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As the UCT debacle shows, non-disclosure agreements kill knowledge and silence the knowers

Ismail Lagardien
By Ismail Lagardien
11 Oct 2022
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The non-disclosure agreement has become a modern form of the 16th century scold’s bridle to shut up, discipline and punish people who carry vital knowledge about institutional or societal failures.

First, they mistreat you, make you question your own judgement and sense of self, demean you, then they silence you, and then they tell your story while you sit in silence, rumour and lies become truth, and evidence is hidden or destroyed. Mankurt!

Their main weapon of choice used to silence and propagate a single-story narrative unhinged from the truth is the non-disclosure agreement (NDA), or confidentiality agreement. This “NDA”, a weapon of entrenched power and influence in offices of mimic women and men, has become familiar to us all, now, with everything that is going on at the University of Cape Town.

The use of NDAs is not new, nor are they unique to organisations. They are a current instalment in the continuum of instruments used to silence dissent, and as the #metoo movement has shown, it is used to silence women who want to see justice after being abused by people, men in this case, in positions of power and influence.

This means of silencing, especially of women, has some of its origins in 16th century Scotland when the “scold’s bridle” was used to “curb the tongue of women”. This contraption was placed over the head of a woman and secured with a small padlock. At the front a small piece of metal went into the woman’s mouth, keeping her tongue flat and thereby preventing her from speaking. The 19th-century writer, Llewellyn Jewitt explained the scold’s bridle in the following way:

“With this cage upon her head, and with the gag firmly pressed and locked against her tongue, the miserable creature whose sole offending, perhaps, was that she had raised her voice in defence of her social rights, against a brutal and besotted husband, or had spoken honest truth of someone high in office in her town, was paraded through the streets, led by a chain...”

We have, in the modern era become more sophisticated, and adopted less corporeal methods of shutting up people with NDAs or confidentiality agreements to silence dissenting voices or voices that may expose those in positions of authority who would use these instruments to shore up their power, secure their tenure and ensure their own “reputational credibility”.

In this sense we may see a continuum from the scold’s bride through cultural detours, conversation stoppers that curb freedom (like Bill Clinton’s don’t ask don’t tell policy which “allowed” LGBTQ people to join the US military as long as they kept their sexual identity or preferences concealed) to legal, non-corporeal instruments, like NDAs, that control, discipline and punish.

The NDA becomes, then, a weapon “of epistemic violence to kill the victims’ knowledge of instances of misconduct and discrimination in organisations”. In cultural fields, like organisations, the NDA results in suppression and privileging of knowledge. Herein lies the rub, with a cruel twist.

Mankurt and the ends of their captors


Sometime in 2007, I asked someone of Filipino heritage, now living in the US, how or why Michelle Malkin, also of Filipino heritage, was so popular (especially among the far-right, neo-nazis and anti-semites in the US).

The friend to whom I asked the question explained that her father, born and raised in the Philippines, had joined the US war machine. In a previous conversation, her father told me that while he lived in his native country he had worked for the US intelligence service which opened the way to US citizenship, and which he “repaid” by “joining the service”.

The answer I received from my friend (about the Michelle Malkin question) was this: “You have to understand. To be accepted, you have to be more American than Americans.”

I remember comparing this, at least in my head, to public intellectuals like Fareed Zakaria, Dinesh D’Souza, even Christiane Amanpour or Asha Rapanga (who served in the US Federal Bureau of Investigation).

We have perfect examples in Britain today with the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, who sang the praises of the British Empire and spoke about her dream of seeing plane loads of refugees leaving the UK for Rwanda, or her predecessor Priti Patel, all of whom may be described as latter-day Janissaries — or at least more American than Americans, or more British than the British.



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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XvoQTVmtbQ

The Janissaries were an elite fighting and intellectual force made up of young people, Greeks, Serbs or Armenians, captured by the Ottoman Empire who were forcefully converted to Islam and then turned on their own people.

The Janniseries were a “step up” so to speak from slaves, the Mankurt who the Kyrgyz writer Chinghiz Aitmatov described in The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years as fictional legends; prisoners of war and captives turned into docile bodies and used for the ends of the captors. The Mankurt, tortured to the point of submission, lost their sense of humanity.

We get then, perhaps harshly put, to contemporary South African institutions in which a verisimilitude of the Mankurt or Jannisery have acquired positions within iniquitous organisational structures, and are charged with maintaining as much of the status quo as possible.

It is in their interests to imagine their contemporaries and subordinates as processes, not people, which makes it easy to use the NDA as an instrument of punishment, the scold’s bridle — that 16th century punishment for women who dared to speak — often resulting in non-corporeal violence and epistemic injustice.

The Mankurt’s responsibility, in the current climate, is to maintain the status quo, and produce conversation stoppers like “militancy” or “radicalism” or “bullying” to sustain a single narrative.

First, they call you militant, unreasonable, or, when you ask difficult questions, accuse you of bullying when there are difficult questions, ex-ante, that have to be asked; then they threaten and discredit you, and then they apply the 21st century scold’s bridle — the NDA.

The NDA as epistemic injustice and the death of knowledge


Research has shown that women are regularly, and more often, subjected to misconduct (abuse) than men within organisations. Women face anything from humiliating behaviour, sexual harassment and misogyny and are, then, when leaving organisations quite often made to sign an NDA — though, to a lesser degree, men often face the same treatment. The NDA is fast becoming more ubiquitous than the exit or handover report, the document you submit after you have cleared your desk and leave your place of employment.

At the level of academic scholarship, too, research by Speak Out Revolution this year revealed a distinct pattern of “structural sexism and misogyny” that effectively shuts down scholarly work that captures women’s lived experiences.

Like the 16th century scold’s bridle, women who produce “dangerous knowledge” (scholarship on feminism, or LGBTQI+ issues), or anyone who questions dubious passages of progress, of retrogressive social change and transformation, are dismissed as disruptive, radical or militant.

Forget the adage that “to hear with a feminist ear is to hear who is not heard, how we are not heard” — dare only to question the acquisition and deployment of power and authority, and charges of “insubordination,” and with departure from the field, the organisation, knowledge is killed by the NDA.

On the back of this epistemic injustice emerges the single narrative. Epistemic injustice refers, at the outset, equally to practices of silence as it does to distributive unfairness with respect to “goods” like information or education. Epistemic injustice can result in individuals as knowers being harmed, first, and then silenced by the NDA.

To understand the power of the NDA, we have to turn it on its head. Imagine if each or all the women who were abused by Harvey Weinstein (or Jeffrey Epstein, for that matter) had to sign an NDA. We might never have learned about the cruelty and misogyny of the man.

Not all of this may be said of what is going on in any of South Africa’s academic institutions. The current UCT debacle is only one recent bundle of claims and counterclaims about leadership failures at the institution.

There are, nonetheless, instances where confidentiality agreements or NDAs have been used to silence those who may be tempted to expose the way that people who may or may not have acquired positions of power and authority on dubious grounds, or who have, indeed, failed as leaders, and in whose interests it is that the status quo is maintained.

The NDA, I would argue (borrowing from the British historian, David Olusoga) is a lot like a type of “omission that is dishonesty by omission and we do it all the time”.

If we really want to get as close to the truth as humanly possible and defend it, perhaps we can call for a magical revocation of all NDAs and confidentiality agreements. Dan gaan die poppe dans. DM

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