It’s Saturday afternoon on Lamu Island in Kenya, and I’ve just finished reading Karyn Maughan’s book I Will Not Be Silenced. I’m on the island to host a four-day symposium with the theme “AI and the weaponisation of hate speech”.
This is peculiarly apposite, as you will realise if you know the story of how Jacob Zuma and his allies have tried to destroy Maughan’s life by attacking her mercilessly on social media, and in the courts.
I brought an extra copy of Maughan’s book with me, to give to one of the young journalists at the symposium. She, too, has been viciously attacked online and in court by people she has investigated, to the point of despair and mental breakdown. When I spoke to her before the event, she was reluctant to attend. Her lawyer had urged her to keep a low profile while the legal proceedings were taking place. She was also exhausted from the constant online attacks. After I chatted to her about Maughan’s experience she found the strength, and the desire, to attend and to share her journalism story.
And this is one of the most important impacts, and sustaining values, of I Will Not Be Silenced. It serves not only as a testament of how Maughan fought back and worked out how to survive, but also as a detail-rich history of corrupt and evil people and their attempts to destroy our democracy. The book is also a statement of solidarity with women journalists who are experiencing similar harassment, and a guide to thriving in adversity.
This is no airport self-help book. The last line reads: “Zuma has taught me how easy it is to start your life fighting for justice, but to end it clinging to the tiny shreds of the eviscerated authority that you once held so firmly yet will never get back.”
This is no facile homily about the victory of good over evil. The kind of inhumanity that Zuma, his daughter Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla and his buffoon-at-law enabler Dali Mpofu have unleashed on Maughan is not something that will ever stop, thanks to the amplifying effect of social media. Every time Maughan investigates one of the many corrupt individuals who infest our country, from businesspeople to politicians, the malevolent agents of disinformation will be unleashed upon her. In this sense, “I will not be silenced” is more a grim statement of purpose than a tale of triumph over adversity.
The cost of being relentlessly harassed by Zuma and his crack team of attack clowns is tallied by Maughan in several ways. The most poignant, perhaps, is when she speaks of how it affected something as simple as her mourning of her friend Eusebius McKaiser. His death in 2023 was a major loss to journalism, and especially to that sort of fearless journalism that engages with the fault lines and rich lodes of our fractured civil society.
Maughan writes about the insidious impact of the barrage of attacks from Zuma and Mpofu, exacerbated and enabled by Zuma-Sambudla.
int. He robbed me of the chance to properly mourn my friend when I most needed to be part of a community grieved by his death. No court case can ever restore that. It is irreplaceable.”
— Karyn Maughan
“I never doubted that Zuma’s private prosecution campaign would end in failure,” she writes. “His case was so self-evidently baseless that there was simply no way that it would survive legal scrutiny. So, when, just before the start of Eusebius’s memorial, I received confirmation that a full bench would rule on the validity of that private prosecution, I knew — just as Eusebius had always known — that we had a very good chance of winning.
“I nonetheless still carry a great deal of sadness and anger over the fact that, in a moment when I should have been wholly focused on mourning my friend, part of my brain was absorbed by what the court would find about Zuma’s unfounded prosecution. I know I can never get that moment back.
“People often ask me if I would ever sue the former president for malicious prosecution. There would be no point. He robbed me of the chance to properly mourn my friend when I most needed to be part of a community grieved by his death. No court case can ever restore that. It is irreplaceable.”
Woven into Maughan’s book are details about other women whose lives Zuma has attempted to ruin, and in some cases did ruin. Chapter 1, for example, is about Fezeka “Khwezi” Kuzwayo, who alleged that Jacob Zuma raped her in 2005 while he was the ANC deputy president, and who died in exile after enduring some truly evil hate speech. Zuma was acquitted on that charge.
Another review of I Will Not Be Silenced could focus entirely on Maughan’s analysis of South Africa’s legal system, and some of its practitioners and official bodies, such as the Legal Practice Council, the body that is supposed to set the norms and standards for legal practitioners and to regulate their professional conduct and hold them accountable. It is revealed as an asinine enabler of Mpofu’s outrageous conduct, and essentially complicit in the buffoonification of our legal system, and worse — its weaponisation against civil society watchdogs by bad actors.
To her credit, Maughan included Zuma-Sambudla as one of Zuma’s victims. We are all aware of Zuma-Sambudla’s attacks on social media, especially during the 2021 riots.
Maughan describes when she noticed that Zuma-Sambudla was morphing into a pro-Russia proponent of disinformation and hate speech. “When [her] profile appeared on Twitter, I was convinced it was fake. There was no way that the crude insults and blatant dishonesty posted by that account could have come from the measured young woman I had first encountered at the Zuma rape trial. Or so I thought. I even persuaded Thuli Madonsela not to take legal action over a defamatory tweet posted by an account that purported to belong to Duduzile, because I was convinced that she was not the person who had tweeted it. In that tweet, posted on 10 August 2019, the alleged Duduzile claimed that Madonsela was a ‘paid spy’ for multibillionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros.”
To return to Mpofu, who is now the go-to pop-up lawyer for any desperate criminal who wants to obfuscate themselves out of a conviction by using the ever-reliable Morosoph Gambit (I include a word designed to confuse my meaning, in homage to Mpofu). When thinking about why Mpofu so viciously insulted Madonsela, Maughan writes: “I think we both knew, however, that Mpofu’s treatment of her had nothing to do with anything she’d done. Rather, I believed, it had everything to do with who she was: a resilient survivor who had, despite all the cruelty, harassment, threats and insults thrown at her, maintained her principles and continued to fight the good fight. In other words, the exact opposite of Dali Mpofu.”
She goes on to describe Mpofu’s legal “strategy”. “Much like the auditions of tone-deaf would-be stars on reality TV shows, Mpofu’s arguments in courts, inquiries and tribunals are excruciating to watch. He has become the advocate of choice for people who seem so desperate to avoid accountability that they are prepared to resort to legal strategies that defy logic. His litigation is almost always fixated on using minor technicalities and is underpinned by conspiracy theories and pettiness.”
Another woman Maughan mentions is Nompumelelo Ntuli-Zuma, Zuma’s second wife, baselessly accused by Zuma and his cronies of attempting to poison him, and kicked out of her home. Zuma was saved by the ministrations of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who knows something about poisoning people. Perhaps this is why Zuma-Sambudla worships at the shrine of St Vlad. There are more positive references, to brave journalists such as Redi Thlabi, a remarkable woman who never met a fight she shied away from, and Pauli van Wyk and Ferial Haffajee, themselves the targets of vicious harassment.
Every reader will take something different from this book. For me, looking at the amount of damage that even the amateur-hour Zumas and their middle-fingered glove puppet lawyer can inflict, despite being idiots striving to rise to the level of incompetents, the book lays the groundwork for thinking about how the new wave of AI-augmented disinformation and hate speech needs to be approached. An AI-powered Bell Pottinger is soon going to be offering its services to the likes of Zuma, if it hasn’t already done so.
Maughan’s tale of professional survival, and of the courage needed to continue to do the journalism essential to the survival of our democratic rights, helps us to understand the terrible cost and the terrible triumphs.
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