When I was 18, Roy Rudden, then a deputy editor at The Daily News in Durban, invited me to come and see him. I had been sending the newspaper badly written news articles by post.
He asked me about my reading habits. I shrugged my shoulders. He then gave me a pile of books, including two by Matt Braun, The Spoilers and Hangman’s Creek, and told me to come back for more once I had finished reading them.
I fell in love with Braun’s work, especially The Spoilers, a copy of which has been my companion ever since. I have revisited The Spoilers several times over the years, the most recent taking place this past weekend.
Reading The Spoilers against the backdrop of the allegations by KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi wasn’t a joyride down memory lane, as it has been in the past. It struck a different chord — a depressing reminder of what Braun described as “an unholy marriage between underworld vice lords and corrupt politicians” that exists beneath the surface.
Braun’s The Spoilers is about a private detective, Luke Starbuck, who was hired by a railroad company to investigate train robberies. Starbuck ended up peeling back layers of San Francisco’s underworld in the late 1800s.
The layers included insiders within the railroad company, the men who robbed the trains, and their boss who in turn paid a portion to the higher-ups. At the top sat Christopher Buckley, a blind man who controlled all of San Francisco’s underground activities as well as the city’s politics.
A Democrat, Buckley’s control of San Francisco politics and city corruption is well documented. Braun’s Buckley “rubbed elbows with the city’s social elite, the rich and powerful” but had no visible links to the underground, making him “exceedingly dangerous”.
Mkhwanazi’s allegations centre on the existence of a similar unholy nexus in SA, which — if Mkhwanazi is telling the truth — now has a hold over the country’s institutions. Mkhwanazi has alleged that there are crime syndicates that have infiltrated law enforcement and intelligence agencies. They are in cahoots with corrupt politicians, businesspeople, metro police and correctional services, prosecutors and the judiciary.
The allegations have been described by President Cyril Ramaphosa as raising “serious concerns around the constitution, the rule of law and national security”. Ramaphosa has now placed responsibility to make sense of all this on a commission of inquiry to be led by the outgoing acting deputy chief justice, Mbuyiseli Madlanga.
Madlanga’s task is to first establish the truthfulness of Mkhwanazi’s allegations and then, hopefully, map the alleged nexus of criminal syndicates, corrupt politicians, the judiciary and business people.
There’s no doubt that Madlanga will give it his best shot. But to scrape off the body politic the kind of link Mkhwanazi alleges requires tough measures and resoluteness — the kind Mkhwanazi has displayed in fighting crime in KwaZulu-Natal.
Starbuck’s conclusion at the end of The Spoilers is depressing, though. He saw no logical progression in human affairs but change whereby the winners “hung the losers or carted them off to prison” with things going much “as they always had and always would”.
The only change, Starbuck concluded, would be “a change in names and faces”, with a new political kingpin stepping up into the void to quickly replace Buckley. I’m afraid that a new nexus of “spoilers” is already sitting pretty, waiting to pick up from Mkhwanazi’s alleged unholy alliance.
• Sikhakhane, a former spokesman for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.