Two white men under the age of 45 walk into the bookstore and take their seats. It’s surreal, and it’s painful to watch. There is no other way of putting it. Though they never say it, they are here to discuss black failure.
Words matter. The two men are also exquisite wordsmiths — otherwise the audience wouldn’t have bothered venturing out on such an overcast early evening. And although they do not state it, they are also here to paint a picture of the historical betrayal of South Africa’s historical revolution all those moons ago, or, at least, the too-hasty suspension of its moral and ethical agency.
The occasion is the launch of Kyle Cowan’s devastatingly piercing book, Mafia Land: Inside South Africa’s Darkest Cartels. His interlocutor, Jeff Wicks — a fellow political crime sleuth — has been riding a news wave of his own with his recently released title The Shadow State: Why Babita Deokaran Had to Die. Not long ago, I was on that very stage myself as the psychologist-turned-novelist Onke Mazibuko’s interlocutor, after months of working as his manuscript’s “reader”.
Walking us through the treacherous landscape of Mafia Land, Cowan tears down the façade to reveal a South Africa teeming with horrific characters we are now beholden to — whether we like it or not and whether we know it or not. Craven mafias; cartels of all stripes, including criminal police cartels; crime syndicates; politicians. You name it. All locked in a ruthless war over the country’s riches.
Mafia Land is a hair-raising account of 12 of the most dangerous cartels that are bedevilling South Africa. This is not politics as usual. In chapter 9 of the harrowing yet brilliant book, Cowan describes what amounts to an ordinary day in the dramatic business of kidnapping for ransom — a murder scene.
Between April 2023 and March last year, the South African Police Service recorded more than 17,000 kidnappings, a fourfold increase from the about 4,000 incidents a decade earlier.
This figure is merely a drop in the ocean — a glimpse of the brazenness of a ritualised, well-organised criminal enterprise operating in an altogether ungovernable polity. For Cowan, the scale of the growth in kidnappings is staggering. “Between April 2013 and March 2025, 104,311 kidnapping cases were recorded by the police. But 48% — 50,503 of those cases — were recorded in just three years, between April 2022 and March 2025. Digging a bit deeper, of those 50,503 cases, 26,184 were in Gauteng.”
In this intricate but exquisitely detailed account, we are introduced to the 12 mafias as though we are being introduced to the holy hierarchy of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. We have a tobacco mafia, a water tanker mafia, a taxi mafia, a hospital mafia, a construction mafia, a kidnapping mafia and even a police mafia.
Cowan’s book blows open the windows of silent bourgeoisie civility to reveal not only one “industry” of the underground, but 12 of the country’s most dangerous cartels, with talons reaching deep into the machinery of state.
In this intricate but exquisitely detailed account, we are introduced to the 12 mafias as though we are being introduced to the holy hierarchy of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. We have a tobacco mafia, a water tanker mafia, a taxi mafia, a hospital mafia, a construction mafia, a kidnapping mafia and even a police mafia.
His revelations of each mafia going about its daily business is true to genre. Like all mafias everywhere, the operational system feeds off a vast web of patronage and extraction — which stretches from street level to the highest echelons of government.
In the foreword to Jeff Wicks’ equally depressing and at turns riveting account about why whistleblower Babita Deokaran “had to die” — ingeniously titled Shadow State— Pieter du Toit contextualises Wicks’s dog-with-a bone investigative obsession.
“Once Wicks started tugging at a very fine, nearly invisible thread ... he couldn’t stop. What he found made Paul Pretorius, senior counsel and evidence leader at the Zondo Commission of Inquiry into State Capture, sit up and take notice,” he states, before dropping the bomb: “In Gauteng, an insidious extraction network, rivalling the Zuma-Gupta network, had stolen billions of rands from the health department. This is State Capture 2.0.”
Deokaran, Wicks reminds us, “was a casualty of the shadow state”. For him, the shadow state is a “parallel criminal world designed to prey on public funds”. The thieves in this tragic opera are enabled by legit organs of South Africa’s hyper-capitalism: car dealerships, estate agents, lawyers. The establishment business. They are also protected — the author states, matter-of-factly — “by hapless, or corrupt, police officers and an endless army of hit men who take their deadly stock in trade to the highest buyer”.
Maks Ntaka (first name a naughty quip on the main character’s condition; in Xhosa, intaka means bird, as in, “he sang like a canary”) is — on the surface and by his own buttonhole estimate — a fairly ethical corporate young hand on the come.
Our birdman fits the bill. Educated at posh schools, a millennial with huge ambitions, if premised on political naïveté and nonexistent people’s skills, he steps towards his professional zenith with both old counsel — ingrained in the ethos of hard graft — and deal-closing corporate jungle instincts.
He is also the lead protagonist in psychologist and award-winning novelist Dr Onke Mazibuko’s second work of fiction. Canary (Penguin Books) is a searing, layered commentary on ambition, the uneasy and multidimensional nature of complicity, human frailty, and the way individual greed so quickly morphs into institutional greed. Told with a fast, cinematic pace, it is also — because so much unfolds inside its lead’s mind — a psychological thriller in the mould of Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.
Light and accessible in style the writing might be, yet it is also a Fanonian critique on how soon resistance movement leaders quickly descend into the petit bourgeoisie, while the majority of those they fought alongside in the trenches barely scrape by.
After years of loyal devotion to arms-tech industries, Ntaka has found proof of monumental-scale corruption in his department. Tender fraud, kickbacks, inflated contracts.
Shaken and self-righteous, he decides to blow the whistle — but as he prepares to do so, he discovers his long-time mentor has implicated him in the fraud. The earth beneath his feet has long collapsed; the outlandish intrigue of his isolated life is that he is the only one unaware. Not only is he being set up, but shady foreigners with bottomless pockets are on his trail, looking for their cut. For Maks — and, somehow, for the reader engrossed in this riveting tale — the walls are closing in. Disaster, or worse, death lurks at every turn. What is a good man to do? But is Maks a “good” man, if he continues his clandestine affair with another man’s wife?
Foreign correspondent Tom Burgis’s The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers and the Systematic Theft of Africa’s Wealth is a record of his reporting on the ugly “under” and often handsome “over” belly of a continent that never leaves its travellers — and its children — unscarred, untouched or not deeply stirred.
In a chapter titled “God Has Nothing To Do With It”, Burgis unearths yet another case of malfeasance in an Africa rich in minerals and human potential but caught in the permanent omnigrip of dark forces. Since Africa’s minerals are the root of this monumental grand larceny, the phrase used to describe the writer’s pursuit — “unearths” — sounds as prescriptive as it is precise.
From Johannesburg to Lagos, he narrates and exposes — with a scalpel and controlled rage — not only the grand thievery of African elites but also the global web of traders, bankers, middlemen and corporate raiders pillaging the continent’s natural wealth.
That curse, his meticulous reporting reveals, is no accident. “When the warlords of Nigeria’s oil province assembled for a conclave”, he reports, “and resolved to shake the world with a campaign of kidnapping and sabotage, they entrusted the task of launching the onslaught to one of their most feared confreres.” Farah Dagogo was short and slight, but he had established a reputation for daring and ruthlessness. “Born in the east of the Niger Delta, where Africa’s mighty waterway divides into countless creeks and empties into the Gulf of Guinea, he grew up watching oil desolate his homeland.”
What this Farah Dagogo chap— raised poor but witness to others enriching themselves off the country‘s oil wealth — does in the name of taking back his people’s wealth is something any student of decolonial literature knows too well. In no time, he and his militia supplant the extractive outsiders and mainland elites and become even more raw and brutal hoarders of wealth. Anything and anyone who stands in the way meets death.
What do all these books — and others, including Pieter du Toit’s new title on Paul Mashatile, The Dark Prince, whose contents one hardly needs to imagine — tell us about the intrinsic power, potential and folly of language? For example, referring to cartels and other looters, including those in the civil service, as “Dark Knights”. The phrase does the entire discourse a disservice. It provides the cartels and their beneficiaries with a fig leaf to hide behind. No, these are not fictional or fantasy characters. They are flesh and blood people. Some are our lovers. Some our relatives. Some our colleagues. We attend funerals with them. Weddings with them. Socials with them. We know they are stripping this country to its bones. We hug them. We cower beside their ill-gotten hot wheels. We call them heroes.
• Madondo is the author of Sigh, the Beloved Country, a collection of essays on faith, black magic, new money and politics, among other books. He writes about poetry, photography, and politics
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