War Party: How the ANC's political killings are breaking South Africa

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 Madiba voted, little realising the historic day would not put an end 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 brother-in-law Rodney van der Byl were the only two of the nine ANC councillors who refused to follow their old comrade’s fiery edict. A few days later gunmen pumped 18 bullets into Van der Byl outside his home.

In the ensuing two years a savage war broke out in Richmond, and massacres claimed about 120 lives, including those of four ANC councillors. President Nelson Mandela visited the town repeatedly, decrying the violent scourge but in vain. At the time, I visited Richmond almost every week to file stories for the Daily News and later for the Sunday Tribune. I interviewed the local undertaker back then. His business was booming because, as one resident told me, Satan is dancing in the streets. He was referring to Nkabinde.

* * *

At one stage South Africa’s most wanted man was Nkabinde’s lieutenant, a Self-Defence Unit commander, Bob Ndlovu, whose evasive powers became legendary. He survived an astonishing 73 attempts to arrest him. In September 1997 Nkabinde himself was arrested and tried for 16 murders. Three days later Ndlovu was also caught and charged with 14 counts of murder. He was convicted and served 12 years before he was released.

In May 1998 Nkabinde was acquitted of the charges. Seven months later he was dead, aged 38. Gunmen fired 80 rounds into him in the Spar parking lot in the centre of Richmond. In a revenge attack shortly afterwards, 12 members of the ANC-supporting Ndabezitha family were murdered at their home outside the village. That’s mostly ancient history now.

Vic Nkabinde has his mother’s and father’s names tattooed on his left arm. He is a happening young man with a cool haircut and goatee who wears trendy gear. He spent a year in the US working in hospitality. I have no grudge and no hate, he tells me. It has been a long road. As a kid I never understood anything. I just made assumptions about what happened. For a time I did hold a grudge, but the past is the past and we need to move forward. My father’s killers have become my friends.

This is true. Vic is close to one of the two killers who unleashed a volley of shots into his father’s car. Nine men were arrested for his father’s murder and a number of them were sent to jail, including the men who carried out the shooting, SANDF soldier Sandile Dlamini and former soldier Lincoln Mbikwane. Others tried in connection with the murder included three of significance: Ragavaloo’s bodyguard Siphiwe Shabane, ANC Richmond councillor Joel Mkhize and local policeman Sergeant Anil Jelal.

For the sake of brevity, here is a summary of the assassination gleaned from the indictment, as reported in an IOL story. Simphiwe Dlamini, Nkabinde’s bodyguard, was with him at the time of his murder. Automatic weapons stolen from the police were used in the incident.

On the morning of the killing, the assassins took up position in the centre of Richmond while Joel Mkhize monitored Nkabinde’s movements and alerted them when Sifiso drove into town. Four men in a stolen car drove past Nkabinde’s parked car outside the supermarket. When he emerged from the shop and got into his car, the four pulled up alongside the vehicle and stopped. Mbikwane and Dlamini, wearing balaclavas and surgical gloves, climbed out of their car and let rip with their guns and then fled. Nkabinde was rushed to hospital in Pietermaritzburg but died after failed attempts to resuscitate him.

After the shooting the assassins rendezvoused at the Richmond cemetery, where they and their accomplices met the policeman Anil Jelal, who had been assigned to protect Ragavaloo. Jelal took their guns.

* * *

Years later the ANC’s Willies Mchunu, who was premier of KZN from 2016 to 2019, facilitated peace talks in prison as a result of which the Nkabinde family reconciled with Sifiso’s killers.

Vic said the encounters were a turning point for him. "I met the guys and spoke to them. I cried a lot of tears. With God’s grace, I was freed. It took a lot of courage to get here. It felt like I was in prison, like a prisoner in my own life.

Sandile [Dlamini] calls me every month. When I met him, we clicked. When I meet him or the others now, we greet and shake hands.

There’s no disputing, Vic said, that his father helped shape the ANC in KZN. But he was also killed by his comrades. Vic attempted to rationalise it like this twenty years later: In every family there are problems. He had problems with his brothers, but not the ANC. The ANC was his home and that is why we decided to go back. We felt like we fit. There is no UDM in Magoda.

A few years ago Vic and his mom led the UDM in Magoda back into