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Mafia Land: Inside South Africa's Darkest Cartels
Behind the façade of South Africa lies a brutal shadow-world ruled by mafias, cartels, and crime syndicates locked in a ruthless war over South Africa’s riches. There’s the tobacco mafia. The water tanker mafia. The taxi mafia. The hospital mafia. The construction mafia. The kidnapping mafia. Each one feeds off a vast web of patronage and extraction that stretches from street level to the highest echelons of government. Their bloodsucking tentacles reach deep into municipalities, state-owned enterprises, political parties, the police, and even the National Prosecuting Authority. Those who resist them are silenced in cold blood. This is not a criminal underworld lurking in the shadows. It is part of the system itself. Where does organised crime end and the state begin? Are the two so intertwined that it has become near impossible to distinguish the one from the other? Has South Africa become a mafia state? Multi-award-winning investigative journalist Kyle Cowan sets out to answer these and other questions, revealing the dark underbelly of a country where the thin blue line has all but disappeared.
218 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 15, 2025
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35 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 4, 2025
It is neither shocking nor laying bare anything new. It reads as a summative paper of Media24’s investigations/articles over the last couple of years. This is evident by a thin book and grade R large scale font. A mooted attempt in riding the wave of actual exposé.
On a lighter note: a good compilation of the growing mafia style state.
On a lighter note: a good compilation of the growing mafia style state.
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December 4, 2025#MafiaLand – Kyle Cowan
#PenguinRandomHouse
For most of us the word Mafia is synonymous with Don Vito Corleone, self-appointed ruler of a sinister underworld where ruthless businessmen drive flashy cars under the watchful eyes of muscled bodyguards wielding deadly weapons. Beyond the limitations of fiction and the silver screen, very real such organisations exist; organised crime groups with a hierarchical structure, building their empires by extortion, intimidation, kidnappings, and murder. And they walk among us.
Cowan, an accomplished investigative journalist, has infiltrated this phenomenon rearing its ugly head in South Africa at length, and identifies twelve manifestations thereof on the local front, including mafialike tentacles grabbing hold of the taxi and tobacco industries, construction, water supply, law enforcement, and more, revealing a shadow world where cartels erode the rule of law by fusing criminal enterprises and political power.
Probes into the tobacco industry revealed current estimates that the economy is losing around R18 billion a year to the illicit cigarette market; water tanker cartels utilize the incompetence of local government, aided by sabotage, as a personal piggy bank at the expense of the end user; statistics show that the taxi industry makes up the largest proportion of targeted killings in the country, and, euphemistically disguised as business forums, criminal enterprises known as the construction mafia, demand as much as 30% of project costs, in exchange for not bringing work to a grinding halt by any means possible.
Cowan unpacks the nature and extent of criminal capture of various sectors, including the Eskom contracts at Kusile and Chancellor House and correctly states that the public may elect to turn a blind eye, but “…it is felt every time you flip a switch in your house and there is no electricity.” (147)
On 6 July 2025 a career policeman of more than 30 years, Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkwanazi publicly accused the Minister of Police, Senzo Mchunu, of collusion with organised crime syndicates. At the time of writing this review, the Madlanga Commission is hearing evidence pertaining to allegations of criminality, political interference and corruption in the criminal justice system. In the wake thereof Jeff Wicks’ The Shadow State was published, lifting the veil on mafia-like activities unearthed at Thembisa Hospital, and discussed in this book.
In the words of an anonymous insider: “Either you get a shit detective, if he isn’t shit, he’s corrupt. And if he’s pretty straight, the prosecutor is either shit or corrupt.” (61) And therein lies the main problem: “…government will have to focus on cleaning up corruption within police ranks, before anything else. Wolves in sheep’s clothing are unlikely to keep the flock safe.” (173)
#uitdieperdsebek
#PenguinRandomHouse
For most of us the word Mafia is synonymous with Don Vito Corleone, self-appointed ruler of a sinister underworld where ruthless businessmen drive flashy cars under the watchful eyes of muscled bodyguards wielding deadly weapons. Beyond the limitations of fiction and the silver screen, very real such organisations exist; organised crime groups with a hierarchical structure, building their empires by extortion, intimidation, kidnappings, and murder. And they walk among us.
Cowan, an accomplished investigative journalist, has infiltrated this phenomenon rearing its ugly head in South Africa at length, and identifies twelve manifestations thereof on the local front, including mafialike tentacles grabbing hold of the taxi and tobacco industries, construction, water supply, law enforcement, and more, revealing a shadow world where cartels erode the rule of law by fusing criminal enterprises and political power.
Probes into the tobacco industry revealed current estimates that the economy is losing around R18 billion a year to the illicit cigarette market; water tanker cartels utilize the incompetence of local government, aided by sabotage, as a personal piggy bank at the expense of the end user; statistics show that the taxi industry makes up the largest proportion of targeted killings in the country, and, euphemistically disguised as business forums, criminal enterprises known as the construction mafia, demand as much as 30% of project costs, in exchange for not bringing work to a grinding halt by any means possible.
Cowan unpacks the nature and extent of criminal capture of various sectors, including the Eskom contracts at Kusile and Chancellor House and correctly states that the public may elect to turn a blind eye, but “…it is felt every time you flip a switch in your house and there is no electricity.” (147)
On 6 July 2025 a career policeman of more than 30 years, Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkwanazi publicly accused the Minister of Police, Senzo Mchunu, of collusion with organised crime syndicates. At the time of writing this review, the Madlanga Commission is hearing evidence pertaining to allegations of criminality, political interference and corruption in the criminal justice system. In the wake thereof Jeff Wicks’ The Shadow State was published, lifting the veil on mafia-like activities unearthed at Thembisa Hospital, and discussed in this book.
In the words of an anonymous insider: “Either you get a shit detective, if he isn’t shit, he’s corrupt. And if he’s pretty straight, the prosecutor is either shit or corrupt.” (61) And therein lies the main problem: “…government will have to focus on cleaning up corruption within police ranks, before anything else. Wolves in sheep’s clothing are unlikely to keep the flock safe.” (173)
#uitdieperdsebek
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews