Rian Malan writes to Helen Zille: Behind the MoM marches lurks something far more dangerous

Rian Malan is the author of My Traitor's Heart — a bestseller translated into 11 languages, still in print decades after publication, and a book that drew praise from V.S. Naipaul, John le Carré and the New York Times as one of the most important works ever written about South Africa. In short, he is the real thing, one of the finest non-fiction writers our country has produced. And for me, easily the greatest living SA writer. Commissioning Malan at rates that reflect his stature is beyond what BizNews can fund from its operating budget. The economics of modern media — collapsing CPMs, platform aggregation, subscription fatigue — make it impossible. But a BizNews community member has changed that. Their donation has seeded a commissioning fund dedicated to sourcing the very best South African writing and research for our readers: work we could not otherwise afford. This is not charity. It is an investment in the journalism South Africa needs — fearless, deeply reported, written with the skill that makes it stick. If this piece moves you, consider joining the fund. Write to me via alec@biznews.com. Not to cover salaries or overheads, but to put more Rian Malans in front of more South Africans. And for the rest of the tribe, read and enjoy. - Alec Hogg.By Rian Malan.Dear Helen — I’d like to make it clear at the outset that I have nothing new to say about the drama instigated by this “March on March” movement (henceforth MoM) that has dominated the news lately. All I know is what I’ve read, which initially suggested that MoM was just another anti-migrant pressure group led by honest people whose aims were as stated — there are way too many foreigners here, and they must go. But somewhere along the line, my phone started receiving AI-generated “news bulletins” delivered by fake American TV anchors castigating “President Rammer-fosa” for his failure to heed the angry masses and expel all foreigners. I thought, hmmm, someone is spending a lot of money on this, considering all the T-shirts, buses, salaried activists and fake news on view.Where does it come from? I don’t know, but I started paying serious attention when the real President Ramaphosa announced that he was mobilising his forces to thwart the pogroms the MoMs were allegedly planning for June 30. I hear he intends to spend R600 million on this effort. That’s an awful lot of wonga, and it suggests Cyril is throwing everything into the fray — cops, soldiers and intelligence services, plus thousands of Home Affairs bureaucrats, belatedly ordered to round up and deport a few thousand illegal aliens in the hope that this will appease the apparently fearsome MoM beast. Why is Cyril scared? He seems to know something I don’t, and it probably has to do with the murky ties between Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma and sinister figures who instigated the events of July 2021, when parts of Durban were sacked and burned by looters maddened by the prospect of free fridges and flat-screen TVs. One of the suspects fingered in that caper was former president Jacob Zuma, apparently still smarting from his undignified defeat at Ramaphosa’s hands and itching to get back into the game. If MoM is a stalking horse for Zuma’s MK Party, almost everything I am about to say could turn out to be irrelevant. But I am going to send it anyway, because it’s been gestating for a year and I’d like to get it off my chest before we reach the Abahamba faction’s deadline. (Abahambe is Zulu for “They must go!”) My story begins in a tiny hamlet that owes its existence to a spring that rises in a nearby kloof before entering pipes that deliver sweet water to a string of smallholdings where survivalists, greens and holy rollers grow fruit and vegetables. When I first laid eyes on Van Wyksdorp, in October 2015, it seemed a place of innocence long lost elsewhere. The streets had no names, the houses no numbers. All incoming roads were dirt. Some inhabitants were rich, most very poor, but almost everyone spoke Afrikaans and liked rugby. There was a river at the foot of the village and beyond it, a vast empty plain with purple mountains in the distance. At the time of my first visit, that river was running strongly and the fields were green, sometimes with lucerne but often weeds because subsistence farming is brutal and most South Africans don’t want to do it. Which is why I was surprised to see a party of Africans tilling a hillside with Iron Age agricultural implements. I strolled over to say hello and thus met the first foreigners to settle here. They were Malawians who said they were very happy to be in South Africa, even though they were working for “pocket money” and rations only. And no, they weren’t victims of Boer exploitation. They’d been spirited across the border by a fellow Malawian married to an Austrian mystic who owned the land they were working. The husband’s eyes were fixed on higher things, so his wife turned that hillside into a thriving vegetable farm producing exotic greens for sale in diaspora communities in George and Cape Town.I was impressed. You would have been too, because I believe you’re also a fan of free market theorists who see immigration as a mostly good thing. Those people were doing a job South Africans scorned and against all odds, making a go of it, providing a valuable service and adding to the sum of light by boosting our gross national product at least a little bit. I wanted to write about them, but they politely declined, presumably because they were undocumented.A year or so later, we bought a plot with water rights and hired the local contractor to build a house for us. One morning in 2017 a crew of workers showed up to dig our foundations. Eleven were coloured South Africans. The twelfth was a skilled Malawian bricklayer named Chief who had firm ideas about how to proceed. The coloureds were reluctant to take orders from him, so I called on their boss to referee the dispute before it escalated. Turned out Chief was right, and he soon took over leadership of the contractor’s team. So that’s how it started. Five Malawian farm labourers and one stellar brickie. Eight years later, that brickie is a man of substance who rents a house in town and sends a small fortune to his family back home every month. And the number of Malawians here has soared into the hundreds, causing coloureds to claim they are outnumbered. That is unlikely, although it might be true in the category of young males strong enough to dig foundations and mix concrete. There’s strong demand for that sort of thing around here. Where there was once just one building contractor nine years ago there are now four, most running several crews simultaneously. Even so, they can’t keep pace with demand, which forces whites who don’t want to wait in line to import contractors from as far away as Cape Town. Those whites are semigrants fleeing the consequences of decades of misrule in the north of the country. Some come here because land is cheap, or used to be. Others, because they like the idea of living in a place so lonesome and isolated that few South Africans could find it on a map. Some buy residential plots here in the village. Others buy the right to reside inside game ranches with high fences and locked gates on all access roads. One has built a palace on a remote hilltop with an adjoining airstrip. By my reckoning, this boom has resulted in the building of around 150 new houses within a 30km radius of the village. If we assume an average of R1.5 million per house, this translates into around R225 million in capital investment. Include the price of the land on which those houses stand, and the total rises to half a billion. Hardware stores in nearby towns are making a killing. The local artisanal brickworks are working flat out. Building contractors are driving smart bakkies and taking overseas holidays. The great American gonzologist Tom Wolfe would have called this “a happiness explosion,” and it is exactly that for some.But not for everyone. Which is what I want to talk about.Winters in the Little Karoo are cool and dry and once the morning mist lifts, you can climb to the top of the nearest koppie and see everyone and everything in the village below. On weekday evenings, there’s usually a rugby team practicing in the gloom on a field that has no floodlights because there is no money for such things. And prowling the touchline there’s Jacques van Staden, once a star hooker in the Black Birds, now the club’s treasurer. We met soon after I arrived here, when he hit me up for a donation, and he often comes around for coffee and a chat.Around the time of Covid, when the building boom moved into high gear, Jacques started complaining about the declining position of all the hopeful young men in the Black Birds’ talent pool. Seventy percent of them sit at home all day, he said. Some have never worked at all. But why, said I, pointing to all the economic activity around us. It’s the Malawis, said Jacques. There’s a lot here already, and more come every day. They are getting most of the construction jobs. If my boys ask for work, contractors say, we’re not hiring at the moment, but we will let you know. For some, that day comes. The rest stand around watching bakkies pull up at various rendezvous points to load casual labourers. Some coloureds make the cut, but they are usually outnumbered at least three to one by Malawians. On some bakkies there are no coloured faces at all.I got up at 5am the other day to check Jacques’ claims, and what I saw in the half-dark in bore him out. Then I went back on a Friday afternoon, when the bakkies come back early and young foreigners swagger to the shops with pockets full of cash, some of which is spent on gifts or drinks for young local girls, a factor that inspires rage in coloured youngsters who subsist on their grannies’ old age pensions. They attribute their humiliation to foreign invaders and the forces that abet them — the ANC mostly, but also the DA. You have many supporters around here, but they are outnumbered by coloureds who think the DA takes them for granted. The last actors in this tableau are white employers who hire Malawians. Coloureds say that’s because Malawians are willing to work for as little as R50 a day plus rations. This could be true in some cases, but those in the know say the going rate for unskilled labour is more like R200 a day, with skilled brickies like the aforementioned Chief pulling R700. Since he works seven days a week, that’s a tidy income. But the grunts under him earn less than the minimum wage. Contractors like Andre Snyman say this is bullshit. He’s running four crews at the moment; all of them are foreigners, and he says all are paid at least the minimum wage. And besides, he adds, his hiring preferences have nothing to do with money. So what then? Like all white employers, Snyman says he hires Malawians because they work hard. “Our people can’t build,” he says. “Malawis do more in a day than two locals.”It’s hard to verify such claims, but let me tell you a story I heard soon after I came here. The narrator was an Afrikaner who had an orchard about 300m from where I am now sitting. He worked in a distant city, but returned every November to harvest apricots. He started by eyeballing his trees and estimating how many tons of fruit they might yield. Then he arranged for a truck to collect his harvest, which had to be done in advance. And finally, he went up to “the block,” a.k.a. the coloured township, to make arrangements with casual labourers.On the appointed day, a dozen or so men and women would show up and start picking. Things usually went well for a few days, but then workers started asking for advances cos they needed to put food on their tables; some presumably did exactly that, but others used the cash to buy Red Top, an evil alcoholic concoction that inflicts a babbelas so extreme that it takes days to recover. The rest of the workers were paid on Friday, whereupon others got drunk too and were similarly afflicted. Come Monday, only three or four pickers would show up for work, and that ten-ton truck was due to arrive on a date that could not be changed.“I can never fill the truck completely,” said the farmer.“Sometimes I have loaded as little as three tons, which is a disaster, because they charge me for a full load even if the trailer is mostly empty.”This was years ago, when Malawians were still thin on the ground. These days, all his harvest workers are foreign Africans, and every apricot gets picked on time. Moral of the story? “Rian, the blacks saved me.”There are scores of similar yarns in this town, and they are all at least partly true. The Malawis come from a desperately poor country where people starve if they can’t grow enough to feed themselves. They are accustomed to backbreaking labour, and thrilled to be in a country where they are rewarded in cash. They work from dawn to dusk without complaint and are grateful for the rewards they get. And since most are here illegally, they can’t go to the police if they’re cheated.Coloureds, on the other hand…there is among them a sharp young activist who is angling for a career in politics. He is an intriguing mix of coloured nationalist and social justice warrior, but when I asked about the foreign influx, he said, “My mense wil nie werk nie.” My people don’t want to work. This seems to confirm the aforementioned apricot farmer’s bias, but the weighting was different. What he actually meant was this: my people know about unemployment insurance and the minimum wage. They know about labour law and government agencies that will investigate their complaints if they feel mistreated. These are the fruits of liberation, and they are not cheap, which is another reason why white employers avoid hiring them. “Ons het gestruggle vir ons rights maar ons kry niks nie,” said the activist. We struggled for our rights but got nothing.Well, not exactly. When the great changes came in 1994, the National Party held onto the Western Cape thanks to strong support from rural coloureds. Local Boers reciprocated by building a rugby field for the local underclass and instituting a land reform project which turned 14 coloureds into small landowners. The provincial government built RDP houses and invited farm labourers to move into the village, where they’d have access to a clinic and a fairly good school for their children. A charity came into being to feed the indigent and in 1998 or thereabouts, Thabo Mbeki’s social grants kicked in. But nothing much has happened since.That’s partly God’s fault, because it is surely he who cut our rainfall and decimated commercial agriculture. Seventy years ago, our mountains were lined by huge fields where farmers grew winter wheat. There was a Railway bus that made its way down the river and across the plain, stopping here and there to pick up cans of milk and boxes of tomatoes for delivery to distant markets. There was an apricot orchard in every kloof, and for a time, ostriches by the thousand. Almost all that was gone by the time I arrived. There were three or four commercial farmers left. Coloureds were heavily dependent on social grants and seasonal work, while whites were mostly retirees living on pensions or investments made when they worked in distant cities. All that changed after the construction boom got underway. I know you believe in market forces and the magical transformations that result when they are allowed to operate freely. I do too. Or did until recently. Assuming my calculations are correct, the R500 million that has flooded into this district in the last eight years should have lifted all boats, including those of the coloureds. In theory, the boom should have stimulated demand for labour, which should have pushed wages inexorably upwards. That hasn’t happened, thanks almost entirely to uncontrolled immigration. When I arrived here, the going rate for an unskilled labourer was R160 to R180 a day. It has since risen to around R200, which means wages have actually declined in real terms. That number is based on interviews with coloureds who have axes to grind and might therefore be on the low side. But so what? For coloureds, the entire subject is theoretical, because most can’t get construction jobs even if they’re willing to work for two blue banknotes a day.Over the decades, I have presented several versions of myself to those who bothered to read me. I started as a gormless leftist, graduated to the militant centre and these days, neighbours know me as a bullshitter who talks right but behaves left, at least to the extent of giving succour to coloured dronkies who stand at the gate, calling my name. A loaf of bread, a tin of baked beans, a few kind words, that sort of thing. I do this because I like them, and because I seem to owe them something. Apartheid was probably more hurtful to coloureds than anyone else, because they are, after all, our cousins. Or my cousins, if you prefer. Back in the days when telephone directories were a thing, the Cape Town variant contained several pages of Malans, most of whom lived in coloured group areas. I looked some of them up because I thought there might be a book in it, and many were just like me. Loved rugby, spoke Afrikaans, drank too much and harboured doubts about the direction in which the country was heading.It goes without saying coloureds were one of the factors that drew me to Van Wyksdorp. I imagined it might be a place where I could practice what PW Botha called nasiebou, or nation building. I had some big ideas in this regard. One involved making friends with Israel’s Desert Research Centre in the hope that a country with hardly any friends left in the world would send cargo planes loaded with drip irrigation systems and tomato strains genetically engineered to flourish in an arid climate. I proselytised for the DA, and when that failed to gain traction, joked about staging a revolution and renaming the village after Piet Matthys, a coloured outlaw who famously shot and killed a police commandant on the outskirts of town in 1947. But in the end, all I did was hand out baked beans. It wasn’t enough.Around two years ago, coloureds started telling me they’d seen something amazing on TV, a politician called Gayton McKenzie standing in the dark alongside a border fence that had been trampled flat by foreigners flooding in to steal their jobs and corrupt their women. As we know, Gayton has the common touch and is Afrikaans-speaking to boot, but that’s not why coloureds saw him as a Moses coming to save them. The magic lay in what he said that night: uncontrolled immigration must end now. This far and no further.Some coloureds were suspicious, but most thought Gayton was namteet, local slang for lekker or cool. Jacques started talking about establishing a branch of the Patriotic Alliance. I drafted a letter asking Gayton how to proceed, but I didn’t want to sign it lest I be mistaken for a latter-day Joe Slovo, trying to hijack a cause that wasn’t really mine. Jacques had reservations too, so that came to nothing, and I began to draft a letter to you instead, observing that Gayton was about to become a major force in Western Cape politics for reasons that merited your attention. Here we go: I thought taking a stand against open borders might help the DA overcome black suspicion and win a general election. In fact, it was a no-brainer; according to polls, 85 percent of South Africans are angry about the ANC’s failure to control borders. If you’d taken up their cause, the ANC would have suffered an apoplexy of indignation while progressives everywhere bayed for your blood. So what? Those people carry on as if South Africa is a rich European country with close to full employment, rather than a failing state inhabited by millions who somehow survive on almost nothing. Once they’d recovered from shock, they would have accused you of trying to surf an anti-immigration groundswell similar to the one that carried Trump and the Brexiteers to victory in 2016, a serious crime in the eyes of sophisticated white suburbanites. But black South Africa would have loved you for it.My neighbours thought it was insane to talk like this, which is why the first draft of this letter was never sent. Now I’m kicking myself, because the MoMs have moved into the migrant policy vacuum and radically changed the game. This meant little or nothing to the Little Karoo until June 7, when President Ramaphosa found it necessary to inform that nation that he was mobilising his forces to keep the peace while simultaneously making an effort to enforce laws his party has ignored for decades.A week or so later, faint aftershocks of this belated eruption of courage reached my doorstep. Police raided the village’s shack settlement and carted off a vanload of undocumented aliens. A large truck was seen leaving town, loaded to the gunnels with Malawians and their belongings. Other Malawians took to keeping their heads down and staying away from work. Some say they were instructed to do so by white bosses scared of the massive fines Cyril is threatening to impose on those who hire illegal foreigners. In a nearby town, police found undocumented aliens on the back of someone’s bakkie and levied a heavy fine. This prompted Andre Snyman to tell me that his son had a similar experience some time back. Police checked his workers’ documents, found some to be forgeries, and presented his father with an R22k admission-of-guilt fine. Snyman refused to pay, claiming he never hired foreigners without first asking to see their work permits. “How am I supposed to tell whether or not those papers are genuine?,” he said. The prosecutor had no comeback, and the case was dismissed.This could be an important detail. Almost every foreigner in this country can produce papers when asked. Some are genuine. Some are crude forgeries. And some forgeries are almost indistinguishable from the real thing, backed by a birth certificate and an entry on the National Population Register, arranged for a fee by corrupt Home Affairs officials. If you believe, as Cyril does, that foreigners with valid permission are entitled to stay, separating real refugees from chancers might be difficult or even impossible. Which is presumably why the MoM movement wants to forgo the niceties and deport everyone who speaks with a foreign accent, starting tomorrow.I got up from my desk a moment ago to have a smoke. In the garden, my man Willem Williams was hacking at weeds with a panga. I said, “Practising for June 30, are you?” He laughed and said, “Might be an interesting day.” Willem was a firebrand when I first met him, but he’s come around after years of sparring with me. I say, give the foreigners a break, man. If you were born in a country like Malawi, you’d be here too. We don’t need pangas and pogroms to drive them out. Let’s rather elect politicians who enforce laws already on the books. Thou shalt not enter the country illegally. Also, thou shalt not hire anyone who lacks a valid work permit. And if you break either commandment, you should be deported, jailed or heavily fined.But that would require a competent government, and there is no little hope of that at present. Let’s give President Ramaphosa the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s genuinely determined to carry out the reforms promised. But that would require him to wield a sjambok on lazy police and civil servants, and he’s not that kind of guy.And if MoM’s true aim is to push Jacob Zuma’s MK Party into power, the prospects are even more dismaying, for it is Zuma who set us off on the road to a failed state by weakening institutions and tolerating corruption. As state president, Zuma consistently recognised complaints regarding porous borders, undocumented migrants, competition for jobs, and the proliferation of foreign-owned spaza shops in townships. But he did nothing about it. Nothing. For eight years.Which brings us back to the Democratic Alliance, a genuinely non-racial party that has shown itself capable of running tight ships wherever it has been given a chance and preserving Cape Town’s status as a truly world-class city. If you’d seen fit to take a strong stand on open borders, the DA might now be topping the polls and heading at last towards the Union Buildings. And once you got there, we all know that you’d have been man enough (sorry) to clean up corruption, rebuild broken institutions and enforce firm but fair immigration laws. Far more importantly, you’d at last have been in a position to scrap laws presently strangling our economy, because a return to growth is our only hope of a happy ending. I don’t have to argue that, do I? Jobs would heal almost all our wounds, including those caused by open borders. Oddly, Van Wyksdorp is leading the way in this. There is now a space-age medical cannabis farm just outside town, and its workforce consists almost entirely of locals. I wrote a fan letter to its boss the other day, thanking him for putting South Africans first. Let’s have much more of that.On that note, I’ll apologise for bending your ear and fade back into obscurity. I take it you’re living in Johannesburg at the moment, so good luck tomorrow. You might need it, but the Karoo remains pretty relaxed. African women and children have disappeared from Van Wyksdorp’s streets, and there are muted mutterings of trouble to come. But my bones maintain that tomorrow is more likely to be an undeclared public holiday, and therefore just another opportunity to get drunk again.Yours sincerely, Rian Malan

Rian Malan writes to Helen Zille: Behind the MoM marches lurks something far more dangerous

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