From apartheid to democracy, South Africa’s brave journalists have stood as the conscience of the nation — truth-tellers who risked careers, reputations and even their lives to expose injustice, corruption and abuse of power. Investigative journalist Kyle Cowan has joined this progressive pantheon of fearless wordsmiths.
A two-time winner of the Taco Kuiper Award for Investigative Journalism, Cowan’s latest book, Mafia Land: Inside South Africa’s Darkest Cartels lays bare the rot within our democratic order.
Fellow journalist Pieter du Toit calls it “terrifying” — and with reason.
In his foreword, academic Piet Croucamp recalls the late Suna Venter’s tattooed mantra — “Were you brave?” — a question that haunts every journalist confronting power. Venter, one of the “SABC 8”, died traumatised after defying political interference in the public broadcaster.
Croucamp suggests Mafia Land is Cowan’s courageous answer to that same question.
During apartheid, journalists fought censorship and propaganda, often underground or in exile, to report on racial oppression. Their courage helped mobilise both local and global resistance to the regime.
In the democratic era, a new generation — Cowan, Du Toit, Jeff Wicks, Mandy Weiner and Venter — has carried that torch, confronting the decay of the post-liberation state, a post-apartheid culture of complicity in corruption.
They have exposed the assassinations, police brutality and systemic corruption that erode public trust.
Cowan’s Mafia Land, together with Du Toit’s The President’s Keepers, Weiner’s The Whistleblowers and Wicks’s investigations into the murder of Babita Deokaran, expose how organised crime and political power have merged.
Crime and cartels form the double-edged theme of Mafia Land, an unflinching journey into the underbelly of a democracy gone astray. From the tobacco and taxi mafias to construction rackets, water tankers, hospitals and kidnapping syndicates, Cowan maps how organised crime has infiltrated the state itself.
His question lingers: “Where does the mafia end and the government begin?”
The book lands at a time when the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry probes corruption and maladministration in public institutions — a fitting echo of Cowan’s narrative.
Even the recent suicide of South Africa’s ambassador to France, Nathi Mthethwa, has renewed public scrutiny of how power, politics and impunity intersect.
Cowan opens with a riveting prologue: “Black Sunday, 6 July 2025. KwaZulu-Natal’s top police officer, Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, dressed in full SAPS military-type regalia, publicly accuses Police Minister Senzo Mchunu of politically shutting down the Political Killings Task Team. From Brazil, President Cyril Ramaphosa watches the drama unfold — an unprecedented act of defiance that sparks a presidential probe.”
He dedicates four tense pages to that press conference, showing how fragile the chain of command has become in a politicised police force.
To frame South Africa’s descent, Cowan looks back to the American Mafia, the Sicilian-born Cosa Nostra that infiltrated US society through secrecy, loyalty and violence. Its code of omertà (silence) finds parallels in South Africa’s underworld of hitmen, extortion and political contracts.
Cowan categorises a dozen “mafias” operating across South Africa, devoting nearly 190 pages to the anatomy of our homegrown cartels.
His research is exhaustive but never abstract. He takes readers through the streets and the corridors of power — showing how organised crime operates through municipal contracts, state-owned enterprises, police stations and procurement tenders.
Each “mafia” becomes a mirror reflecting how patronage politics, kickbacks and silence have eroded the moral fibre of governance.
His narrative structure, by mafia type, is masterful. It lets readers trace how different domains (health, water, transport, energy) are captured by overlapping syndicates. Crime here is not random: it is a political economy, institutionalised through fear and favour.
Cowan’s prose is brisk and unflinching. He writes not as a distant observer but as a journalist walking a tightrope between exposure and danger. His message: the rot is systemic, but the resistance — from journalists, whistleblowers and civic actors — remains the thin thread holding democracy together.
While Mafia Land argues that mafias have embedded themselves in the state, Cowan avoids fatalism. To call South Africa a “mafia state”, he suggests, would be to surrender hope. The existence of investigative journalism, robust courts and public outrage shows resistance is alive.
Ultimately, Mafia Land is both a wake-up call and a requiem — a reminder that democracy can decay not through coups or revolutions, but through complicity, silence and fear.
In asking, “Were you brave?” Cowan answers Suna Venter’s question on behalf of a generation — yes — brave enough to confront the darkness and call it by its name.
Mafia Land is published by Penguin Random House.