Caryn Dolley is an award-winning journalist and author based in South Africa.
She has covered organised crime in the country for nearly two decades, exposing how South Africa fits into the global criminal landscape, how gangsters appear to have infiltrated aspects of private security, and how politics, rogue intelligence, and state corruption is infused in these noxious arenas.
Caryn also focuses on human rights and has reported extensively on how state complicity in crime can result in, and fuel, street-level violence, including murders. She’s covered the biggest-ever firearm investigation in South Africa, in which police officers were suspected of smuggling guns to gangsters and in which the state was accused of being liable for crimes committed with those firearms. As a result of her coverage of this, Caryn was threatened with death.
Through her work, she tries dismantling stereotypical ideas about crime, especially gangsterism, in South Africa, and she hopes to expand her focus to include how certain apartheid-era atrocities have been covered up for decades.
Caryn has won numerous awards, including one for national sustainability for exposing the extent of a developing environmental crisis in South Africa – the poaching of succulents (plants).
She’s also won regional awards and been commended for various investigations, including how South Africa is entrenched in global drug dealing, an arena in which politics is a recurring theme.
Caryn has worked as a journalist at Daily Maverick, a researcher at the non-profit organisation Open Secrets, the amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism, and has been deputy news editor and an investigative reporter at News24, an online publication in South Africa. Caryn has also been a reporter at titles including the Sunday Times (South Africa), as well as the Western Cape-focused publications the Cape Times and Weekend Argus.
In October 2024 her fourth book Man Alone: Mandela’s top cop – exposing South Africa’s ceaseless sabotage, was published. (The ebook is available here and here.)
Professor Thuli Madonsela, former Public Protector of South Africa, Social
Justice Chair at Stellenbosch University, advocate and human rights activist, described the book as:
“A gripping crime, spy and political-scheming thriller offering a frightening glimpse into the egregious brutality of apartheid security forces and their dark, apparently continuing shenanigans, that included wanton murders, such as the Gugulethu 7, turning cadres into askaris, and disinformation – smear campaigns against those standing in the way or trying to expose the truth.
“Caryn Dolley’s Man Alone reads like a who’s who at the interface of politics, the underworld, and the shadow of South Africa’s ugly past. The book is principally based on the account of ANC underground operative turned intelligence officer, whose efforts to confront gangsterism and related organised crime turned him from hunter of criminals into the hunted.”
Towards the end of 2022 Caryn’s third book Clash of the Cartels: Unmasking the Global Drug Kingpins Stalking South Africa was published.
In June 2021 her book To The Wolves: How Traitor Cops Crafted South Africa’s Underworld was published by Maverick451. It debuted at number one on the South African non-fiction bestseller list and the following year Maverick 451 announced it sold the option rights for the book,
Back in June 2019, her first book The Enforcers: Inside Cape Town’s deadly nightclub battles was published by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Caryn enjoys painting in her spare time. She is proudly appalling at it.
