Nhlanhla Dube is a native of Harare, Zimbabwe. He holds a PhD in English Studies from Stellenbosch University. In 2024 he completed a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town. His research interests are Geocriticism, Spatiality, Literary Bulawayo and John Eppel. He has also published peer reviewed papers on Law and Literature and Literary Pornography.
The Whites Are Busy Here Today: A review of Karyn Maughan’s “I Will Not Be Silenced.”
Legal journalist Karyn Maughan has been in and out of the courts for the majority of her professional career. Her memoir I Will Not Be Silenced takes us through her years reporting on court cases, particularly Jacob Zuma’s trials, as well as her own private prosecution by Zuma. Maughan writes her memoir with bravery and grit, qualities needed when going up against powerful personalities such Zuma, Advocate Dali Mpofu, and anonymous online trolls who constantly bombard her with rape and death threats.
The book is a harrowing testament of what it is like to be a white female journalist in a country such as South Africa, which is still deeply patriarchal and sexist. As she reflects in this book, Maughan’s race makes some Black people uncomfortable: accusations of racism are constantly thrown at her. Her reporting, which seeks to unearth impropriety, is constantly labelled as racist, one-sided, Apartheid era-influenced anti-Black propaganda. Throughout the book Maughan shows how she has had to constantly fight these accusations. She is at pains to demonstrate how she is vindicated by objective and progressive sectors of society.
Maughan’s body takes centre stage in this memoir. A Type 2 diabetic, her health struggles are intertwined with her legal and professional challenges. The book opens with a demonstration of how her affliction continually bedevils her:
“I am lying on my side in a single bed, covered in a cold sweat and shaking. There is spit running down the side of my face, and I can’t feel my hands.” (1)
This disease takes away her bodily autonomy and often leaves her incapacitated. Maughan interprets the increasing episodes of diabetic attacks as the consequences of Zuma’s private prosecution against her:
“While I smiled in court and kept doing my job as the online tide of fear and hatred kept washing over me, my body was falling apart.” (88)
Maughan’s body shows the trauma of being on the receiving end of the anger of one of South Africa’s most powerful men, Jacob Zuma, uBaba ka Duduzane, uMsholozi. Scholars of life narratives have always made the connection between the body and a person’s life story. Smith and Watson remind us: “It is easy to think that autobiographical subjectivity and autobiographical texts have little to do with the material body. But the body is a site of autobiographical knowledge, as well as a textual surface upon which a person’s life is inscribed.” (37) Maughan’s body is under siege. Even her co-workers know it, and throughout her trial, they give her sweets and other such comforts and accommodations essential for diabetics:
“This resulted, on one occasion, in my friend Cathy Mohlahlana cutting short a radio interview with me because she realised I was going low on air; I hadn’t picked up the tell-tale signs.”(88)
The point made throughout the memoir is that Zuma, through his private prosecution of her, is not only attacking her professional reputation and liberty, but also her body.
Continuing this theme, Maughan describes the ways Zuma has attacked other women’s bodies. Fezeka Kuzwayo, the woman Zuma was accused of raping, takes up a significant chunk of this memoir; Maughan covered that trial.With in-depth research, Maughan details how Zuma’s supporters were unleashed on Fezeka:
“When I see the then-31-year-old HIV /Aids activist Fezeka ‘Khwezi’ Kuzwayo, her face obscured by a scarf, walking up the courthouse stairs to take the stand against Zuma, I can hear Zuma’s supporters shouting ‘nondindwa’. It means ‘prostitute’ in isiZulu.” (6)
Maughan makes the point that even if by Zuma’s account the sex with Kuzwayo was consensual, he should have known better and not had sex with a liberation comrade’s HIV positive daughter:
“Zuma was in his early 40s when he met Fezeka. She was seven.”(12)
Maughan also alleges that Zuma mistreated two of his former wives, Kate Mantsho-Zuma and Nompumelelo Ntuli-Zuma, providing evidence. Zuma reads as hostile to most women in this memoir, apart from his adoration for his daughter Duduzile. But Duduzile is on the side of the patriarchy because she enabled her father’s abuse and vilification of women:
“Duduzile, who had been a crucial defence witness in her father’s trial on charges of raping a young woman she had grown up with, was openly celebrating the prospect of me being raped in prison.”(97)
This memoir often feels like a project meant to demonise Jacob Zuma. Maughan’s own life recedes into the background for the vast length of this book. Her personal life story becomes linked to that of Zuma and his persecution/prosecution of her. I Will Not Be Silenced is essentially a book about Zuma; Maughan’s personal life is an unseen participant. Maughan is not a fully fleshed-out character in her own story–rather, she becomes nothing more than a recipient of hostility from a powerful politician.
The reader gets very few details about Maughan. Who is she outside of being a victim? What is the nature of her personal and intimate relationships? Who are her lovers? For the most part, these questions go unanswered. Granted, a memoir, because of its form, is meant to give a snapshot of a person’s life during a particularly significant but limited time period; still, there needs to be some personal angle that gets the reader hooked. Maughan fails to get the reader to care about her life outside her persecution/prosecution. For whom is this book written–people who want to get to know Karyn Maughan, or those seeking confirmation that Zuma is the monster the media make him out to be?
Scholars of life narratives have long theorised the “convergence of autobiography and photography as modes of self-representation and technologies of memory” (Ngoshi, 55). At the centre I Will Not Be Silenced are photographs which accompany this period of Maughan’s life. This is not an innocent act; photographs strengthen the arguments made by the text, as “[autobiographers] determine style insofar as it serves the desired goal. The inclusion of pictures, for instance, could be seen as authenticating documents meant to prove a certain point that would otherwise be contested, in the absence of the photographs” (Nyanda, 132).
There are photographs of Maughan with the big shots of South African social, legal, political and academic circles. She is snapped with Zuma’s ex-wife, Nompumelelo Ntuli-Zuma, with Professor Thuli Madonsela, journalist Qaanitah Hunter, Advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, editor Adriaan Basson, and even former Chief Justice Raymond Zondo. The point of these photographs seems to be that Maughan moves in enlightened circles and knows people–people who are broadly understood to be champions for justice in South Africa. The import is that there seems to be a league of women not intimidated by Zuma, and who can challenge his power. Madonsela is one of them, and now Maughan has joined those ranks. That association with Madonsela is repeated throughout the text, but the photographs give it gravitas. The caption underneath the photo of Maughan with Madonsela reads in part: “Madonsela’s unambiguous support gave me the huge courage at a time when I needed it the most.” The reader can see this in the photograph, which shows the two women hugging and smiling for the camera.
Zuma gets his fair share of attacks, but Advocate Dali Mpofu is a friend-turned-nemesis whose betrayal is personal:
“One of the questions I am most often asked by people who have followed my private prosecution saga has nothing to do with the former president. With predictable monotony, I am asked what I think ‘went wrong’ or ‘is wrong’ with Dali Mpofu.” (109)
Maughan has had a close association with the advocate, even attending his mother’s funeral:
“He was also my friend. Or at least I thought he was.” (109)
As leader of Zuma’s private prosecution bid against her, Advocate Mpofu plays a central part in this narrative. Not unsurprisingly, he gets properly blasted in this memoir:
“Mpofu’s offensive behaviour seems to know no bounds; the worse his case, the more vitriolic he becomes.”(137)
From a brilliant legal mind and friend, Mpofu transforms into a one dimensional character that’s portrayed as nothing more than Zuma’s attack dog:
“As would happen throughout the litigation, Mpofu’s arguments that day were frequently delivered as stream-of-consciousness monologues that veered from one wildly inappropriate comparison to another, punctuated by strange huffing noises and hand gestures.”(139)
In this passage, Advocate Dali Mpofu is described as a blithering idiot. This attack shows that Maughan thinks very little of him as a person and as a legal practitioner. I Will Not Be Silenced is neither a legal trial nor a thriller where all sides are given a chance to speak; it is, by design, a one-sided and subjective account from Maughan’s point of view. There is no right of reply.
The attack on Mpofu does, however, invite some questions. Despite his sins, what does it mean for Mpofu to be represented this way? Throughout this memoir, Maughan records constant accusations of being a racist who uses her job as a journalist to attack Black people. When people who think she is racist read this memoir, they might see her description of Advocate Mpofu as ammunition for their allegations–because it alludes to certain ugly stereotypes about Black people. Oneof those is that no matter how educated and successful they become, there is still something about Black people which hints at bestiality and a lack of refinement. Let us be clear here, the Advocate is considered by many, even Maughan herself in earlier years, to be a legal juggernaut. Since Maughan invokes a literary trope in explaining Mpofu’s behaviour–that of stream-of-consciousness–perhaps we should turn to a literary source to understand why her description of Mpofu is problematic.
In Richard Wright’s Native Son, the Black man who is the main character, Bigger Thomas, reads a news report about his trial. In it, there is a description of how white America sees him:
“All in all, he seems a beast utterly untouched by the softening influences of modern civilization. In speech and manner he lacks the charm of the average, harmless, genial, grinning southern darky so beloved by the American people.”
Maughan’s description of Mpofu’s “strange huffing noises and hand gestures” (139) is uncomfortably close to how racist white America describes Bigger Thomas. If, as reflected in the memoir, Advocate Mpofu used his legal acumen to hound Maughan through the attempted private prosecution, then, through her writing skills and journalistic pen, she has hit back hard.
Maughan’s memoir is an interesting account of major events that captured the media’s attention for most of the past decade in South Africa. I Will Not Be Silenced attempts to add a personal angle to these events. Its handling of Zuma shows just how large of a figure he is. The most valuable contribution Maughan’s memoir will make is in how it is a source of history; however, it frequently feels very one-sided, and comes off as an attempt by Maughan to finally get back at her tormentors, after years of persecution.
The central theme is that her detractors could not bring her down. Some readers will find inspiration in this, and will want to see how powerful men who use the system can be defeated. Others may see the book as somewhat vindictive and gratuitous, because the private prosecution against Maughan failed, the outcome never being in doubt. Whichever interpretation readers make, however, Maughan has made her point: She will not be silenced.
Contact: nhlanhladube09 [at] gmail [dot] com
I Will Not Be Silenced is available to purchase from NB Publishers here.
Details:
ISBN: 9780624091288
Publisher: Tafelberg
Date Released: November 2024
Price (incl. VAT): R 350.00
Format: Soft cover, 224 pp
References
- Maughan, Karyn. I Will Not Be Silenced. Tafelberg, 2024.
- Ngoshi, Hazel Tafadzwa. “When the written and visual texts collide: photographic images and acts of memory in Zimbabwean autobiography.” Scrutiny2, Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 55-66, 2012. DOI: 10.1080/18125441.2012.747757
- Nyanda, Josiah. “The Curse of Historical Recurrence in Geoffrey Nyarota’s Against the Grain : Memoirs of a Zimbabwean Newsman.”. Research in African Literatures, Volume 54, Number 2, pp. 128-143, 2024 https://doi.org/10.2979/ral.00008
- Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography:A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
- Wright, Richard. Native Son. 1940.
Harare Review of Books 
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