Nothing left to steal, by Mzilikazi wa Afrika

Nothing left to steal: Jailed for telling the truth, by Mzilikazi wa Afrika. The Penguin Group (South Africa). Cape Town, South Africa 2014. ISBN 9780143538929 / ISBN 978-0-14-353892-9

Nothing left to steal is a report of how Mzilikazi wa Afrika became one of South Africa’s most awarded investigative reporters in the post apartheid aera.

Preface to Nothing left to steal

Just days after I joined the Sunday Times as a rookie reporter in January 1999, I was stripped naked, brutally assaulted and thrown into the lions den. On my first investigative assignment with the newspaper, I had infiltrated a modern-day slave trade syndicate operating between South Africa and Mozambique. I had arrived in the Mozambique capital, Maputo, dressed in my oldest clothes. Since eu ndofaloportugues (I don't speak Portuguese), I managed to manoeuvre around by speaking my home language, Xitsonga, which is close to Xilandi, one of the Mozambican languages. Within hours, I was recruited by the syndicates runners and taken to a safe house in Rosana Garcia, a small Mozambican town near the South African border in Komatipoort. The dark was strong, paving the way for the stars to blossom, indicating that the night had just begun. As these stars decorated the sky, the earth was struggling to cope with the nightmares as the wind blew strongly, bringing with it the elements of coldness. Under usual circumstances, this was supposed to be bedtime for normal folk, but it was the beginning of a night of horror for me. That night I became a slave smuggled to my homeland South Africa, ready to be sold to the masters for a price I didn't even know. As we weathered the coldness and darkness waiting for the moment of truth, deep inside my mind, apart from being nervous, I was pondering the big story that would finally emerge once I had completed my undercover assignment. But little did I know that my cover was about to be busted. The slave master, John Nkuna, found my passport and cash stashed in my underwear during a strip search at one of the South African safe houses. The slave trade might have ended in the eighteenth century thanks to the introduction of colonialism in Africa, but almost two hundred years later in Mozambique, a country that battled many wars even after ousting Portuguese colonialists in 1975, the practice was still going on, though in a new form called human trafficking. Nkuna went berserk, picking up a hoe handle and clobbering me brutally as he interrogated me. When he was satisfied that I was physically broken, Nkuna and his assistants dragged me into a bakkie (pick-up-truck) parked outside. With two AK-47 assault rifles pointed in my face, they drove me around before dumping me in the middle of Kruger National Park in the hopes that lions or leopards would finish what they had started. Through the grace of God, I survived to tell the story, exposing the slave ring. Nkuna would eventually be arrested and sent to jail. This was not the first time that I had been brutally assaulted and had guns shoved in my face. I was arrested on 9 October 1989, just weeks before I was to sit my matric examination, after an ipimpi (police informer) told the police that I had a couple of AK-47 rifles stashed somewhere in my house. I was not a gunrunner but a political activist whose house was often used as a "base" - a secret place where underground political activities were taking place - to move weapons.  [...]

This is an excerpt from the report Nothing left to steal, by Mzilikazi wa Afrika.

Title: Nothing left to steal
Subtitle: Jailed for telling the truth
Author: Mzilikazi wa Afrika
Genre: Memoir
Publisher: The Penguin Group (South Africa)
Cape Town, South Africa 2014
ISBN 9780143538929 / ISBN 978-0-14-353892-9
Softcover, 14 x 22 cm, 280 pages