On Shaping South African Society

The De-centre: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies offers a commentary section, with a call for this section having the slogan: “A space for critical commentary on issues shaping societies’ present and future”. When I received this call, the slogan elicited particular interest for me, and it is with this slogan that I considered my own research – that is, the impact that the phenomenon of whistleblowing has on shaping society. I understand whistleblowing as a social phenomenon that occurs when an insider discloses a wrongdoing to an authority that they believe would be able to remedy that wrongdoing, and this understanding is largely informed by Janet Near and Marcia Miceli’s (1985) seminal work. It is widely accepted that United States lawyer, journalist and civil activist Ralph Nader employed, in 1971, the “first formal use of the term “whistleblower” to denote insiders who expose organizational wrongdoing” (Uys, 2022: 26). Nader, in fact, put the term to use in order to avoid common derogatory vocabulary such as ‘snitch’ and ‘informer’. Yet, the history of ‘blowing the whistle’ dates back to well before that. In South Africa, Adam Tas and Emily Hobhouse can be considered two early whistleblowers.