{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.025485436893203883, 'fraction_numerical': 0.01516990291262136, 'mean_word_length': 5.152985074626866, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Who Killed Meyer Hasenfus?: Organized Crime, Policing and Informing on the Witwatersrand, 1902–8

INTRODUCTION More than a hundred and fifty years have passed since the discovery of the diamonds and gold that heralded the arrival of southern Africa’s twentiethcentury industrial revolution. Given where the region has come from, and where many fear it is headed, it is puzzling that, as yet, we do not have a comprehensive history of either its organized crime or policing. In the case of the Transvaal, the economic core of the country’s industrial heartland, the reason for the lacuna is easily understood. In the twenty-eight years that separated the discovery of gold in the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek, in 1886, and the outbreak of World War One, the Witwatersrand was subjected to no fewer than four different administrative regimes culminating in that of the Union of South Africa in 1910. For the better part of three decades, the Rand and its principal city, Johannesburg, lacked anything approaching a properly constituted, professional police force. Not even the conclusion of the South African War (1889–1902), which many expected to usher in an age of imperial efficiency, produced any startlingly new dispensation. The polyglot South African Constabulary patrolled the countryside while the urban Witwatersrand, controlled by the Transvaal Town Police (TTP), was dominated by ex-army officers supported by a few score men whose rather limited experience of policing had been acquired in very different forces in Britain. The Star, mouthpiece of the ascendant mine owners and hardly an enemy of the newly-won state, complained in 1904: