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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