On language, power and the Tlaleng Mofokeng misjudgment by the Health Professions Council of SA

The recent sanctioning of Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng – distinguished South African physician and United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health – by the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) for the alleged use of “inappropriate language” on social media against Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israel propagandist Hillel Neuer, invites a deeper inquiry into the politics of language: who defines what is appropriate, who is disciplined for transgression, and how such disciplinary power is shaped by longstanding racialised assumptions, and who benefits from such actions.

My clinical encounters with elderly African men often reveal the complexity and richness of linguistic expression. Many arrive immaculately dressed – suits, polished shoes and Stetson hats – and speak with a quiet dignity. When responding to routine questions, some say to me, without any animus: “Doctor, there is fokol wrong with me.” Fokol – a derivative of fuck all – is not deployed as a vulgarity but as a communicative shorthand. It reflects mode rather than malice, a linguistic rhythm rather than moral deviance. It is a reminder that language is not static; it is a living, evolving organism shaped by history, culture, power and sociality.

Linguistic evolution is constant and dialectical. English itself has transformed dramatically from the Victorian period to the present, traversing Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Achebe and Rushdie. Languages adapt, absorb and innovate. South Africa’s mining industry produced Fanagalo, a hybridised pidgin of Zulu, Afrikaans, English and other local languages – a linguistic infrastructure for a racially and ethnically stratified labour system. Today, digital communication has generated new vocabularies through memes, emojis, abbreviations and neologisms. “To google,” once unimaginable, is now unremarkable. What one era deems vulgar becomes mundane in another.

Language is also a marker of identity, and exists at the intersection of, and is shaped by, various markers of identity. It reflects class, culture, age and geography. As English becomes a global language spoken predominantly by non-Europeans, its colonial anchors loosen, giving rise to new forms and registers. Working-class idioms travel upwards; youth vernacular becomes mainstream; rap, kwaito, amapiano and other musical cultures expand the expressive field. The result is a linguistic landscape that is constantly remade.

The idea of “vulgarity” itself is historically contingent. Words once taboo – profane, sexual, bodily – are today commonplace, while slurs once considered harmless are now rightly condemned. The term “vulgar”, originally neutral and derived from the Latin vulgaris (“common”), has undergone semantic degradation, acquiring a pejorative meaning in modern use. Comedy, cinema and social media have diminished the shock value of conventional profanity. Meanwhile, communities have reclaimed historically abusive terms as markers of identity and resistance. Even corporate boardrooms now accommodate language once unthinkable in formal settings.

Context is therefore indispensable. Language can serve functions of solidarity, catharsis, humour, resistance and identity. In settings of power imbalance, however, it can also be weaponised as bullying. The social meaning of a word cannot be divorced from who speaks it, to whom, and under what circumstances.

This brings us to the HPCSA’s handling of the complaint lodged by the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) against Mofokeng. The SAZF had no locus standi, the HPCSA no jurisdiction, and even if jurisdiction were assumed, correct procedures were not followed. Mofokeng’s posts bore no relation to patient care, collegial conduct or any domain governed by the council’s mandate. Yet she received a penalising letter free of reasoning, justification or interpretive clarity – only a bald assertion that her language constituted unprofessional conduct.

Her statement – “f**k Netanyahu” – was deemed inappropriate. In doing so, the HPCSA stripped the utterance of its political context: Netanyahu’s rejection of a ceasefire in order to continue mass civilian killing in Gaza. Mofokeng’s criticism was an act of standing up to power, not an assault on vulnerable persons. She was not punching down; she was punching up. That this was adjudged “unprofessional” reflects a Victorian prudishness out of step with contemporary understandings of linguistic context, and a selective moralism that tolerates cruelty expressed in polite tones while censuring resistance articulated in vivid ones.

The second charge concerned her critique of Neuer of UN Watch, a well-known purveyor of anti-Palestinian racism and propaganda and who has agitated aggressively against UN officials, particularly Rapporteurs including Francesca Albanese, critical of Israeli violations. Mofokeng called him “evil”, a “bastard” and “evil scum” (all worthy epithets) and remarked that the “white man” attacking UNRWA should keep her name out of his “filthy mouth”, Here again, the HPCSA misconstrued the context. “White man” in this usage signals not a racial slur but an invocation of whiteness and supremacy as orientations of power. Many white individuals stand with Palestinians; this was not a condemnation of phenotype but of ideological posture. Her language, in context, constituted a moral denunciation of someone materially contributing to the starvation and genocide of Palestinians through campaigns to defund UNRWA.

To overlook this context is to miss the nature of resistance. It is also to forget the HPCSA’s own history – most notably its inability to sanction apartheid-era physicians such as Dr Wouter Basson, who continued to practise and teach for decades despite his egregious violations of medical ethics.

Mofokeng’s speech aligns with a long tradition of resistance articulated by figures such as Audre Lorde. In The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action and The Uses of Anger, Lorde insists that silence in the face of injustice constitutes self-betrayal, and that anger, when channelled constructively, is a resource for dismantling oppression. She reminds us that language is an instrument of survival and transformation, and that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. Mofokeng refuses to be confined by those tools or by a narrowly policed Overton Window that suppresses moral outrage at genocide.

Simone de Beauvoir, whom Lorde invokes, wrote: “It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting.” Mofokeng’s words emanate precisely from such knowledge. To discipline her for expressing it is to misunderstand language, to misread context and to misalign professional ethics with power rather than justice.

In effect, the HPCSA’s decision reproduces a familiar pattern in which coordinated hasbara strategies deploy institutional pressure and forms of lawfare to discipline or silence those who speak out against Israeli state violence and in defence of Palestinian human rights. One such case is playing out in the Cape High Court in Mendelsohn vs UCT. In this instance, the council was drawn – perhaps unwittingly – into a broader architecture of intimidation that targets individuals rather than addressing the substantive issues at stake. Institutional integrity now requires corrective action: the HPCSA should acknowledge its misjudgment, rescind the sanction and extend a formal apology to Mofokeng. Failure to do so will not only compromise its credibility in the public sphere but also expose it to considerable vulnerability under judicial review. DM