In the same week that American right-wing political influencer Charlie Kirk was gunned down on a Utah university campus, South African insolvency lawyer Bouwer van Niekerk was assassinated at his Johannesburg office. One killing has dominated global headlines, commanding frenzied comment even here. The other seems barely to have troubled our national conscience. That imbalance should trouble us.

Kirk has been widely hailed as a free-speech martyr. Even if one strongly disagrees with his politics, it is not hard to see why: he was engaged in a public debate on a university campus when the assassin’s fatal shot rang out. If his rhetoric was incendiary, often hateful — he typically  vilified anyone outside his own white, male, Christian demographic – still the obvious must be stated: his murder cannot be justified. As democracies have long understood, free speech means little if it does not include the right to offend.

Why protect offensive speech? Not because incivility is a democratic virtue, but because today’s heresy may become tomorrow’s truth. Shielding unpopular, unsettling views is society’s concession to necessary self-doubt — our admission that we don’t have a monopoly on wisdom. Or truth. Or justice.

But in the digital age, this rationale demands some examination. In the attention economy, offensive speech is no longer a byproduct of vigorous debate; it is the product itself. Outrage draws clicks, fuels algorithms, and turns vitriol into profit. Free expression, held sacred as a safeguard for truth and accountability, is increasingly brandished as pretext for outrage’s profitability.

The global reaction to Kirk’s death shows how much America still sets the terms of the free speech debate. Its culture wars, its campus clashes, its polarised media environment — all are exported, and too often imitated. It isn’t just that when the US sneezes, the whole world catches a cold; we’re actively seeking the disfigurements of its car crashes.

And we in South Africa can find ourselves debating questions that arise less from our lived reality than from America’s fractures. To take our cues uncritically from that model is to risk aping its errors, confusing the defence of speech with the defence of spectacle.

If Kirk’s death has been cast as a parable of free speech, van Niekerk’s murder tells a different but no less urgent story. His was the quiet, meticulous work of untangling insolvent estates, tracing wrongdoing, and holding the corrupt to account. In a South Africa entangled by mafia-style networks and endemic graft, this work of accountability could hardly be more critical. And it seems to be precisely why he was killed.

As we well know, Van Niekerk joins a grim roll call. Two months ago, City of Ekurhuleni forensic auditor, Mpho Mafole was shot dead while investigating an electricity billing scandal. Forensic investigator, Zenzele Sithole was shot dead the previous year, while apparently pursuing a sensitive guns-for-hire syndicate within the police. Liquidator Cloete Murray and his son Thomas were murdered in 2023 while probing state capture-linked fraud. That same year, Hawks detective, Frans Mathipa was short dead while working a case relating to the SANDF special forces members.  Last month, we observed four years since chief financial officer at the Gauteng health department, Babita Deokaran was gunned down outside her home after flagging suspicious health department payments relating to Tembisa hospital. And there are any number of other names that might be added. Each killing delivers the same chilling message: pursue accountability, and you invite a bullet.

This is not random violence. It is systemic — an inevitable impulse of the networks that feed off corruption and that must immunise themselves to remain untouched and undisturbed. The cost is not only the lives lost, but the deterrent effect on others who might otherwise step forward. Professionals charged with unspooling corruption retreat, citizens learn that telling the truth can be fatal, and impunity hardens into the operating principle of public life.

In this sense, van Niekerk and those like him are heroes for free expression in its most essential form. They did not command crowds or dominate airwaves. They did not provoke for attention’s sake. But they gave public meaning to expression through the painstaking work of documenting facts, uncovering wrongdoing, and speaking truth to power in courtrooms and boardrooms. Their professional expression was not spectacle but substance — and it was silenced.

If South Africans want to honour the cause of free expression, we needn’t look abroad. However tragic Kirk’s death, our own heroes are close to home. To remain silent about their murders and the inaction that too often follows is itself a form of speechlessness — one that emboldens those who profit from violence and corruption.

The test for free expression in South Africa is not whether we can lament the polarisation of American politics, but whether we can defend those who, through their words and their work, insist that corruption will not have the last word here.

Nicole Fritz is the Executive Director of the Campaign for Free Expression