Hounded to death, aged 32
SUNA Venter, one of the “SABC 8” journalists fired for speaking out against Hlaudi Motsoeneng’s policies at the public broadcaster, died last week at 32. She was recently diagnosed with “broken heart syndrome”, a cardiac condition known as stress cardiomyopathy which severely weakens the heart muscles.
Since being fired, and then reinstated, the journalist had been mercilessly harassed and abused: shot in the face with a pellet gun, threatened on the phone, assaulted, and abducted and tied to a tree at Melville Koppies while the grass around her was set alight. Her flat was repeatedly broken into, her tyres slashed and the brake cables on her car cut. Her family believe her ongoing victimisation and trauma lead to the extreme and unremitting stress that damaged her heart and led to her death.
In a photograph online, taken at a protest, she has a black cross of masking tape over her mouth. In another, on facebook, she is outdoors, her long gingery hair ruffled by the wind. She looks younger than her 32 years and has a slightly serious air, even in the candid shots. I imagine her mother and father looking at the photographs, seeing the face of their beloved child, bullied and frightened to a point where her heart, quite literally, broke.
It’s hard to know how to think about Venter’s death, how to process it, beyond being just battered by the utter horror of it. There are many elements to this tragic story, each appalling. The poisonous trainwreck at the SABC. The journalists who continue to fight for some measure of decent news coverage. The real threat to press freedom in this country, and the intimidation to which individual journalists are increasingly being subjected. The hired thugs, and the thieves who pay them. The hardening of positions and hearts. The melting away of common ground, the ground that says we do not torment and torture other people because we disagree with them.
Venter has been hailed, in her death, as a martyr for freedom of expression. As a hero. Those who knew her speak of her passion for current affairs, her courage and her principles. She was by all accounts a remarkable woman. Now she’s a young woman who paid an unimaginably high price for that courage and those principles. She died of a broken heart. — Kate Sidley