Category: Africa

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Azwihangwisi Judith Mphidi, Adjunct Academic, University of South Africa

South African Police Service members who act with integrity sometimes suffer for it. If they witness corruption, refuse to participate in misconduct, or raise a grievance, they may be labelled disloyal, excluded from professional networks, denied promotion, transferred to undesirable posts, or pressured to leave the service.

These are not hypothetical concerns. An interim report released by the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry named 14 senior police and Ekurhuleni (municipal) officials for investigation into alleged corruption and political interference. South African president Cyril Ramaphosa established the commission in 2025 to look into criminality, political interference and corruption in the criminal justice system.

Public hearings have heard allegations that corruption has reached senior levels of policing. At the 2026 SAPS Fraud and Corruption Imbizo, a meeting convened at the University of South Africa (Unisa) in response to the commission’s findings, officers and delegates described fear, resignation and the normalisation of silence after reporting wrongdoing.

It reflects a broader South African pattern. Corruption Watch, a not-for-profit anti-corruption agency, has documented five decades of whistleblowers facing dismissal, intimidation, social isolation and even murder. Not every case involves the police. Nevertheless, it shows that disclosure without credible institutional protection can carry severe personal and professional costs.

I research ethical policing, corruption, accountability and governance reform. As a participant and observer at the discussions at Unisa, I heard repeated concerns about retaliation, fear of disclosure, distrust of reporting channels and the perception that management protected its own. This raised a central question: surely these events could not be treated as an ordinary workplace issue? If police members feared punishment for reporting corruption, how could the police service credibly confront corruption within its own ranks?

In a recent paper I argue that the state has a constitutional duty to protect members of the South African Police Service from internal retaliation. And failing to do so allows corruption to continue harming the communities that police are meant to serve.

I argue that protecting police members is not simply a workplace welfare issue. It is a constitutional obligation. Where the police service tolerates retaliation against ethical officers, it weakens the institutional integrity required to confront corruption.

I propose a protection model based on three pillars:

• police members have rights

• the state has a duty to make those rights effective

• protecting members is a precondition for human security.

On the ground

Retaliation within the police service is often informal and difficult to prove. It takes forms like stalled promotions, undesirable transfers, exclusion from professional networks, reputational labelling and pressure to resign rather than dismissal.

Research has also identified four reinforcing dynamics that produce silence: fear of retaliation, loyalty pressures, moral rationalisation and distrust of reporting channels.

On top of this, research on whistleblowing consistently shows that people who report wrongdoing may face retaliation, isolation, career damage and threats to their safety, even where formal protections exist. Employees are more likely to remain silent where disclosure might threaten their standing, relationships or career prospects.

Research also finds that retaliation is less likely where organisations build cultures of trust, respect, collective identity and justice.

This has direct implications for the South African Police Service. Legal rules alone cannot protect officers if the everyday culture rewards loyalty to corrupt networks over fidelity to the law.

In South Africa, the risks are severe. Corruption Watch has documented how legal processes can be used to frustrate rather than support whistleblowers. Its later research records decades of retaliation against people who exposed corruption. It included intimidation, dismissal, social isolation and murder.

These findings show that whistleblower protection cannot depend only on legislation. It requires enforcement, independence and institutional willingness to act.

The “blue wall of silence” within policing adds another layer. Research shows that loyalty, fear of professional consequences and norms of solidarity can discourage officers from reporting misconduct. This culture can turn whistleblowing from a professional duty into a perceived betrayal. Officers may fear being called a “snitch”, losing informal support, or being treated as an enemy by colleagues and supervisors.

The cost of silence

The consequences of silence are not abstract. Wrongdoing becomes harder to expose. Corrupt networks are protected. Accountability is delayed. Communities continue to experience organised crime, drug trafficking and weakened policing.

Afrobarometer (2024) reports that South Africans’ views of the police are shaped by perceived corruption and low trust.

Research shows that police corruption undermines public trust and that procedural fairness is central to rebuilding confidence in policing. Communities are not simply reacting emotionally to isolated scandals. They are responding rationally to repeated institutional failure.

The discussions at Unisa reflected this connection. Participants linked internal corruption to drug proliferation and community insecurity. Where officers are silenced, harm extends from the individual whistleblower to families, schools, neighbourhoods and future opportunities.

Protection must come first

South Africa cannot ask officers to report corruption while leaving them exposed to retaliation. This is especially serious where reports involve senior officials or where reporting channels are in the same chain of command being complained about.

Reform must begin with credible protection. The South African Police Force and the Independent Police Investigative Directorate should establish secure, anonymised reporting channels that are independent of local command structures. Disclosures involving senior officials should receive priority and be insulated from those involved.

The law should also recognise informal retaliation more clearly. The police service could be required to show that adverse treatment was unrelated to a disclosure.

Ethics training should reframe whistleblowing as a constitutional and professional duty rather than disloyalty. Officers who disclose wrongdoing should receive immediate legal and psycho-social support.

Finally, the Madlanga Commission’s recommendations must be carried out visibly, with regular public reporting, so communities can see accountability.

Public anger towards the police is understandable. But broad distrust also unfairly affects the many officers who serve with integrity. The way to distinguish between a police service with a corruption problem and a corrupt institution is visible accountability.

That accountability begins inside the organisation.

– Corruption in South Africa’s police force is rife: why protecting whistleblowers is vital
– https://theconversation.com/corruption-in-south-africas-police-force-is-rife-why-protecting-whistleblowers-is-vital-295357

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Alex Bertacchi, Engineer in Mass Spectrometry and Stable Isotope Research, University of Kiel

In the ancient past, when human communities were small and the only way to travel was by walking, what were the chances of meeting a stranger? And what would happen next?

We know that ancient people lived by foraging their food from wild plants and animals, but we know a lot less about their social lives. Would there be conflict as people defended territory? Or would they choose to share? Sometimes survival depends on choosing wisely between these options. Defending a territory has a cost, and it’s not always worth it.

To understand how ancient people interacted with one another, we can start by looking at the food they ate. When food resources are densely clustered in predictable ways, it makes sense to establish and maintain a territory around them. When resources are sparsely distributed, they are harder to defend.

One example of territoriality in modern foraging people comes from the Okiek in the mountains of Kenya. Here, families control the crucially important activity of honey-harvesting. In contrast, foraging groups that live in places where the next meal is less predictable also tend to be less territorial. For example, until recently !Kung foragers in the arid parts of the Kalahari Desert searched for animals to hunt across wide areas, and boundaries between groups were much more fluid.

The strategies used by the Okiek and the !Kung are different solutions to the same problem: weighing the risk of going hungry against the risk of unfriendly social encounters.

Applying this principle to archaeological finds can reveal clues about ancient human social organisation. The problem is how to find food remains from the ancient past.

We are archaeologists who do research in Malawi, excavating fossil animal bones and stone tools from natural shelters of rock. Our aim is to understand how early humans lived from the end of the last ice age, between 19,000 and 10,000 years ago, until the start of farming and herd-keeping just a few thousand years ago. Although no glaciers were present in tropical Malawi during the last ice age, global environments were different from today. We wanted to know more about food availability then, and how this might have affected social interactions.

We focused on a large shelter called Hora 1, located on a spectacular granite mountain that emerges like a tooth from the open woodlands in northern Malawi. Traces of ancient human activity are everywhere in this area: red coloured paintings on the rock walls, stone tools made of shiny quartz, hearths, human burials and, in the layers of earth carefully excavated over several visits, hundreds of thousands of bones. These are the remnants of uncountable meals for the communities who lived here.

Of this formidable number of broken, cooked, cut, chewed and discarded animal parts we were able to identify almost 13,000 individual fragments, collectively spanning the last 21,000 years of human occupation.

We have published a paper about these fragments and what they tell us about ancient cultural boundaries related to food availability. Our findings challenge the existing view that it was mostly coastal environments that promoted boundary formation in the past.

Hunting close to home

Large animals can provide a meal for a large group, so when hunters encounter them, they may prefer to chase them, even if that means ignoring smaller prey. But most of the bones we found belonged to small animals: tiny antelopes, hares, monkeys, and other creatures. That suggests that large prey with a lot of meat – like zebras, wildebeest and even rhinoceroses – were not very common in this valley in the past.

Although the fragments were very small, we could see that they came from everywhere in the body: limbs, torsos and heads were all present. This suggests that these animals were hunted close to the site, and the whole carcass was brought back (not just the best parts of large animals).

The bones indicate that foragers at Hora 1 hunted close to home throughout the thousands of years recorded in the archaeological deposits. We confirmed this by comparing the chemistry of the local geology to chemical traces in the animal teeth: we found that they matched.

But there is a twist to this story.

The animal bones were extremely fragmented, on average only the size of a little finger. Then we looked at some of the smallest and most nutrient poor bones in the skeleton: the phalanges, or finger and toe bones. Most had been broken open to recover even the smallest amounts of fatty marrow from inside. Probably food was not so abundant in this valley if people spent their time on such meagre packages of nutrients.

So why didn’t people just range further to find more food, and what kept them at that site for so long?

We think the answer lies in their social worlds.

In-group cooperation and out-group hostility

We found that animals were of different ages when they died: youngsters, adults, and even animals so old their teeth were worn down. This suggests some form of indiscriminate mass hunting such as the use of nets or traps. It is also possible that fire was used to aid communal game drives of larger animals. All these practices would have required coordination of labour, as well as social norms on how to split the bounty.

This in-group cooperation likely came with some sense of shared identity, like a cultural group.

The next question is how far across the landscape this group would have roamed. Were they like the !Kung, who maintain strong social ties with neighbouring groups? Or were they more like the Okiek, focused on keeping resources within their families?

A clue came from an unexpected source: ancient DNA. DNA preserved in some of the human burials found at these sites showed that relatedness became smaller very quickly as one moved further from the sites. Starting 19,000 years ago, at the end of the ice age, an invisible boundary was taking shape in tropical Africa, separating “us and them”.

All this evidence together points to behaviour that was very “local” in nature. However, the focus on recovering every scrap of food suggests that prey were not abundant enough to justify active defence of this territory. We also do not see evidence for persistent violent encounters or large, stable settlements, as have been documented near rich sources of food such as lakes and oceans. It is possible that these boundaries were only symbolically defended, for instance through collective practices like the 9,500-year-old funerary pyre that we recently described from Hora 1.

Read more: Oldest known cremation in Africa poses 9,500-year-old mystery about Stone Age hunter-gatherers

Most “cultural groups” that are known from archaeology are inferred from durable artifacts that preserve well, such as ornaments made of animal teeth and shells, or pottery shaped in a specific way. But most foragers spent so much time on the move that they never made such heavy things. In tropical Africa, our research has unearthed evidence for ancient cultural boundaries even without these objects.

We have also found that there can be a “home” territory and a strong sense of in-group cultural belonging without violence against other groups. Finally, we have shown that the vast interior of the continent, while less studied than its coasts, is a rich source of information on the evolution of human cooperation and competition.

– What animal bones in Malawi teach us about the social lives of people long ago
– https://theconversation.com/what-animal-bones-in-malawi-teach-us-about-the-social-lives-of-people-long-ago-281660