Fawzia Moodley has come full circle

• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Publication title: Post

In those days, few people of colour got into journalism. And if they did, it was mainly in the metro (read township) or “Indian” editions of mainstream newspapers

A friend introduced me to Hussain Kolia of the Sunday Times, who gave me the opportunity to freelance for the paper. My first assignment was covering the suicide of a young man who had hung himself from a mango tree in Isipingo Beach.

I went to the house, cried my eyes out, didn’t do a single interview, and returned to the office empty-handed. Admittedly, not an auspicious start to my career!

I also freelanced for The Graphic, a conservative newspaper targeted at the Indian community. Surprisingly, I was given the task of covering non-racial sports. I soon realised why.

My late husband Monty was involved in the South African Council on Sports (SACOS), which was campaigning for the boycott of apartheid sport by the international sporting community. Because of its right-wing stance, The Graphic was barred from SACOS’s meetings, and I unwittingly became the conduit for the paper to cover its events.

Then came a stint with Ukusa, a progressive newspaper that covered the news through an anti-apartheid lens. With struggle activists like Griffiths Mxenge, who was murdered by apartheid hit squads, on its board, the paper, of course, did not last long.

I joined Subry Govender’s Press Trust of South Africa. He was banned because of his activism and strong political views, which he never shied away from expressing in his articles.

Subry was banned by the apartheid government, and barred from working in the media industry, but that did not deter him from slinking into the Press Trust offices – ostensibly run by his wife Thyna – to edit our hard-hitting articles on the ruling National Party, and dispatching them to international outlets like the Press Trust of India, BBC Radio and Germany’s Deutsche Welle.

Regular visits from the dreaded Security Police to our offices were par for the course, but the wily Subry always managed to escape before their arrival.

Then I joined The Leader newspaper which, under the helm of the late Sunny Bramdaw, also bravely took up the cause of the Struggle. It was an uphill commercial battle to survive as a lone voice in a muzzled media landscape.

But the thrill of putting out politically daring stories that few other media would touch, and working with people like Rafiq Rohan, Gary Govindsamy, the late Trevor Harris, and photographer Kevin Joseph, made it worthwhile. We earned...