Africa’s brave investigative journalist, Bob Rugurika, has no place to call home and is living in fear of arrest and his life. Rugurika’s crime was to do his job by exposing human rights violence in his country. He’s one of over 100 Burundian journalists living in exile.
“As an investigative journalist, when I decide to go on, I become very attached to a story. I am very attached to my cause, to my mission, and that is informed by our radio editorial philosophy, it is to promote accountability to the members of government. We want to create a country without violence. If we are in a country with violence encouraged by authorities, then we can’t say we are in a country, we are in a (war) jungle. If we give up, this world will deteriorate,” says Rugurika, the Managing Director of African Public Radio; banned, but operating on the web.
The steadfast radio journalist, who was this year’s winner of the Press Freedom Award at the CNN Multichoice African Journalist Awards, presented this year’s Carlos Cardoso memorial lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). Cardoso was the slain Mozambican journalist who cut his teeth in social activism at the college in South Africa. Cardoso was a Wits student when the apartheid government deported him. Like Rugurika, Cardoso was also a thorn in the side of his corrupt government and was assassinated in 2000 when he was investigating a bank linked to the son of the president.
<div id="attachment_5511" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5511" class="size-medium wp-image-5511" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/000_Par8128400-300x202.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="202" />BURUNDI-POLITICS-UNREST-RADIO</div>
“I grew in a weak society – Burundi. There were too many cases of human rights violations. There was a bad conception of power in the minds of the politicians and authorities. Then, I had a dream of becoming a lawyer or a policeman to reduce all those cases of injustice. But when I graduated in university I realized that those two sectors were the most corrupt in Burundi. Then I decided to join the African Public Radio – a voice-of-the-voiceless radio – we documented human rights violations against the members of the public,” says Rugurika.
Mathatha Tsedu, an adjunct professor at Wits and veteran journalist, said Burundian officials were at the university looking for Rugurika. They wanted him arrested because he is a fugitive in his country.
In January 2015, Rugurika was held for more than a month after he interviewed a former government soldier who was in hiding. The soldier was part of the paramilitary who were allegedly instructed by the government officials to murder three Italian nuns who worked in Burundi. Rugurika’s case caught the attention of the international civil community, and thousands of Burundians demanded his release. He was released in March.
Burundi was supposed to go the polls in 2015, but the government decided to use its paramilitary to threaten civilians who protested the decision to stall elections. The Italian nuns were witnesses and ready to testify, so the national intelligence decided to kill them, said Rugurika.
“Since 2010, they tried to corrupt several journalists. I am not accusing my colleagues. Some are victims of this corruption, they fear for their lives if they refuse to take the money. It was the same case with me&#8230; They told me I have two choices, either I take the money, or face jail, or be killed. I refused the money and risked being killed. Deep in my heart I decided to publish the reports (about the death of nuns). It was my contribution to show the world that we have a criminal government. I don’t have fear to state that,” he says.
“The government didn’t release me to give me my freedom, they planned to kill me. On 29 March (2015) three armed guys were sent to kill me in my home. Fortunately, they went to look for me in a neighbor’s home.”
Rugurika went into exile in neighboring Rwanda and later Brussels.
Rugurika says before the government started persecuting journalists, there were attempts to enforce a law for journalists to reveal sources, but Burundians fought against it. This failure led to the formation of Rema FM, a government propaganda radio station. All the independent media houses were banned and are under police surveillance.
It may be unsafe for journalists like Rugurika for some time yet.

‘They Planned  To Kill Me’

It was a sombre and belated ceremony. On August 19, after years of negotiations, South Africa welcomed home the remains of Nat Nakasa nearly half a century after he died after falling from a hotel window in New York. Nakasa was reburied on September 13 in Heroes’ Acre in Chesterville, Durban. The gravesite is a few kilometers from where Nakasa grew up.
<div id="attachment_3146" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3146" class="size-medium wp-image-3146" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/453858634-300x217.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="217" />CHESTERVILLE, SOUTH AFRICA- AUGUST 19: Minister of Arts and Culture Nathi Mthethwa, SA National Editors’ Forum executive director Mathatha Tsedu and Kwa Zulu Natal MEC for health Sibongiseni Dhlomo on August 19, 2014 at King Shaka International Airport in Durban, South Africa. The men attended a small ceremony at the airport to welcome back home well known late journalist, Nat Nakasa whose remains were brought back from the USA to be reburied in Chesterville Durban. (Photo by Gallo Images / The Times / Tebogo Letsie)</div>
In October 1964, the 27-year-old Nakasa enrolled at Harvard University to study journalism. It meant he left South Africa forever as his government denied him a temporary visa. Nakasa was the second African to receive the Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. The other was his colleague Lewis Nkosi. Nakasa’s death in exile remains a mystery.
At the time, Harvard University made a statement saying Nakasa committed suicide because he was homesick and depressed as the United States (US) government refused to extend his stay. But there was speculation that Nakasa, who was believed to have been watched by intelligence services, could have been pushed from the high hotel window.
Although Nakasa had no political allegiance, the apartheid government feared that he worked for the banned revolutionary organizations of Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe.
“As I have never been active in politics except as a journalist, I expect no difficulty in obtaining a passport,” Nakasa wrote to the Nieman Foundation.
“If I shall leave this country and decide not to come back, it will be because of a desire to avoid perishing in my own bitterness – a bitterness born of being reduced to a second-class citizen,” Nakasa wrote in a column before he left South Africa.
Former journalist and academic, Professor Keorapetse Kgositsile, knew Nakasa well. Kgositsile, who was in exile with Nakasa in the US, first met him in the early 1960s when he worked for the left-wing publication The New Age and Nakasa for Drum magazine in Johannesburg.
“The general assumption is that Nat committed suicide. But I am not convinced that he did. As I have said before, I have no evidence to argue that he didn’t but also there’s no concrete evidence that he did. And knowing him, and the general African attitude towards suicide, especially our generation, it would be very strange because I don’t know of any South African who committed suicide around that time. I find the issue of suicide very problematic… It was misguiding that Nakasa wanted to return to South Africa during apartheid. He understood clearly he would not be allowed back. Those who said he wanted to return were undermining his intelligence,”
says Kgositsile.
“I respected Nat because he didn’t have any complications. He was what he was. He was humble, almost reserved, quietly spoken, honest and frank. He was almost withdrawn. When you met Nat, the man was not different from Nat the writer. He wrote what he believed and lived.”
South African musicians living in New York, Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, and photographer Peter Magubane raised money to bury Nakasa at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, near where the assassinated Malcom X had been laid to rest few months earlier. At the time of his death, Nakasa was working on Makeba’s biography.
Nearly 30 years later, Nakasa’s plight stirred journalists back home. In 1993, an article by an Afrikaans newspaper journalist, Dana Snyman, pressured Harvard University to put a modest headstone on his grave. Five years later, the South African National Editors’ Forum inaugurated the Nat Nakasa Award for brave journalists.
In 2012, Kgositsile joined a South African delegation, including Siphiwo Mahala, the Deputy Director in the Department of Arts and Culture, and Vusi Shongwe, a KwaZulu-Natal provincial representative, to negotiate the return of Nakasa’s remains from New York. It took two years and went to the Supreme Court.
It was a sad end to what could have been a hopeful story for African journalism. A reminder of this hope is a picture of a young African in the front row of a Harvard scholars’ group, dressed in a tweed jacket buttoned over a thin striped tie. The context makes it even more intriguing. In 1964, America was a staid and conservative place. It was a time when many black people lived in fear of being lynched. A year before the country elected a Catholic, John F. Kennedy, for the first time in nearly 200 years of democracy.
Nakasa, the second of three children, was born in Lusikisiki in the Pondoland region of the Eastern Cape. Poverty forced Nakasa to leave school, without qualification, in 1954. His family moved to Durban where he cut his teeth working for the Ilanga Lase Natal newspaper, in both Zulu and English.
Johannesburg beckoned; Nakasa joined The Post and later Drum magazine and freelanced for international publications. He became part of the iconic Drum team: Henry Nxumalo, Casey Motsitsi, Can Themba and Lewis Nkosi.
Nakasa also became the first black columnist on The Rand Daily Mail,
a white liberal newspaper
in Johannesburg.
As Drum magazine struggled against growing press restrictions, Nakasa met John Thompson, an American who led the Fairfield Foundation, an organization supporting international cultural endeavors, at one of the mixed-race parties that Nakasa frequented. Thompson convinced Nakasa to found the first black-owned literary journal, The Classic, in 1963. Later, Thompson encouraged Nakasa to enrol at Harvard.
In another world, Nakasa would have returned to Africa as an erudite professor to enrich and train his fellow journalists; sadly, he didn’t.

The Native Of Nowhere Is Home

Nazreen Pandor marches to the beat of her own drum. A daughter of political activists in exile during South Africa’s apartheid days, she understood quite young that injustice was something to be fought out.
Over 20 years later, she has made it a crucial part of her life and career in an innovative way and in an unsuspecting place.
“I grew up knowing that I had a bigger purpose, it wasn’t just about me but it was about how I could contribute to society so even when I became a director at Mazars it wasn’t that I got this job, so let’s build but it was about how can I use this job to give a voice to other women in corporate South Africa,” she says.
For the past five years, Pandor has been a director at the Human Rights and Social Compliance division at Mazars, a global auditing and tax advisory. She began her career as a lawyer at boutique law firm Mallinicks, now known as Webber Wentzel, and was trained by one of South Africa’s leading public lawyers. She left that experience knowing her strength in the world.
“I step into the world knowing I’ve been trained by the best, so I should be the best,” she had told a South African magazine last year.
At the firm she has spearheaded two very important projects that echo her commitment to social change even within the corporate environment. One is the Mazars’ Women’s Forum, a place for women within the firm to meet, talk and network with each other. The forum hosts breakfasts in both Johannesburg and Cape Town quarterly. She says it provides an avenue for women, like herself, to find role models and mentors in a network they are already a part of.
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“I was lucky enough from a young age to have a number of role models and mentors who were saying to me, ‘you’ve got to network, you’ve got to network, you’ve got to network’ so it was something that was always ingrained in my mind.”
The other project is the ground-breaking Youth Employment Index which wants to involve the youth and various stakeholders as they deal with a daunting economic trend.
“It’s about creating decent employment. Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, not everyone is going to get out of school and have the idea to start something big. Some people will have to fall into blue collar and white collar employment, but how do we make sure that when our young people are coming into these places, we are stimulating the economy&#8230;”
As soon as we meet her, Pandor, calm and confident, radiates an assertive elegance in a sweeping green dress.
“I have my dresses made,” she says before we could ask about a stockist.
Pandor is a practising Muslim and has incorporated her faith into all aspects of her life and personal style. She never ignores a call to prayer and even excuses herself from meetings to pray. Her outfits match the aesthetic of the cutting edge Islamic fashion and her sheila, headscarf, is colour-coded and styled in line with the look of the day.
There are difficulties with keeping up with her faith and career in a very South African corporate environment but she feels it is her challenge to face.
“I’ve always found it very difficult. It’s almost like when I am wearing a scarf I’m forced to have a different persona and because I’m a very vocal person, people look at me [and think] ‘so she does have a voice’,” she says.
The scarf is a recent addition to Pandor’s wardrobe and a crucial step in her personal quest to live out her faith. However, her commitment to it, like her hybrid corporate-social projects,
is resolute.
“On days that I don’t wear my headscarf, I feel naked. And I was a girl who never thought about it twice, I was in my power suits and it was very different&#8230;”
It was a major adjustment in her life but it is all part and parcel of Pandor’s belief in leading by example. As her career and personal life show, she is a woman’s woman, the kind of person many young women will model themselves on without hesitation. She is inspiration that will be tried and tested.

Tag: Exile

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

‘They Planned To Kill Me’

The Native Of Nowhere Is Home

The Woman’s Woman