Greg Ardé
WAR
PARTY
How the ANC’s political killings
are breaking South Africa
Tafelberg
For the people whose lives have been ambushed and
torn apart by political violence.
This book is dedicated to the memory of the dead and
the heartache of the living.
“See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.”
– Noam Chomsky
“Yea, the dogs are greedy; they can never have enough. And these are shepherds who cannot understand. They have all turned to their own way, each one to his gain, from every quarter.”
– Isaiah 56:11
Foreword
In every nation there exists an overworld as well as an underworld. In some countries the underworld occasionally bursts through to the surface with a contract killing, a dirty tender, a politician who fraternises with mobsters.
In some – failed states, mafia states – the underworld has expanded like lava, from below, engulfing the overworld and leaving misshapen parodies mocking its dead forms: a police force, a judiciary, a democracy. Even in such places, money can buy a space of fake security, buffered by a kind of wilful blindness, as shallow and fragile as skin.
South Africa stands on the brink. The state has long ago lost the monopoly of violence – and most of its capacity to mete out anything but blunt justice to small fry. Meanwhile, competing mafias tug at the entrails of its remaining capacities.
How did we get here?
At the centre of this destruction sits the ruling African National Congress (ANC). But at the epicentre sits the province of KwaZuluNatal – because of its long history of political violence and its culture of bloody feuds; because of the cohort of professional killers, izinkabi, which history has produced; and because of the province’s dominance of the taxi industry, where the izinkabi find employment in pegging out the bullet-riddled boundaries of competition over routes, ranks and huge volumes of cash.
Greg Ardé’s War Party is an examination of the connections between KZN’s violent past and its murderous present. Above all, it is an immersion in the way in which local economies are dominated by and dependent on political networks; the way the underworld meets the overworld in the political core of the ANC; the way violence is linked to commerce in the machine of power, patronage and enrichment – and the way it crushes those who stand in its way and refuse to yield.
Greg takes us to the Midlands enclave of Richmond, where the ANC’s most feared general in its pre-democracy war with the Inkatha Freedom Party became one of its most feared post-1994 rivals, and therefore had to be eliminated; where his son has made his peace with the party because in a small town there is no business that can take place without the ANC.
Greg takes us on a whirling journey across the dusty towns of the provincial hinterland, encountering dirty managers and murderous mayors – and meeting their victims: ordinary and extraordinary South Africans trying to do the right thing, sometimes dying in the effort to do so.
We meet scarred taxi bosses and battle-hardened cops; we meet security contractors who preside over more firepower than the police; we meet the politically connected brothers who have turned a ruthless taxi business into a metropolitan transport monopoly that is sucking the city of Durban dry – but we don’t meet the ANC. When it comes to accountability, the party is nowhere to be found.
What is infuriating is that Greg’s book shows that the poisons of violence and graft, the streams of blood, flow up the veins of the ANC to the party’s heart. This dirty councillor is quietly moved to the next town; that accused killer emerges as an employee in some provincial department; this notorious hitman hides out in the office of provincial politicians. The violence is part of the system and everybody knows it. It just used to be someone else’s problem: an issue for poor taxi commuters caught in the crossfire, for small businesses trapped in decaying towns, for the hapless police, beset by dirty colleagues and compromised bosses.
But the state is weak and the monster is loose; it’s been fed and it’s grown; the cities and the suburbs beckon.
Read this book. Get angry. Get active.
SAM SOLE
Managing Partner
amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism
Introduction
She crouched over the stream, a baby tied to her back. It was eerily quiet given the circumstances. She was a young woman, probably my age at the time, in her mid-twenties. She splashed water over an aluminium pan, the rinse being the finale in a mundane daily ritual performed by thousands of poor women across South Africa. But her fastidiousness struck me. The water was barely a trickle and the ground around her was stained with blood.
I had stumbled through a field a few minutes earlier, following the hiss and crackle of police radios. I wasn’t sure if she had noticed me. Quite likely not. For the most part, she kept her head down. Somehow we existed for a few minutes in a curious bubble of silence amid the mayhem. When she shifted once or twice to readjust the bundle on her back, her face remained impassive, perhaps quietly determined. That was my take anyway.
I was transfixed. It was early in the morning. I had a sling bag over my shoulder and a reporter’s notebook and pen in my hand. I was there to cover another political massacre. This one was no more or less horrific than the last, but, like other journalists, I had made this my beat so I needed to be there.
By then I had become largely desensitised. The violence was ghastly. But there were only so many moving victim tales the newspaper was interested in, no matter how empathetically and descriptively you told them. Each of the thousands of politically attributed murders was a tragedy, but the appetite for the stories was waning and reporting on them became a body count.
Journalists darted around KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) to places like Bhambayi fresh after the kill, looking for new angles. The young woman at the stream was my angle, but I stood there mute, trying to take it all in. Over 200 people had been murdered in Bhambayi in the preceding year in clashes between African National Congress (ANC) and Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) supporters. I think this massacre took place in August 1993, though I now can’t be sure. It might have been September. Online references point to 9 murders in August and 22 in September in Bhambayi alone.
The woman beside the stream was a poignant picture of solitude, like those statues that survived intact after cathedrals and churches were bombed to smithereens during the Second World War. Not far away from her, bodies lay twisted and hacked, dead eyes staring vacantly into the sky. It was a maelstrom of misery.
Early in the morning men full of bloodlust had gone on a rampage of unimaginable terror. And there she was a few hours later, bent over the stream washing her pan. In that routine chore, she was trying to cling to life. It was all she could do amid the horror: salvage what little dignity she could in Bhambayi.
That such bloodletting happened there in that place is deeply ironic. Bhambayi borders on the settlement of Phoenix, which was founded by Mahatma Gandhi in 1904. Here he spent most of his South African years, sowing the seeds for his philosophy of Satyagraha, or non-violent resistance to evil. Bhambayi is a Zulu approximation of “Bombay”.
A museum at Gandhi’s settlement celebrates the fascinating historical nexus which the place represents. A few kilometres up the road is Inanda, which birthed John Langalibalele Dube and his nephew Pixley Seme, both of whom helped found the ANC, now South Africa’s ruling party. There are reports too that anti-apartheid activists Steve Biko and Rick Turner both spent time at the Phoenix settlement next to Bhambayi.
In 1994, when Nelson Mandela cast his first vote as a free man, it was up the road at Ohlange High School, founded by Dube. I was there when