White South Africa’s new dark side

The world over, organised crime has always played on people’s fears and, as carrot to stick, to the almost unquantifiable desire of the desperate for hope. In times of conflict, recession or depression, civil war and government weakness, organised crime has flourished.

In South Africa, there are thought to be many strands of organised crime, from home-grown cells to established groups from Russia, China and eastern Europe. Dealing in the prime tenets of such organisations: commodity smuggling, money laundering, prostitution, arms dealing and people smuggling, an over-stretched, under-funded South African Police Service, infected by an ambient corruption, struggles even to identify, let alone close down, such groups.

In Dead Cows for Piranhas, journalist Hazel Friedman investigated the fate of many South Africans enticed into drug smuggling, who found themselves arrested and imprisoned in horrifying conditions in Thailand. In her devastating book, she discovered that the proportion of those discovered to be carrying drugs was extraordinarily high. Those unfortunate souls were merely decoys, set up by their handlers to be arrested by the Thai authorities whilst those carrying the really large consignments slip past border controls and deliver their contraband. The title of her book recalling a method of crossing a piranha-infested river – throw in a dead cow upstream, cross safely.

Those who did succeed in getting through were extorted either to repeat the process or to fall into other gang-related operations, prostitution within Thailand or the grooming of future victims. Even more horrifying was the accusation that the South African authorities in Bangkok seemed unhurried to become involved in the fate of their citizens, leaving them to – in some cases literally – rot in a Thai jail.

Further investigations revealed the suspicion of collusion between South African customs officers and the gangs in letting South African citizens leave the country, knowing that they were carrying illegal drugs; the co-operation and likely reward of Thai authorities in stopping those carriers indicated whilst letting others through the system to complete their deliveries. The system combined drug muling with people smuggling, followed by extortion or imprisonment– an ergonomic and efficient business model, wholly devoid of humanity or compassion.

In The History of Blood, the third in a series of crime fiction novels set in South Africa, it is young, white South African women who are being groomed and sent from Cape Town to Bangkok. Since the democratic elections of 1994, the ANC has sought to rectify the imbalance in working opportunities for all South Africans, but their positive discrimination policies have created a new problem – a burgeoning underclass of white working-class South Africans. Many of these people now live on the breadline, in townships and squatter camps which echo those of the hundreds of thousands of black Africans who pour into South Africa hoping for new lives. It is these newly impoverished whites, born and bred in a country where privilege was all theirs, who are becoming vulnerable to the promises of fortune and freedom offered amidst what appears to be a society which has nothing whatsoever to offer them.

University places are over-subscribed and, for most whites, entirely unsubsidised. Unskilled jobs are almost completely unavailable and, for semi-skilled and professional careers, companies are compelled to choose black and coloured applicants over indigenous white ones. With a desperately weak currency, escape to other parts of the world becomes increasingly difficult. They are trapped, ignored and discarded in their own country. Here is true hopelessness for their futures, and for that of their children.

When, in a seedy airport motel in Cape Town, the senior detective in the police’s Serious Crimes division, Col Vaughn de Vries, discovers the body of a young white girl – the adopted daughter of an apartheid-era politician, and a role-model for South African girls, whose modeling career in the US has faltered and failed – he begins to track how she came to be there, uncovering what he believes is a new arrival among the criminal gangs in Cape Town. Determined to shut it down before it becomes established, he begins to trace the pipeline back to its source, encountering both perpetrators and unwilling co-conspirators.

As in reality, many of those drawn into the orbit of organised crime are brought there through sustained threat to their or their family’s wellbeing. Entire communities can be terrorised and compelled to comply with the wishes of an all-powerful crime lord. In small, rural communities, even the judiciary and senior police officers can feel alone, unable to confide in their superiors for fear that they, too, are in the pay of the criminals. As news stories and criminal cases against the most senior echelons of South Africa’s police service continue to appear, seemingly weekly, in South Africa, clearly such fears are not without grounds.

Vaughn de Vries’ journey in pursuit of these criminals takes him along the southern coast of his country, up to the Kruger Park, to the metropolis of Johannesburg and, eventually, beyond the borders of his own country. In his determination to find justice for his victims, De Vries endangers his colleagues and friends, his family and his entire department. If the criminals believe that they will break him, they have underestimated this one man, but the ultimate victor is far from clear. Those who have formed this new gang are not who De Vries might have expected and their motives, power and criminal reach are embedded deep in the contemporary history of the country itself.

The History of Blood by Paul Mendelson is published by Constable, at £13.99