War Party. Greg Ardé

to the ongoing violence which had erupted between the ANC and the IFP during the transition to democracy. In a bid to end these bloody battles, Mandela, speaking at a massive rally in Durban, called on his followers to throw their weapons into the sea.

      The gathering at Kings Park Stadium was a spectacle. Thousands of ANC members arrived decked out in traditional regalia, the hallmarks of a Zulu show of power: skins, shields and knobkieries. Mandela’s peace plea was powerful but it didn’t end the killings. The violence so vexed the president that he made a special journey to Zulu king Goodwill Zwelithini’s palace in Nongoma in 1996. In February of that year alone, 60 people were murdered in KZN.

      Mandela emerged from the royal meeting visibly perturbed and addressed an impromptu press conference. He put on a brave face but he looked quite helpless. Again, trying to get a new angle I pressed him about his concern. His answer has stayed with me because it spoke to the human degradation of violence. There is no dignity in this, he said. “We cannot let … people be humiliated by this killing.”

      By the late 1990s the KZN killings had slowed to a trickle after the gruesome flood that had gone before. Then it started up again, but this time it wasn’t the wholesale slaughter that had characterised the ANC–IFP conflict. Mass murder morphed into targeted assassinations.

      By 2016 the KZN government, probably unsure of what to do, appointed a commission of inquiry to probe the hundreds of political hits that have taken place in the province. Like that of many others, the commission’s report will probably gather dust in a government office somewhere – tragically – because it is a chilling indictment of the ruling ANC and the mafia-style politics the party has incubated in KZN and which is spilling beyond the province’s borders. It threatens to be the harbinger of a fully fledged gangster state where might is right and the big guns call the shots.

      I don’t have an intimate understanding of the ANC or its broedertwis, nor do I regard this book as political analysis of any heft. But, working in KZN, I have seen a story unfold. It is about how greed shatters ordinary lives and is robbing South Africans of dignity. The ANC’s policy of cadre deployment has created a depraved, venal monster, a vortex of competing patronage networks. Comrades are killing each other for a place at the trough, for jobs, tenders and contracts.

      Lurking behind this monster is a breed of hitmen, or izinkabi, hatched largely by the powerful taxi industry, which offers the perfect cover for killings. The industry is awash with cash, guns and killers, and it moves them around effortlessly. As a result South Africa is developing what the academic Paulus Zulu has described as a “culture of blood” fed by greed, which prizes money over human life.

      In KZN murder is increasingly the currency of power. And it is spreading to the other provinces. The capture and evisceration of the police, crime intelligence and prosecutorial authorities have helped spread the killing network. The state has found itself largely powerless against the entrenched strongmen.

      In South Africa today, everything seems to be about the party and the spoils of war. The ANC, the party of liberation, is becoming a war party.

      Part One

      THE

      KILLING

      FIELDS

      OF KZN

       Chapter 1

      Joining the party

      KZN is a province awash with violence. It is no longer the violence of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the ANC and IFP fought a bitter battle for supremacy in the province. That contest has been decided, and the ANC has come out on top. Now the murderous battles take place within the party, in the fight for office and material benefits. This transition from one form of violence to another can be summed up in the story of strongman Sifiso Nkabinde and his family, and the local politics of Richmond, where he once bestrode the stage.

      * * *

      It was a surprise to see Sinqobile “Vic” Nkabinde sporting a big flashy watch. It looked like a saucer strapped to his wrist. The face of the watch was an ANC flag that beamed up at us. I suppressed an inward shudder. After all, ANC comrades had killed Vic’s father, Sifiso.

      The sharp young man in designer jeans sitting in his mom’s house in Magoda, Richmond, was only 10 when his strongman father was slain. Months before his murder Sifiso Nkabinde told me and other reporters that there was a bullet with his name on it. This revelation was more a matter of common sense than prescience. The self-declared ANC warlord lived by the sword and he knew he would die by it. But I doubt even he could have anticipated quite how bloody his demise would be.

      On 23 January 2019, twenty years to the day that Sifiso had been killed, I nosed my car west and joined hard-body bakkies and livestock lorries on the road to meet his son. It is a slow, winding journey to Richmond. The road rises gently upwards from Durban, and you can get to Richmond in an hour and a bit. It takes half that time travelling south from Pietermaritzburg. Either way, you can savour the journey. The countryside is heart-achingly beautiful. The R56 intersects sugar cane fields and the darker-hued greens of commercial forests. The islands of indigenous bush are teeming with wild birds.

      In summer, temperatures easily reach 31 degrees and the only reprieve from the heat is when fat cotton-wool cumulonimbus clouds burst open in afternoon thundershowers. After the brief rains, white and yellow cosmos flowers seem to spring up magically on the roadside.

      Richmond is down the drag from Ixopo, where Alan Paton famously wrote in Cry, the Beloved Country of how the hills “are lovely beyond any singing of it”. The town of Richmond is all that, too. There are quaint vestiges of the colonial era in the red-brick houses clustered around the main street. Nowadays they compete with a growing number of hardware stores, taverns, funeral parlours and a spiffy new KFC opposite the courthouse and police station. A few kilometres from the town are the townships of Ndaleni and Magoda, lush with neatly fenced vegetable gardens. Richmond’s beauty is often rightly juxtaposed with its history of bloody conflict.

      Sifiso Nkabinde’s son Vic sits upright on the couch opposite his mom, Nonhlanhla, in their living room. He is an earnest young man on a mission. If you had visited them twenty years ago, it would have been impossible without an armed escort. But in 2019 it was a doddle. I simply drove down the township road and stopped at one of the many roadside taverns for friendly reassurance that I was on the right route. The ease of moving about in the town is an indication of how violence has evolved and transmuted in KZN.

      Sifiso was shot dead in Richmond village early one January morning in 1999. The murder largely brought to an end the carnage that erupted after he was outed by his ANC comrades as a “police spy”. “That was nonsense. Nobody produced any evidence of that,” his widow, Nonhlanhla, said to me. While researching this book, I spoke to two highly placed cops who were adamant that Sifiso had worked with the apartheid police, but no evidence has ever emerged publicly. Whatever the truth of the matter, Sifiso’s story is instructive for a number of reasons, not least because it was an early indicator of how things would get done in KZN, a template for the broader violence that would take hold in the province.

      Sifiso’s potted biography goes something like this. He was born in 1961 and became a school teacher in 1989. Then he underwent a giddy rise to the position of provincial deputy secretary of the ANC in 1991 as a protégé of the firebrand Harry Gwala, the “Lion of the Midlands”. By 1994, when Sifiso was elected to the KZN legislature, his gangs of Self-Defence Units (SDUs) ruled Richmond through fear.

      Three years later Nkabinde spectacularly cut ties with the ANC when they accused him of being an apartheid-era police spy. His supporters said his rising star threatened a number of ANC members, including Jacob Zuma. After Sifiso left the ANC, he joined Bantu Holomisa’s United Democratic Movement (UDM). Thereupon he called a meeting of ANC Richmond councillors and, according to his former friend and Richmond mayor Andrew Ragavaloo, a bellicose Sifiso demanded that the entire town council follow him to the UDM. Ragavaloo and his