We must stand up for journalists under fire in Gaza
The recent passing of the revered veteran photojournalist Peter Magubane resulted in dozens of well-deserved tributes, many of which reflected deeply on the sacrifices made by his generation of media workers in helping to shape the country we live in today. Through the telling of his life story, we were reminded that there was a time in this country’s dark and painful history when imprisonment, and even death, awaited those who dared speak truth to power — whether through the pen or the camera.
We were reminded that, despite these hardships, media workers such as Magubane persevered because they did not see what they did as just a job to help put bread on the table and send their children to school, but rather as a calling that could be used to serve the greater cause of freedom from oppression.
I came into journalism long after the conditions Magubane and his peers had to work under had passed. My career started soon after South Africa had adopted a new dispensation that guaranteed the right to freedom of expression, including freedom of the press.
But in my youth I had seen the crucial role played by reporters and photographers in exposing injustice and getting the truth out to the world, even in circumstances where those in authority did all in their power to suppress it. I had witnessed, for instance, how several journalists — one of whom worked for a Canadian news agency — had helped a mother in my neighbourhood elicit information from the security police about the whereabouts of her son and two of his friends.
They had disappeared on their way to a university where he was a second-year student, and there was a lot of speculation that they had been picked up by the security police as they left the township. But the police stonewalled the mother’s efforts to find out what had happened to her son. It was only after the press picked up the story and exerted pressure on the authorities that it was revealed they had been killed.
Many years later, thanks to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it was further established that the three had been killed execution-style and then dismembered through the use of limpet mines, as part of the then government’s dirty tricks campaign to discredit the liberation struggle.
As political violence between township communities and vigilante groups, backed by the police, escalated, one learnt to appreciate how sometimes the mere presence of men and women armed only with their notebooks and cameras could secure a community some peace — albeit for limited periods.
There were many instances — during mass funerals and night vigils, for example — when the police and their collaborators pulled back from an apparently imminent attack when they saw a journalist or two in the vicinity.
And so communities would know these journalists by their names. In my part of the world, it was the likes of the late Christina Scott, Fraser Mtshali and Fred Khumalo — to mention but a few. The latter — whose byline was later to grace this newspaper for many years when he worked for it as both a reporter and a columnist — delivered a journalistic series for the Zulu-language Catholic newspaper UmAfrika on the violence that was tearing families apart in Mpumalanga township in Hammarsdale, west of Durban. His work was worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.
Whenever trouble was brewing, community leaders and activists would call the newsrooms to alert the journalists. Though the presence of the media often had a calming effect, this did not mean that the lives of the journalists themselves were not sometimes threatened.
Like the Magubane generation before them, they often fell victim to police harassment and detention without trial. Others had their homes attacked by vigilantes as a form of intimidation.
But the state’s repressive hand found itself increasingly constrained by international condemnation. Solidarity groups beyond our borders were formed to shine a light on the human rights abuses perpetrated by the apartheid state, and they also highlighted the plight of journalists working under repressive conditions.
We therefore owe a debt of gratitude to journalists, media organisations and human rights activists who stood in solidarity with persecuted South African media workers and campaigned hard for the release of those detained without trial for using their pens and cameras to expose the excesses of the regime. We can never really repay this debt. But surely our history and collective experience demands of us that, when we see the lives of journalists being threatened elsewhere in the world, we speak up in solidarity in the same way others around the globe spoke out for Magubane and his peers?
At the last count, 119 journalists have died covering the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza since October 7. According to the International Federation of Journalists, this amounts to more than one media worker killed every day in the territory. This is among the most disturbing aspects of the ongoing conflict.
We should join our hands in solidarity with those calling for the killings to stop, and for journalists to be allowed to do their work without any threat of violence against them.