South African journalist, Karima Brown, died from Covid-19 complications on March 4, Thursday. Brown had reportedly been admitted to hospital last month where she was receiving treatment.&nbsp;



eNCA broke the news confirming the anchor of their show ‘The Fix’ has died.&nbsp;



“For a long time, Karima has been a robust voice in South Africa’s media landscape. Her years of activism preceded this. She had a big personality and didn’t shy away from voicing her opinions. Karima believed in hope. She was also a loving mother, a loyal friend, and a committed colleague. Her death leaves a massive void for many,” eNCA MD, Norman Munzhelele, said in a statement.&nbsp;



Brown was also the editor at FORBES WOMAN AFRICA, published by the ABN Group, from October to December 2013. She was a recognizable voice in the South African media landscape and known as a political commentator. 



Brown also hosted several television and radio shows, including programs on CNBC Africa and 702 Talk Radio.



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Veteran South African Journalist Passes Away

Facebook is hiring a small team of journalists to help curate breaking news and repair its strained relationship with news publishers, the social media giant announced Tuesday. 



The company says it will employ journalists to select breaking news and top stories that will appear in its soon-to-be-launched feature called News Tab, rather than using algorithms to determine what is shared with its vast network of users.



With the move, Facebook is part of a growing trend in the tech industry. Apple, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and Snapchat have all employed journalists to help their companies sort through the news and cozy up to news organizations.



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Apple, for example, has used some form of human curation since its subscription Apple News app launched in 2015. In June 2017, the company hired former New York magazine executive editor Lauren Kern as the app’s editor-in-chief. Twitter has also employed some form of human news curation since 2015. 



Even with a team of in-house journalists, companies like Twitter continue to struggle in the fight against misinformation. On Monday, Twitter announcedit will no longer accept advertising from state-controlled media, in large part as a response to the discovery that China ran a misinformation campaign to combat Hong Kong protesters. 



Facebook, facing similar scrutiny for the same Chinese misinformation campaign, said that employing journalists will help “surface more high quality news.”



“Our goal with the News tab is to provide a personalized, highly relevant experience for people,” Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of news partnerships said in a statement sent to Forbes. “The majority of stories people will see will appear in the tab via algorithmic selection. To start, for the Top News section of the tab we’re pulling together a small team of journalists to ensure we’re highlighting the right stories.”



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Facebook says the team will take into account user controls, pages and publisher as well as the news that users interact with or share,&nbsp;and other unnamed signals from its vast network to personalize content.&nbsp;



The company has been under pressure to mitigate its misinformation problem since it was revealed in 2016 that Russian operatives carried out a misinformation campaign in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” on the network, as it was described by special counsel Robert Mueller in his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.



The Mueller Report found that Russia spent $1.25 million per month on digital advertisements in an effort to sow discord in the U.S. and influence the presidential election. On Monday, Facebook came under fire for taking money from China to spread disinformation about Hong Kong protests.



The social media giant remains an important part of many Americans lives, much more than its rivals Twitter and Snapchat. According to Pew Research, about 69% of American adults use Facebook, and of those who use it, about 74% visit the site once a day. By comparison, only one in five U.S. adults (22%) use Twitter.



According to a survey conducted in 2018, about four in ten (43%) U.S. adults get at least some news from Facebook.



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In January 2017, Facebook hired Campbell Brown, a former television news anchor, to lead its news partnerships team. She remains a key figure in easing the tension between large national news outlets—those who have historically provided an endless trove of free content for the social media giant—and the company.



Publishing executives have slammed Facebook for siphoning advertising revenue away from traditional news publishers while also demanding that those same companies provide content for free. Following years of backlash, the social media company is now trying to work with publishers to create a more even relationship.



Facebook’s news partnership program involves deals that are potentially worth millions of dollars. The Wall Street Journal reports that several news outlets including the Washington Post, Bloomberg, Dow Jones, and the New York Times have discussed receiving as much as $3 million per year to license news content.



The News Tab, which has not been publicly viewed, is being positioned in stark contrast to the company’s Trending Topics news section, which shut down in 2016 following increasing pressure from users.



In 2016, the tech website Gizmodo published an article alleging contractors hired to curate the now-defunct Trending Topics feed were actively suppressing conservative news stories. In a letter to Congress, Facebook said, “We could not reconstruct reliable data logs from before December 2014, so were unable to examine each of the reviewer decisions from that period,” thus suggesting that it may have very well suppressed conservative news when the tool first launched.



-Michael Nuñez; Forbes

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Facebook Joins Other Tech Giants In Employing Journalists To Curate News

His face contorts slightly as he, slowly, but painfully, returns through the murky mist of 42 years. His hands tremble with emotion as he relives horrific images lodged in the corners of his mind. The birds singing in the blue sky over the idyllic garden of his family home in Roodepoort, Johannesburg, contrasting with the moody, mean, streets of Soweto of yore.
Eightythree-year-old Enoch Duma lived the slaughter of scores of schoolchildren on that fateful winter’s day in Soweto in 1976. It was his job to be there as a reporter for a Johannesburg newspaper and he had his own car. He knew serious trouble was building. Many of the schoolchildren involved used to call him “Bra E” and held him in high esteem.
“I just knew the previous night the people were uneasy as if something was going to happen, some people didn’t go to work. You had people like Tsietsi Mashinini, Seth Mazibuko and other student leaders coming to your house. I was always ahead of what was happening,” recalls Duma.
On the morning of June 16, Duma was out driving through the tense streets of Soweto and saw a big crowd approaching.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2013/12/01/rose-soweto-rose/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: How The Rose Of Soweto Rose</a>
“They ran to my car. Tsietse said ‘hey! Soweto is burning – it is bad, it is very bad, just stay ahead of things. Hide if you can hide because there is going to be trouble tonight. If the police shoot we are going to answer with petrol bombs’. This was something new in Soweto.”
The mood turned ugly when news filtered through the crowd in Orlando that police had shot dead a young student, Hector Pieterson – a bloody killing captured for eternity by the famous photograph by Sam Nzima that he smuggled out through police lines to make the front pages everywhere from New York to Sydney the next day.
“When people heard it was Hector they were very angry. They armed themselves with Molotov Cocktails and started throwing these petrol bombs recklessly. They were just mad,” says Duma.
The birds outside tweet, incongruously, as Duma’s face darkens with the deepening story.
“I can still see the madness in their faces and their anger. They didn’t know what to do,” he says.
“I saw a burning body thrown into a dustbin. I couldn’t stand it I had to drive through. There were moments when I thought I wasn’t going to make it. It was difficult to see where the students were coming from. They were coming out of buildings with Molotov Cocktails and some carried dustbin lids as shields. Among the leaders were very young people. The real fighters were the little girls – they were ready to die.”
Among them, Susan Shabangu who spent months on the run in the clampdown that followed; like many of the survivors, she escaped into exile to fight the struggle and ended up as her country’s mining and social development minister.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2016/06/01/walking-day-horror/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Walking Into A Day Of Horror</a>
It was a horrific chapter of a rich career that saw Duma, the son of a Baptist minister, born in Durban in KwaZulu-Natal, work his way from reporting the courts in his hometown to working on a national newspaper. He joined The Post in Durban through a friend, who was a reporter on the paper, called Duke Ncobo.
“The newspaper wanted a young cub reporter and suggested I should write two stories for the editor. He read them and looked at me and read them and looked at me and said ‘did you write this or did someone write this for you?’ I said ‘no’. He said ‘go to Mr Ncobo’, who said ‘I think the editor likes you’!”
His first arrest came in bizarre fashion. Ncobo invited the young Duma to a party in a block of flats in downtown Durban belonging to the leading lights of the African National Congress including Fatima Meer and journalist GR Naidoo.
An elderly woman living below called the police complaining of the noise; the police, who suspected the party was a front for a political meeting among people of color, encouraged her to press charge. They arrested 27 partygoers including Duma and threw them in the cells.
The court case turned into farce. The elderly lady, in her 70s, complained that the partygoers had banged the floor above her as they danced. In court, the judge asked the lady to demonstrate the dance. There were titters in court as ushers cleared the chairs away and the lady did a high-stepping dance. The judge ruled she hadn’t made sufficient noise to convince him, yet Duma and his colleagues were held to have been a public nuisance.
Duma secured a job on the City Post, amid the bright lights and jazz of 1950s Johannesburg and arrived at Park Station with nothing but a suitcase. A van from the newspaper picked him up to take him to the newsroom buzzing with young journalists.
“You must pretend to be one of them, otherwise they will give you a hard time,” chirped the driver.
These were colorful and chaotic times for young black journalists at the City Post. A regular caller with stories was a young and vivacious social worker called Winnie Mandela.
“Winnie Mandela, she was very young used to come to the office and was very friendly with reporters. The gangsters respected Winnie,” says Duma.
Gangsters and guns were another part of newsroom life at the City Post. Gangs ruled many of the Johannesburg streets in the 1950s – the Spoilers, the Americans and the Msomi gang.
Their leaders used to waltz in off the street with wide-brimmed hats and long fine coats looking more Chicago than sub-Saharan Africa. Often, they carried small “baby brown” pistols, sometimes concealed in a bandage, to intimidate journalists for a number of sins. 
It could be to force them to stay away from their girlfriends or stop writing about them or start writing about them. Often a gun up the nose proved mightier than the pen, until one day.
“One day, they came and they found the deputy editor having a meeting with the reporters. The gangsters introduced themselves and the deputy editor Henk Margolis, an American brought in to work on the paper, says: ‘Gentlemen, can I help you?’
“They pointed a gun at him, Henk noticed this and was not scared. ‘If you think you can intimidate me you are wrong, I was born in Chicago, so I have not time for small fry’. That day we thought there was going to be a showdown. Henk grabbed hold of the leader and pushed him outside. That was the last time the gangs came to the office,” says Duma with a smile.
It turned out that gangsters with police uniforms on proved to be Duma’s downfall. He was arrested numerous times and ended up spending nine months in prison. He went into exile in the United States (US) and with his wife of 56 years, Kitty, he was a prime mover in the divestment campaign – encouraging US firms to pull out of South Africa – that helped usher in the end of apartheid.
A system that stoked the fiery horror of June 16 that people who were there will never forget.

Enoch-Duma-306

Soweto Burning: June 16 Remembered

African literature cannot be completely told without a mention of one Can Themba. This was the kind of journalist he was. In defiance of racist laws, Themba attended white church services; he was yanked out of church, beaten and arrested for trespassing.
Canodoise ‘Can’ Themba was born in 1924 in Marabastad, a township outside Pretoria, the capital city of South Africa. Themba wrote for the South African black magazine called Drum, in Johannesburg, in the 50s, a publication that spawned a generation of talented young black journalists. Because of his man-about-town manner Themba was popular among thugs and educated alike in Sophiatown, the now defunct suburb where both black and white lived. Themba called his abode, at 111 Ray Street, the House of Truth where his friends gathered to carouse and debate. They called him the ‘shebeen intellectual’.
Essop Patel, the late South African judge and poet, wrote about Themba’s house of truth and drink in a book he edited, The World of Nat Nakasa. Nakasa, a Harvard graduate who later died in exile in America, was Themba’s colleague from Durban; Themba welcomed him to Johannesburg.
“For those with the Karamazovian lifestyle led by Can Themba and his ‘pards’ in a room called the ‘House of Truth’ in Sophiatown, Nat’s initiation must have looked like leading a lamb to the slaughter-block. The curious and interesting thing is that while Nat conducted himself as something of a dilettante from the word go, there was plainly nothing bogus about him. He cheerfully sank into the Bohemian life with Can Themba and his crew in Sophiatown and later drifted into the twilight world of ‘mixed gatherings’ and ‘mixed parties’ in Hillbrow,” writes Patel.
Siphiwo Mahala, who has never touched a drink, is a scholar of Themba’s work and African literature. He wrote a new play about Themba, along with veteran actor Sello Maake kaNcube. He of all people knows that Themba would have chuckled at the thought of a teetotaller writing play about his life half a century after his death.
Last winter, Mahala premiered the bio-play The House of Truth at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. Maake kaNcube depicts the little known story of talks Themba had with Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu while they were students at the University of Fort Hare – a cauldron of African nationalism, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. The politicians asked him to rally his journalism colleagues behind their movement, the African National Congress, but Themba made it clear he would choose alcohol over politics.
“I am a student of African literature. I remember distinctly when I first encountered Can Themba it was obviously his most popular short story – The Suit. I read it from an anthology by different South Africans called To Kill A Man’s Pride. What struck me about the book, until that moment I had not read a book that depicts a township life like I know it. In the same book I read The Music of the Violin by Njabulo Ndebele. I was probably in standard eight or thereabout, around about 1992. Ultimately, when I finished school I wanted to study literature, because when we grew up most of these writers’ work wasn’t available in our school syllabus,” says Mahala.
Mahala’s interest and devotion to the work of Themba was by chance when he was a master’s student in creative writing at the University of the Witwatersrand, in 2002.
“I presented my short story called Mpumi’s Assignment in the creative writing course. During feedback people kept on saying it reminded them of Can Themba’s The Suit. At that point, I wasn’t sure whether to take it as an offense or take credit. Somewhere it felt like they thought I have plagiarized. There’s a scene there where a woman finds an earring that is not hers in their bedroom. So, she asked her husband whose earring this is, he says it’s his and he is trying to be hip. So, she says okay put it on. And this guy happens to be a teacher and is forced to wear the earring to school. So, they took that and associated it with The Suit.”
Mahala reread The Suit to examine the similarities. In the process of reading, he thought the story needed a conclusion.
“We last heard of the adulterous man when he ran away clad only in underwear. That’s where I thought of writing The Suit Continued, which was published in 2002,” says Mahala.
The Suit Continued didn’t only become the introduction of the introverted Mahala in Johannesburg’s literary scene, he made it his academic project, uncovering Can Themba’s oeuvre. It bothered Mahala that the story of Themba was largely told from the time he worked for Drum.
“Now we have established this connection between Siphiwo Mahala and Can Themba. There are so many academic papers and reviews linking us. So, I felt obliged to know better about Can Themba, the person. I spent a lot time with ‘Bra Willie’ Kgositsile who used to regale me with stories of his own upbringing and life in Sophiatown and encounters with Can Themba,” he says.
Mahala, the author of a novel When A Man Cries (2007) and a collection of short stories African Delights (2011), said the late professor and vice chancellor at the University of Fort Hare, Mbulelo Mzamane, challenged him to immerse himself in Themba’s work.
<div id="attachment_31488" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31488" class="wp-image-31488 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172-1024x681.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="681" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172-600x399.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172-768x511.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Above: Siphiwo Mahala with actor, Sello Maake kaNcube</div>
“He had been pushing me to go back to school to study towards a PhD on Can Themba. In 2013, he said to me: ‘You already know so much about Can Themba, and chances are, your supervisors wouldn’t know as much you know about Can Themba’,” he recalls.
In 2014, Mahala enrolled for a PhD at the University of South Africa. His research sent him back to where it all started, at the University of Fort Hare, and Grahamstown, where he was born, in the Eastern Cape. From the university Mahala retrieved Themba’s correspondence with the Transvaal Department of Education. Themba, who studied English but wanted to teach, had a long and miserable run-in with the education department. He was refused promotion because he lacked a teacher’s qualification. There’s a rich archive on Themba’s life at The National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown, lying just 20 kilometers from Mahala’s home in Joza township.
“Fortunately, I didn’t struggle so much. Now I am depicting a real character as opposed to crafting a fictional character. I had to reflect on Can Themba’s life as much as possible, this including the kind of music he listened to, his behavior in general. The play goes beyond the carbon character that has been created about Sophiatown. You see Can Themba in love, you see Can Themba as a family man, you see Can Themba frustrated. The issues of his troubles with the education department were never written about. I didn’t have to be creative that much, the creativity was demanded mostly in packaging the story,” says Mahala.
The idea to have the story of Themba in film was hatched in those interactions with the poet and professor of English, Kgositsile. The film A Teacher in the Newsroom features the scholars and writers; Kgositsile, Pitika Ntuli, Don Mattera, Nadine Gordimer, Joe Thloloe, Muxe Nkondo, wife Anne and daughters Morongwa and Yvonne Themba.
Mahala thought it would be unfair to compare Themba to his privileged contemporaries like the prolific Nadine Gordimer, a friend of Themba.
“Nadine in many was ways was privileged as a white person despite identifying herself with the struggles of the black people. The major distinction here is that fact she lived until her nineties, Can Themba died at 43, she had over 30 years to write after Can Themba had died. She could establish herself even further. I think for a man of his talent, his capabilities, his potential wasn’t fully explored.”
The Suit was published in 1963 in the inaugural issue of The Classic, a literary journal founded by Nakasa and Gordimer. Three years later the politically-charged story was banned after the apartheid government declared he was a “statutory communist”.
The following year, Themba died in exile in Swaziland without a book to his name. Thanks to his friendship with Italian catholic priest, Angelo Ciccone, Themba was the first non-priest to be buried at St Joseph’s cemetery in Swaziland.
Playwrights Barney Simon and Mothobi Mutloatse adapted The Suit to theater production which Maake kaNcube performed at Johannesburg Market Theatre at the dawn of democracy. A French adaptation followed in 1999, and the play toured the world between 1999 and 2014. Former President Thabo Mbeki posthumously bestowed Can Themba with the Order of Ikhamanga, in 2006.
The 50th anniversary of Themba’s death will be celebrated with his stage work The Suit, Crepuscule, and The House of Truth, around South Africa.
“I think from 1993, during the South African transitional period, more and more people started knowing about Can Themba. During that period, many of the exile people were coming back and many of them knew Can Themba,” says Mahala.
Mahala had merely expected Maake kaNcube to lend his theater expertise.
“But the wonderful surprise was that he didn’t only like the play but wanted to perform it. So, the full-cast play had to be changed to one-man play per his advice.
“So, when I wrote this, I knew Sello is the real person that feels and knows Can Themba. I have dealt with so many academics and people who are related to Can Themba, but they don’t feel him as much as Sello does,” says Mahala.
“Can Themba, if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be the actor I am now,” says Maake kaNcube.
You can be sure the man himself is raising a glass to Mahala and sees the irony in the playwright teetotal chronicler – wherever he is.

The Literary Bon Viveur  Who Drank,  Fought  and  Wrote  Furiously

It is not often that a jovial call from an old friend in the African night brings back chilling memories of brutality that could have shamed the devil. It came from Washington; from fellow journalist Ray Choto – a man who was prepared to die, at the hands of his own people in his own land, to protect his sources. The kind of journalist everyone should want to be.
The unexpected call sent my mind racing back to January 1999 and nine days of sun and torrential rain that dripped with dark deeds.
Choto and Mark Chavunduka wrote a story for their newspaper, the Sunday Standard in Harare, claiming that there had been a coup attempt. Senior military sources told them that 23 soldiers, including seven officers, were under lock and key.
The government was enraged but, instead of refuting it, or writing a lawyer’s letter to the Standard, sent soldiers to clap Choto and Chavunduka in handcuffs and leg irons. They were kept for what Choto called “nine days of hell”.  Soldiers stripped them, blindfolded them, beat them with planks, kicked them in the kidneys and shoved their heads in drums of water.
For days we pumped out the story, day and night from Harare and pestered the authorities. What makes me sick to my stomach is that everyone in power knew where the two were, but no one had to guts to leak it. It sticks in my craw even more that if the journalists had been from the United States or Europe the story would have been at the top of world news and the battered young men would have been out before the sun went down.
Instead it was more than a week before we set eyes on Choto and Chavunduka; even then they were still in custody in the Magistrates’ Court. They were charged with an old colonial law, the Law and Order Maintenance Act, and released on bail. I can still see Chavunduka smiling as he saw me striding into the court on that sunlit day.
“Chris, what’s happening?”
“I thought you were going to tell us,” I laughed. A few minutes later the two shared another relieved smile as I waved them off in their car on their way to the Sunday Standard.
What did happen on those violent nights was no laughing matter. Back in his newsroom, Choto told, gesturing with his painful and swollen hands, how his torturers pushed live electric wires into his testicles. He was in so much pain he snapped the chain of his handcuffs.
The torturers were worried, at the end of their work, as the blood poured down the faces of the two young journalists; they feared Aids, Choto said. It had been raining heavily outside, so the torturers kicked their two young countrymen, naked, down a grassy bank to wipe off the blood.
To cap it all, the Supreme Court threw out the case against the two on constitutional grounds. A letter to the editor would have saved everyone pain, shame, money and trouble. The journalists believed their ordeal was a warning to the independent press.
Choto flew to London for psychological and physical repair. He took a fellowship at Stanford University, California, before joining the Voice of America in Washington. In 2002, he went home to visit his family where a military source told him to get out fast; his family agreed. He hasn’t set foot in Zimbabwe for more than 15 years and missed his mother’s funeral in May 2010; a thorn in his heart, he says.
Chavunduka died young in 2002; friends agree his ordeal hastened his demise.
When I spoke to Choto on that night call, we chuckled through our reminiscing. We talked of  hardship and lost friends, in the robust way journalists do, that’s how we live with the pain.
For me, I will always think of the smiling Choto and Chavunduka, bathed in that summer light, as they drove from court with broken bodies and many nightmares to come. How many journalists pay this high price for principle? I wonder why Africa breaks its youngest and brightest on the wheel.

Torture That Could Have Shamed The Devil

Friendships are sometimes forged in the most unlikely of circumstances. Against the backdrop of legalized racism, apartheid South Africa was one such circumstance. During its darkest years one could be forgiven when reading a “white” newspaper for thinking black people did not exist. And yet it was in this environment that Nelson Mandela and a young, promising, white journalist forged a friendship that would last a lifetime.
Benjamin Pogrund, 82, sits in his Jerusalem apartment, smiling. The veteran journalist and a pioneer of black reporting at the then all-white daily newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail, joined the press as a missionary which, he’s quick to admit, is a very bad thing for a journalist.
At the time, black South Africans were not featured in the mainstream press. There were some stories about court cases, riots or mine accidents where black people were mentioned but it was “crazy” how they were ignored, remembers Pogrund. He took it upon himself to change things.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4922" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_2316-225x300.jpg" alt="" width="225" height="300" />
“Benjy Boy”, as Mandela called him, describes his success as being in the right place at the right time. He says the Rand Daily Mail was an awful paper when he joined, with a new editor, Laurence Gandar, who luckily had the same political views as Pogrund.
“He liked what I wanted to do, because I started covering black politics, which hadn’t been done before,” says Pogrund and a friendship between the junior reporter and senior editor soon flourished.
But covering black South African life meant being ostracized at work and in the Jewish community to which Pogrund belonged.
“I was dealing with an all-white paper,” he explains. “So I was like a cat being dragged in from the night, they hated me.”
At the time the Jewish community was split, between businessmen who surrendered to apartheid so their businesses would succeed, and liberals.
Soon Pogrund began covering everything from housing, education and jobs, to pass laws. And through the years he became a confidant for the leaders of black resistance, among them Mandela.
The two had countless secret meetings. While most of the police force would be out hunting for Mandela, he’d show up on a dark street corner disguised with worker’s overalls to meet Pogrund.
“His followers probably wanted to cut my throat, they probably thought I’d trapped him and I’d hand him over&#8230; but we got away with it,” he chuckles.
For Pogrund, it was Mandela’s generosity of spirit that always stood out. He sums it up with one specific story – Mandela called for a major strike against the government. The day came and the government issued a statement saying it had failed. The Rand Daily Mail ran with the headline “Strike Has Failed, Says Government,” without consulting Pogrund. The strike itself didn’t go as planned but it wasn’t the failure the government claimed it was. Hundreds of thousands of workers did stay home, but when they read the newspaper, a paper which they respected, they were scared of being dismissed, and went to work.
Pogrund remembers sitting in his office, feeling miserable, when his phone rang.
“And there’s Mandela’s warm, cheery voice, and I started stuttering an excuse, ‘Nelson, I’m sorry we screwed up’&#8230; He said to me, ‘It’s okay Benjy boy, I know it wasn’t your fault.’ I loved that man ever since.”
Pogrund and Mandela’s relationship extended beyond the clandestine meetings. While still in prison, Mandela insisted that Benjy Boy bring his second wife, Anne, for a visit. He even sent a card to their son Gideon for his bar mitzvah – a coming-of-age ceremony in Jewish tradition.
As for the Mandelas, Pogrund jokes that he was their Jewish uncle, telling how he helped Mandela’s daughter, Makaziwe, get into an American university.
“Over the years, now and again I’d go and visit her regularly, and she’d say to me, ‘please get my father off my back, he’s driving me crazy. He wants me to go to Harvard, I don’t want to go Harvard, I’m happy here at UMass Amherst!’’
Pogrund eventually found sanctuary in Britain where he worked on Fleet Street. From there he went to America and onwards to Israel to help build the Yakar Center for Social Concern. He’s been here almost two decades.
But ties with South Africa run deep and although he believes a lot has been accomplished, he is sad and angry by what hasn’t been.
“The country now has clean water and more access to healthcare, jobs, everything like that. Everything is better… but on the other hand, the failure is colossal.”
The reasons include government corruption, the heritage of apartheid and the currency. But most importantly &#8211; education.
“The majority of schools are described as dysfunctional, lacking ordinary toilets, electricity, blackboards, desks, books.”
Pogrund looks at how countries like Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan used education to come out of poverty, but says South Africa just isn’t getting there.
“There are a lot of people doing well. But the bottom people have it bad, and this carries over into people going to universities who shouldn’t be there&#8230; they haven’t achieved enough.”
And his beloved profession has become a disappointment.
“Under apartheid, we had some very committed, very good journalists. People didn’t sit around discussing press freedom, they just did it. They had a commitment, they got on with it. But whereas we were unable to exercise our full rights, now the opposite is true – and there isn’t the competence to do it.”
For a man of many words, there’s one thing he can’t get himself to talk about: Mandela’s last days. The laughter stops and sadness takes over; at times it’s even difficult to hear him.
“He had a miserable last couple of years. Miserable. It’s too personal.”
In the just over two years since Mandela passed away, Pogrund is more convinced than ever that the world desperately needs another Mandela.
“Israel is in a need of another Nelson Mandela, England is in need, every damn country is in need of a Nelson Mandela.”
Sadly, he is gone.

The White Knight Who Wrote Black

It’s a dark and strange way to earn a living – in which you can die. If you survive, it is often prostrate on a pile of pills or swimming in an ocean of alcohol.
It is a painful story for one of Africa’s most accomplished journalists, Angus Shaw, to tell. It is also painful to listen to his excruciating experiences.
“A warzone produces two types of journalistic victims – one is shot at and injured or dies and the other type ends up screwed up in their brains,” says Shaw.
“I realized that you can’t drown your sorrows because your sorrows in most cases have learned how to swim. I try not to worry about things I cannot change and always remember that as a journalist my role is to shed light and not to bring change.”
Shaw had his own fight with alcohol. In covering wars in three decades, he says it was not all gloomy.
<div id="attachment_4869" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4869" class="wp-image-4869 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/006-300x175.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="175" />United Nations media accreditation card, Somalia. Sgt. Rocko who typed it out clearly wasn’t familiar with the first name Angus</div>
“People should know that the African story is not all about wars, poverty and savagery. Journalism for me has been enriching, rewarding, except financially,” he chuckles.
Shaw has been on the frontline in a string of Africa’s nastiest wars: Liberia, Rwanda’s genocide, Ethiopia, Somalia, two wars in Mozambique. In Zimbabwe, the country of his birth, he saw war as both a journalist and a conscript.
The story of the Shaw family is intertwined with a century of tumult in Africa. His grandfather came north from South Africa with the pioneer column in 1890. Settlers were looking for gold and diamonds but ended up farming. Shaw’s grandfather and father prospered in tobacco and lived the life of Riley.
“My father was part of the Salisbury Club and, like many of his peers, he drank hard and worked hard. Due to his drinking lifestyle one day he forgot to come and pick me up from school and only showed up late and drunk.”
Shaw senior also smashed his car into the Salisbury Club, a gentlemen’s club in Harare, after a few drinks with one wheel of his car landing in the hotel lobby. The authorities took his driver’s licence. So, he had to be driven later by his chauffer over 1,500 miles from his Miegunyah farm, 30 kilometers from Harare to Durban, for the Durban July horse race.
Along the way, Shaw’s father put money away for his son to choose between business or school. Shaw chose the latter and went to a minor public school in England.
“After a short stint in the United Kingdom, I returned to Southern Rhodesia, where I would start my journalism career at the Rhodesian Herald in 1970. Those days there were no journalism schools so one had to go for attachment,” he says.
Shaw was soon thrust into reporting the violent bush war leading up to Mozambican independence in 1975. When Samora Machel took over Mozambique, a civil war broke out that would last nearly three decades.
“In Mozambique we were traveling in the company of the Zimbabwean forces and UN peacekeepers. The Zimbabwean forces were mainly protecting their pipeline, while Samora Machel was fighting to keep control from the Renamo rebels.”
After Mozambique, the Rhodesian army drafted him to fight the guerrillas back home.
After he served his time in the rank, he left to interview nationalist exiles in Lusaka and Dar es Salaam. It was not easy.
“Every able bodied white man going through an airport needed to have a clearance,” he says.
“All of the nationalist leaders whose names are inscribed on roads in the capital, Harare, related to me on first name basis.”
They included Robert Mugabe, Josiah Tongogara and Simon Mazorodze.
“I first met Robert Mugabe when I had gone to the townships. I asked if I could interview him and he said he could only talk to me if I arranged a press conference for him in the city center, which I did.”
His experiences in his country’s war would lead to his first book- Kandaya, Another Time, Another Place.
When he moved on it was to the hell of Idi Amin’s Uganda.
“Kampala was on fire, the city was in ruins as there were bodies all over. What I saw made World War Two look elementary,” he says.
The 1978-79 Ugandan war pitted the Tanzanian liberation forces against Amin’s army.
“There were mass graves and as we accompanied the liberation forces to Luzira prison where opponents of Amin were caged, one could not fight back emotions. Prisoners were starved and in one of those prison cells, I threw up. It’s all about wealth, power and corruption,” says Shaw, whom many journalist friends believe is too ideological.
His memories of the Ugandan war would lead to his second book, written in a hotel room in London, Last To Kill, The Rise And Fall Of Idi Amin.
“I wrote the last chapter of this book in the plane to London. A limousine waited for me at Heathrow Airport and with Concorde the book was on its way the following day to New York. Four days later, the book was on sale.”
There was no stopping after Uganda.
<div id="attachment_4868" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4868" class="wp-image-4868 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/0005-300x191.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="191" />Media evacuation from Rwanda aboard a U.N. C130 cargo plane</div>
“In 1979, I also went to cover the Somalia-Ethiopia war. This was a conventional desert war and because of a 16-hour drive on a tractor when one was injured, many died before they could reach medical services. The hum of trucks, tractors and aircrafts drowned the heat of the desert. Journalists were isolated as fighting forces didn’t want anyone outside to know what was happening,” he says.
Shaw returned to Somalia after a clan war broke out. This war almost took his life.
“This was during the famine relief efforts that turned nasty. There were Americans, Germans, Canadians and UN representatives. Americans took a lot of causalities and it’s the same war that Mujahedeen shot down an American Black Hawk,” he says.
Hollywood made a movie out of this, called Black Hawk Down. The reality was worse.
“Americans were sending bodies back home in body bags. One African American said to me ‘we came to help our brothers but they are shooting us’.”
Shaw says war reporting can be seductive as well as disruptive.
“I remember being in Nairobi and felt it strange not to hear any gunshots.”
“I was lucky not to be killed; it was dangerous that we had to always move with bodyguards. Out of seven foreign correspondents that were covering the clan war in Somalia, four died in the country.”
Then came Rwanda in 1994.
“I spent several months there, I saw nice people killing nice people. I cannot describe the experience,” he says.
Nearly a million people are believed to have died in this ethnic war in 100 days.
“The United Nations had burned their fingers in Somalia and when they sent peacekeepers in Rwanda, they didn’t send enough. We went to various massacre sights, in some places we saw people running through the bushes with machetes. In Rwanda we saw piles and piles of bodies.”
What Shaw saw in Rwanda would never leave him.
“I have never been a church person, when you see such horror; you look to the skies and ask God what’s going on. That is where I saw that human nature is imperfect,” he says.
After traveling and covering wars it was time to write about events in his country.
“Between 1988 and 1998 we experienced a lot of multicultural and multiracial relations. The country was prospering but as Mugabe started losing power, all that changed,” says Shaw.
Shaw survived war, but in peacetime Zimbabwe, he was arrested three times. Mugabe saw journalists as agents of the West and supporters of his rival, Morgan Tsvangirai. From his journalism experiences sprang a third book, Mutoko Madness, A Memoir Of Angus Shaw.
“Seven years ago, I went into rehabilitation after a friend convinced me to. I was taught to count my blessings.”
He also believes the changing nature of news gathering led to him being rendered redundant.
“The media has changed so much; I am an old newspaper guy. News agencies are having a hard time. You can’t write a story with 700 words. I like ink on my fingers.”
Shaw has proved this in the dangerous business of shedding light in Africa.

Shedding Light  On Renewable Energy

‘You Can’t Drown Your Sorrows; They Have Learned How To Swim’

It was the dangerous days leading up to South Africa’s first democratic elections on April 27, 1994. Jodi Bieber, a newspaper rookie photographer, was sent on assignment to cut her teeth in a violent Ulundi, in KwaZulu-Natal, a warzone for the African National Congress and Inkatha Freedom Party.
“I definitely knew I was not the war photographer because we witnessed quite a few violent situations in Ulundi. At one time we slept on the floor of our hotel, we thought we might be assassinated,” says Bieber, then freelance photographer at The Star, in Johannesburg.
In KwaZulu-Natal, Bieber suffered rough times documenting the tragic tale of the dead and wounded on the painful path to democracy.
“When I was not freelancing for the newspaper, I created bodies of work about different subjects; one of my first projects was the crime prevention unit in Hillbrow. I spent six months with police who worked undercover,” she says.
Right from the early days, Bieber and her camera tempted fate. She survived to win the prestigious World Press Photo of the year in 2010, for the photograph of a violated young woman in a refugee camp in Kabul, Afghanistan.
The picture spoke a thousand horrifying words. It captured the 18-year-old Bibi Aisha who was dragged by her angry in-laws to a mountain where her Taliban soldier husband cut off her nose and ears. She was left for dead as punishment for running from her marriage to escape years of abuse. Aisha survived and ended up in the refugee camp where Bieber found her in 2010.
“It took the photograph in a very plain room. When I created the picture I asked Bibi through an interpreter to close her eyes and think about her inner beauty and her inner power and look at me. She did that and I took the photo. That’s the photograph they used. But I was very worried because I took her very empowered photograph. I thought I had failed because TIME would want something more vulnerable. TIME said it was the most iconic photograph they had seen. And it went on to win the award. For one year I traveled to about 20 countries and I gave talks to universities. I was in front of the cameras for the first time,” says Bieber.
Bieber’s photograph changed Aisha’s life. In August 2010, TIME magazine ran it on the cover. A family in the United States read the story and adopted Aisha and the Grossman Burn Foundation is paying for a reconstructive surgery on her nose.
“When I choose projects, it’s because I identify with the subject. Because I identify, I relate to it, that’s really why I want to do it. Hopefully through what I do I am also learning something from it. Yes, the aesthetic for me is as important as the content, definitely. I like to touch on the subjects that have some relevance to me,” says Bieber.
When FORBES AFRICA met Bieber in late November, she was going on a two-week assignment to Papua New Guinea to photograph women and children scarred by violence. Doctors Without Borders commissioned this project. A week earlier, South African National Gallery had closed an exhibition of her work called Between Darkness and Light; what she calls a mid-career retrospective. It ran for three months.
Bieber says she creates relationships within the communities, because there’s always an element of danger.
“For me, people are people even if they are criminals, if they know you they won’t touch you, they won’t try to hurt you. I went to Iraq but I never felt fearful but you always know that something might happen. But when I was attacked, I was photographing outside a restaurant in Cape Town. So you never know when you could be attacked. Life is not as predictable. That’s why my book is called Between Dogs and Wolves, a title from French phrase entre les chiens et loups,” says Bieber.
Work is a world away from where Bieber was born in 1966, in Hillbrow, central Johannesburg. She grew up in segregated South Africa and went to all-white schools. The system fostered rebellion in her soul.
“I don’t think art was embraced when I was growing up but I used to question things. I had a history teacher I am friends with now. He opened our eyes to what was happening in South Africa at the time. Remember in 1976 was when we first got television. It was a completely different time, but I remember seeing those yellow nyalas [a military vehicle], I knew something was not right in our society. So, I was very rebellious at high school. I had an opinion and I had a voice, I was not just following the crowd,” she says.
In 1993, aged 23, Bieber took a part-time course at Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg – the training ground for many successful African photographers – while she worked as a media planner for an advertising agency in Sandton, north of Johannesburg. After the course, Bieber left her job for a three-month trainee post at The Star. In 1996, she was one of 12 young world photographers selected for a week’s training in a World Press Masterclass in Rotterdam, Holland. This led to myriad awards at home and internationally.
Bieber’s expeditions are recorded in books: Real Beauty; which challenges stereotypes of beauty in South Africa, Soweto; about ordinary life in South Africa’s biggest township and Between Dogs And Wolves: Growing Up With South Africa, which documents the country for over a decade.
“All my work deals with issues relating to broader society and lots of it challenges the stereotypes that exist in the media,” says Bieber.
For two decades, Bieber’s work changed lives around the world and she vows to document the injustices. Her camera and her soul agree.

Jodi-main

The Restless Rebellious Soul Behind The Lens

There is not much to do in the quiet village of Simon’s Town, Cape Town, best known as where South Africa’s naval fleet lies. It is the sort of home where you go fishing, walking on the beach, or else watching the penguins waddle onshore. It’s the sort of place where a news headline is a handful of break-ins over Christmas.
That’s just the way journalist Claire Robertson, 2014 Sunday Times Fiction Prize and a South African Literary Award author of The Spiral House and The Magistrate of Gower, likes it.
“It feels like you are hiding away from life here, but then you write a book and you get dragged back into life,” she says.
“It shocked me rigid with all the attention&#8230; I thought I am not selling my writing to anyone anymore. I am writing for myself. I started doing that in my journalism, instead of writing the news story.
“A news story is Nelson Mandela made his long-awaited return to Robben Island yesterday, this time surrounded by a company of international news media. The real story is we trailed him around the island, and when we got to the quarry that had damaged his eyesight, where he worked for so many years breaking stones and the reporters yelled out ‘dance for us’. You saw him sigh and sink slightly and then he started his shuffle into this expected shosholoza dance. That is actually what happened. When you get old enough you start writing it.”
<div id="attachment_31636" style="width: 693px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31636" class="wp-image-31636 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5522-683x1024.jpg" alt="" width="683" height="1024" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5522.jpg 683w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5522-300x450.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5522-600x900.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5522-200x300.jpg 200w" sizes="(max-width: 683px) 100vw, 683px" />Claire and her chair</div>
Meeting Robertson at her home, on the slopes of Jackson Road, is a real treat. We sit under the shade of a grape vine with sunbirds flitting through the leaves to the sounds of dustbin men at work.
For the 54-year-old, standing at the edge of the gentle lapping shoreline of Waters Edge Beach, a few hundred meters downhill from here, was the defining moment that led her to abandon the stressful urban streets of Melville, Johannesburg, five years ago.
“[Melville] was getting tough to go walk around at any time of the day or night, which is what I like to do. It was getting less and less safe. You know that feeling when your freedom is being curtailed in South Africa. Certainly everyone has a bloody minded moment and you can’t bear being hemmed in. I thought I wanted to find a place that I can walk at any time of the day, and it was here.”
The quiet life here is a world away from the height of Robertson’s career as a hard news political journalist in the 1980s.
“To be a reporter during the height of the dying days of apartheid in South Africa was the greatest privilege in my personal profession. There was nothing like it. Every story mattered,” she says.
Some stories where harder to write than others, one of them being the reclassification of races which under The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Act, had denied families living together.
“Already as a young person you are trembling at the injustices of the world. Meanwhile you are working in a society where this is just being thrown at you all the time. Following that through to watching a country talk about how it is going to shape itself,” she says.
“Then you are reporting something like the Dutch Reformed Church not allowing black people to join in a service. They would open the [priest’s] garage for the services and shove the old tyres aside as a Christian duty.”
Other stories send a chill down Robertson’s spine on this hot Simon’s Town morning.
“I remember meeting with the commandant in the Pretoria Central prison and hearing this unearthly singing. And he said ‘oh, that it was condemned men singing on the night before they are due to be hanged’. I remember shaking.”
Robertson lived the reshaping of South Africa; she cradled her firstborn daughter the day Nelson Mandela walked out of prison; she also covered the negotiations at Kempton Park which led to South Africa’s Constitution.
These days, it’s the calm of Simon’s Town. Robertson, the novelist, has just come back from a walk on the beach with her Scottish terrier, Henry, and a family breakfast. Her mind is more focused on her third book. The Magistrate of Gower (2015) – a prisoner of war in the South African War, disgraced in an illicit affair, who is now forced to confront his past as a magistrate 30 years later – is sold out and is now in its second edition.
“It’s about the rise of nationalism and what is the response when you see it rearing its head again. It’s very seductive. It takes the good that people have, in this instance the noble suffering during the Boer War and heroes of the Great Trek, it takes part of that and twists it into something else, which is what happened in Afrikaner Nationalism.”
It is rare to find an award-winning author who doesn’t punt their novel with pride. But Robertson’s pride is a small wooden chair in her lounge, finished by her own hand.
“It’’s quite comfortable actually and it’s made from some very cheap wood. I wanted to test out the design before I made one from oak. I am quite happy to say that no one has broken it yet either.”
She points to a wall of saws and power tools, glinting in the skylight, where the chair, two book shelves and a wardrobe were crafted by her from lumps of wood; a hobby she picked up at her parents’ knee.
Included in this home of self-made furniture is a portable writing board; filled with scribbles and doodles, one reading ‘push towards the problem’, and a sticker of a porcupine.
“It’s something prickly, that’s low slung who is just determinately going about on his way.”
Only a journalist would feel the need to say they write their stories longhand, like it’s a bad habit picked up after years of writing shorthand.
“I get lovely notebooks and sit down and write it in longhand. If you start by typing it out you are going to keep correcting yourself, you lose all your momentum and you have no record of your ideas. Things have to be aesthetically pleasing.”
“What I do is start with an idea. With The Spiral House, what was it like on a South Africa slave plantation when these two ideas of science and enlightenment are clashing. It was told through a French naturalist in my head, but what it became was a young female freed slave, whose voice spoke out.”
Robertson has always gone for the road less traveled. She was one of the first South Africans to go to Soviet Russia on a South African passport in 1988. The trip came after one of Robertson’s stories published in The Washington Post. She asked American teenagers what they thought Russia looked like, and Russian teens, in Moscow, what they thought America looked like. The newspaper liked the story so much they nominated it for a Pulitzer.
“You could see the world was changing. You could see that the ANC was starting to talk to people in South Africa. We thought lets just try it.”
“One thing that stuck, was in Leningrad, on one of the big roads, there was a department store. There in this glass case, enfolded in red satin, was a single disposible razor. It loooked like it had been carved out of a lump of Bakelite.
<div id="attachment_31637" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31637" class="wp-image-31637 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5547-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="683" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5547.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5547-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5547-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5547-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />&#8221;it shocked me rigid with all the attention&#8230; I thought I am not selling my writing to anyone anymore. I am writing for myself&#8221;</div>
“They could build space rockets, and amazing awful armaments, but they could not bring a milk Glut and the cereal Glut to the market at the same time. Everything was just screwed up. It was that kind of economy. People wanted consumerist stuff so badly they would spend a fortune on American jeans and sneakers.”
Her journey through the Siberian tundra also foreshadowed where she would end up.
“I found recently an old diary from the late 80s. I said what do I want to do? I want to live by the sea, sub-edit and then write. I had completely forgotten about that. Having got down, unpacked my books to discover I wrote this blissful thing. Clearly I was working this through my system.”
Working on her first novel, through the night at her brother’s home overlooking the sea in Kalk Bay was also an existential moment.
“I remember the book going so well and being so wrapped up in the book. It was suddenly four in the morning. I was working furiously away at my laptop and I heard this guguguggugug, it was the fishing boats heading out before dawn. When you have made a big change in life, and things are uncertain, and you don’t know how things go, it feels like you are getting some form of confirmation. If you are working and the fishermen are working.”
It has been a long journey to a favorite chair in Simon’s Town, from the raging streets of Africa, to walking with Mandela, to a razor in Leningrad.

IMG_5560

Claire And Her Chair

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is the gold standard for every financial journalist. A long-haul flight from Johannesburg to Zurich and a short trainride later, we arrived in Davos, Switzerland, to the world’s biggest summit, ready to wire the views of influential business leaders to the world.
The big players of the global economy – from the deal-makers to the political powerhouses and movers and shakers – arrived in their smart suits to the summit’s alpine reaches, to discuss this year’s theme, A New Global Context. Here are some of the key takeaways from the Davos debates:
The European Central Bank’s bold announcement to pump in €60 billion in bonds every month to reignite growth took center stage. The world was officially in a new phase of global monetary policy divergence. The withdrawal of stimulus in the United States as the economy staggered back to its feet and this new development in Europe created interesting times for emerging markets.
In all our conversations with African leaders, what emerged was that despite the Ebola outbreak and terror attacks in some parts of the continent, Africa should still be every investor’s high-growth high-return destination. In fact, with the exception of the President of Guinea, African leaders dismissed both crises as inconsequential to Africa’s growth narrative. Displaying genius, the President of Guinea used his interview to bring the world in on the request he had made to Christine Lagarde, President of the International Monetary Fund: “Clear our debt so that we may have a fighting chance against Ebola.”
The small delegation from Nigeria, the continent’s biggest economy, did not go unnoticed. With an upcoming presidential election (mid-February), and in the midst of a tense domestic environment, this was somewhat understandable. What the forum lacked in Nigeria’s presence, South Africa more than made up for with a seven-member strong ministerial delegation. They were easily spotted in their long black coats and colorful flag-scarves. From the Finance Minister to the Governor of the Reserve Bank, the delegation put on a brave front tackling the energy crisis and lackluster take-off of the National Development Plan. The country’s public relations machine was spot on and it was evident members had clearly been put through their paces.
I couldn’t help but acknowledge that some of the delegates in attendance at Davos challenged my conventional definition of ‘world leaders’.
Also present were titans from the music world – from the legendary Andrea Bocelli to African songstress Angelique Kidjo and world-renowned hip hop producer Pharrel Williams. It was clear they were being recognized for their pulling power at such a forum.
Kidjo is credited with putting the African country of Benin on the map.
“If we want Africa to be top of mind for the world leaders here, Africans need to make Africa their priority,” she told me. Her passion for Africa’s development agenda pushed me to stretch my own perception of what leadership really is.
The small representation of women was difficult to ignore. One of this year’s co-chairs was Winfred Binyama, Executive Director, Oxfam. In an unapologetic, straight-talking style, she spoke about the world’s continued exclusion of women in positions of influence and power.
Binyama shared some of the highlights of Oxfam’s latest report saying it would take 80 years for women to balance the scales professionally with their male counterparts without the intervention of platforms like WEF.
I hope to return to Davos many more times. One can surely track at least this one indicator over a few years, but I certainly hope it’s not 80 years before we see that happening.

EBOLA. TERRORISM. SO WHAT? COME TO AFRICA

Reporting on the African continent is an “extreme act of courage”, writes journalist Shyaka Kanuma in a Nieman report. The Rwandan was in exile, addressing other Nieman fellow journalists at Harvard University.
The fellowship, one of the most sought after in the world, has seen its fair share of African journalists fleeing trouble back home. Gregory Stemn was one. The Liberian photojournalist chronicled the horrors of his country’s civil war against Charles Taylor’s wishes. South African Nat Nakasa was the first black African Nieman fellow in September 1964. He chose exile to join the fellowship but committed suicide ten months later, jumping off a Manhattan apartment building, manically depressed at the thought of never returning to the country he was forced to abandon.
To be a journalist on African soil is to consign oneself to an uneasy life; be it in war zones or in fearful newsrooms. Greg Marinovich, a Pulitzer Prize-winning South African photojournalist, writing on the tribulations faced by African war photographers noted, “across&#8230; the continent, ruthless regimes bring the violence and fear to bear to suppress the truth.”
This handful of Africans, merely plying their trade on the side of reason, is often forgotten. These are their stories.
January 9, 1994: Katlehong, a township just outside Johannesburg. Gunfire crackles as dignitaries make it beyond the rusted metal shacks of what they called no-man’s land.
Jessica Pitchford was covering the township beat for public broadcaster SABC on that day. Looking into the camera she began, “at the moment, it’s quite safe here&#8230;”
The rattle of bullets broke off the sentence. Pitchford threw herself to the ground.
Ahmed Sharif, a freelance photographer, is shot next to her; dying from his injuries hours later. On the other side, her colleague Charles Moikanyang is shot in the back. She helps him from the line of fire. He survives.
“We were just part of a group of people who happened to be invading an official war zone,” says Pitchford to a magazine a few months after Katlehong.
She wasn’t happy with her story.
“I hate the way I handled this one&#8230; I should have put it in context. I didn’t even mention that a woman and child had also been caught in the crossfire&#8230; all I was worried about was getting Charles to hospital. It was a journalist’s story. A little too self-indulgent, I thought.”
Violence was playing out across the country. In the early 1990s, South Africa was at a crossroads. Political reforms made way for democratic elections to end apartheid. Nelson Mandela was President-in-waiting.
The country’s media was negotiating a new kind of editorial freedom. Journalists were dodging bullets to tell the story of political violence. It is believed that close to 14,000 South Africans were killed during the bloody transition to democracy. Katlehong was ground zero.
Monica Zwolsman was a reporter at Johannesburg newspaper, The Star; the same publication her late husband, award-winning photographer Ken Oosterbroek, worked for.
“Looking back, I am just horrified at what went on and how people lived through that&#8230; I don’t think anyone knew, and we still don’t really know, who was attacking who.”
Zwolsman was part of an innocent and confused generation of journalists.
“I don’t think we, as journalists, had the skills [to cover these events]&#8230; It was difficult trying to get a handle on what was happening. It was never a constant, it started off with pangas (machetes) and steels bars and it evolved to AK-47s.”
Oosterbroek was a leading light in the now-famous Bang Bang Club, a band of daring photojournalists working in what they called no-man’s land – between battle lines drawn in the townships. A week before the elections of 1994, a bullet stopped him forever in Thokoza, east of Johannesburg.
“Everyone knew he was dead except me&#8230; when I got there people had just ran away and I ran into the hospital and I just saw his feet sticking out… that’s when I realized [that he was dead].”
In the book that chronicled their lives out in the field, friend and fellow Bang Bang Club member Greg Marinovich, who was also injured in the carnage says, “after four long years of observing violence, the bullets had finally caught up with us.”
A willingness to pursue a story at considerable personal risk was typical among reporters. They organized in packs; groups of foreign and local journalists moved together, finding safety in numbers.
“The local journalists knew where to go and where not to go. They could read the situation, you had to get to know that and you had to look out for each other. Even today, people are so closely bonded – that group of journalists – because we worked together and we genuinely lived through some crazy times,” recalls Zwolsman.
Back in the safety of the newsrooms, editors could merely keep tabs on their reporters, says Peter Fabricius, who was an assignment editor at the Independent. He sent a number of South African journalists to conflicts at home and further afield in the Congo; it was a difficult job.
“It was pretty nerve-racking having to send people into danger not knowing what you were exposing them to.”
These were the days before cell phones. Cumbersome satellite phones were the only way. But only a few, well-funded, newsrooms could afford them.
Oppression and imprisonment are other occupational hazards. There must be few jobs in the world where you can consider yourself fortunate to end up in jail.
Seyoum Tsehaye is one of those journalists behind bars. He began his journalism career as a guerrilla with the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), the armed movement that ended Ethiopian occupation in 1993.
Some guerrillas were armed with cameras and voice recorders along with Kalashnikovs. They were not objective war-reporters but they captured rare footage of battle and interviewed commanders. These fighters provided the only records of this conflict in Africa’s mysterious hermit kingdom.
After the war, many Eritrean warrior-journalists abandoned their AK-47s to staff the country’s burgeoning state-controlled media. Tsehaye was appointed the country’s first head of state television.
In the late 1990s, with fresh conflict with Ethiopia looming, Tsehaye stopped toeing the party line. He joined an “audacious” independent paper and returned to photography. He began speaking out against the renewed fighting and campaigned for democracy. He was shadowed by secret police until his arrest and detention in 2001.
Recent news of him, provided by “sympathetic prison guards”, claims his health is “deteriorating” as he is shifted from one desert prison to the other.
Still behind bars, Tsehaye won the Reporter’s Without Borders ‘Journalist of the Year Award’ in 2007.
Brian Hungwe, an award-winning journalist from Zimbabwe, is well aware of the risks of political reporting. In 2000, he broke the story of families who lost their sons in the escalating war in the Congo.
Two years earlier, Mugabe mobilized Zimbabwean troops, against the wishes of his electorate, and sent them to the DRC at the start of the Second Congo War. The casualties were considerable.
“It started with one family, their son was a pilot but they only received a knee-cap for burial. They were living in fear that they buried the wrong person,” remembers Hungwe.
Slowly, but surely, more families came forward and Hungwe began an investigation into their claims. It culminated in the “DRC War Casualties Shock” report that won him the CNN Multichoice Journalist of the Year Award.
He was meticulous, even pushing for an official government response, confident that it would shield him from persecution.
“The story was true. If you can defend the truth then you are fortified. I was lucky because the truth was on my side. Getting the government to comment was difficult. They never responded although we faxed them and phoned them as well.”
Once the story was published and Hungwe accepted his award, a senior government representative belatedly denied the story.
Hungwe’s story shows there can be triumphs, as well as danger, in African journalism.
Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan journalist who has been in and out of prison on sedition charges, continues to push the envelope. In 2007, he founded The Independent, a Kampala news magazine. Mwenda won the International Press Freedom Award from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists in 2008. He owns, edits and publishes the magazine.
“You buy the truth, we pay the price,” is the magazine’s motto. Journalists from Kampala to Katlehong will nod with a knowing smile.

The Perils Of  The Written Word

I like to talk to the common people, I don’t like politics.”
Mae Azango sits on the edge of her bed in her old home that is wedged in a rocky enclave between the gray United States embassy and the modern apartments occupied by expatriate workers in Mamba Point, the poshest part of Monrovia, Liberia. Azango’s larger-than-life personality fills every inch of the dim, cramped, lemon-colored room where she lives with her 11-year-old daughter, Madasi. Within five minutes Azango has hijacked the interview and is yelling out the story of how she came to be one of the best-known female journalists in Liberia. Without a hint of irony, Azango refers to herself in the third person, claims to be a household name and universally feared by Liberia’s political establishment; then announces to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf that she will never compromise herself by taking a job from her.
Some might say Azango likes to bluff or show off, but the 41-year-old single mother is one of a new generation of headstrong female journalists, who are not afraid to compete with their male counterparts or reel off lists of their achievements.
“This breed is more aggressive than what we had before,” says Elizabeth Hoff, who was the first female managing editor of a Liberian newspaper and the first woman to be elected president of the Press Union of Liberia (PUL).
Hoff, who now serves as deputy information minister, remained an editor throughout the heat of Liberia’s 14-year civil war that ended in 2003. She says a lot has changed since she worked in journalism, when many women left the profession out of fear for their safety. Those who stayed on fought sexism and struggled to win respect from their male colleagues.
Azango is one of a handful of female journalists in Liberia who have not only earned respect from their male colleagues, but also international recognition. She is part of New Narratives, an organization that supports independent media in Liberia. Founded and headed by Prue Clarke, an Australian foreign correspondent who reported in Africa for a number of years, the organization was set up in 2010, with funding from a Goldman Sachs partner. New Narratives teamed up the muckraking daily newspaper FrontPage Africa, for which Azango and the other fellows work.
These reporters have driven much of the hard-hitting reporting on violence against women and girls in Liberia, ranging from stories on child rape, teen prostitution, maternal health, corruption and education, for which they have won domestic and international accolades.
Azango received the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) International Press Freedom award in 2012 for her controversial reporting on female circumcision, a practice that takes place in the traditional Sande societies that exist within 10 of Liberia’s 16 tribes. She says she received death threats and was forced into hiding, moving from house to house and avoiding the newspaper office for a month. Mohamed Keita, the advocacy coordinator for CPJ’s Africa Program, described Azango as “outspoken”, “fearless”, and “persistent.”
But this was not the first time Azango had experienced threats of violence. Like her other female colleagues who are part of New Narratives, Azango’s experiences of coming of age during the war compelled her to become a journalist and report on the struggles of women and girls.
Azango recounts, in vivid detail, a memory from the early days of the war, when she was 18-years-old and pregnant with her first child, Victor, who is now 22. She says the pregnancy saved her from being forcibly taken as a girlfriend by a rebel.
Charles Taylor’s forces had closed in on Monrovia and Azango was picking potatoes around her home. She kept crossing a checkpoint that was controlled by a fierce commander.
“‘Why am I keep seeing a pregnant woman?’ he yelled. ‘I am looking for a young girl and she is spoiled, why is she in front of me? At the count of five if you don’t disappear I will spray you.’ I was running like a cut, dead dog,” says Azango.
With a father who was an associate Supreme Court justice and a mother who was a teacher, Azango initially aspired to be a hotel manager. But after 10 years of war in her homeland, Azango’s memories of a privileged childhood were replaced with raw experiences of being a poor refugee in neighboring Côte d’Ivoire.
When she returned from exile in 2000, Azango studied journalism at the University of Liberia and has never looked back. Unlike most journalists who focus on the sensational stories surrounding the political establishment, Azango writes about the masses, the ordinary Liberians who live on less than a dollar a day.
“I like to talk to the common people, I don’t like politics,” Azango tells FORBES WOMAN AFRICA. “Why? Because I feel politics come and go.”
But she is committed to journalism that delivers political change. Her reporting attracted so much international attention that the government called for an end to female genital mutilation, although Azango says it continues. Azango’s report on the alleged rape of a 13-year-old girl by a police officer who walked free for over three months, led to the his arrest.
While the horrific violence perpetrated against women during Liberia’s civil war has come to an end, many Liberian women and girls continue to struggle with sexism and abuse and it doesn’t stop in the workplace. One renowned journalist and editor, who died recently, even had a policy of not hiring female reporters.
Wade Williams, 31, is one of two female newsroom chiefs in Liberia, also a New Narratives fellow and Azango&#8217;s colleague and friend. Her past three years at FrontPage Africa have proved challenging, with some of her male colleagues hesitant to accept her leading role. But after three years in the job, the reporters have grown to respect her and women have taken a leading role in the newspaper headed by journalist and editor Rodney Sieh.
Last year Williams became the second Liberian woman to win Journalist of the Year at the PUL awards, since the press union was established in 1964.
For Clarke, these achievements have led to a major shift in how female journalists are perceived in Liberia.
“The sheer fact that women, who were once considered worthy of being nothing more than anchors and doing entertainment, are now breaking the most important stories in Liberia and are among the most credible journalists in Liberia has revolutionized everything,” Clarke tells FORBES WOMAN AFRICA.
Back in Azango’s room we discuss the future of her career. She is uncertain as to whether she wants to continue being a journalist or become an activist working with abused women. The line between activism and journalism has always been a thin one for Azango.
As we leave her house she stands on the stoop and yells, “thank you for taking up my whole day,” in a sarcastic tone, pretending not to have enjoyed telling her story. Dressed in leggings, a bright red t-shirt and floral hair tie, Azango is surrounded by children and women with white knuckles rubbing wet clothes against washing racks. She flashes her broad smile and flips out a nonchalant wave. Perhaps she has reason to bluff.

Tag: Journalist

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