously unfinished feel to this book with a great deal of unproductive padding, for example excursions into the histories of the American mafia or English highwaymen. The hand of an editor or proof reader is notably absent, but there is a clue: an admission that AI was employed in the editing. This may explain abbreviation of the SAPS political killings task team as PTTK (p. 17) and the statement that the country has had ‘at least 11’ national police commissioners since 1994 (p. 230). There is a precise figure which a competent human editor would demand along with substantial tightening of content. Is this the future face of South African publishing?
Cowan comes to strong and cogent conclusions. He believes, with good reason, that the corrupt nexus of business, politics and all branches of government has gone so far as to threaten the integrity of the nation. Systemic change is required; root and branch. But South Africa has no tradition of public service that has not ultimately favoured a particular group; a factor that has enabled recent state capture.
And Cowan is also correct to argue that paper-based procurement systems are wide open to manipulation. But computer-dependent systems in which he places faith are just as vulnerable in different and perhaps even more devastating ways.
Book review by Christopher Merrett, reproduced from his web page, From the Thornveld