Half a century in Makhanda’s melting pot
Three journalists who started their careers in Makhanda offer a snapshot of different eras in the life of Rhodes University, the town and SA through the rise of Black Consciousness in the 1970s, worker solidarity in the first decade of the millennium and #Feesmustfall in the second.
They were among 10 alumni of the Rhodes School of Journalism and Media Studies who received special awards, marking the department’s50th anniversary, at the graduation ball on Friday.
Zubeida Jaffer, who graduated with a bachelor of journalism in 1979, says her time as a student was “amazing”.
“There was a thriving Black Consciousness pulse in the Eastern Cape and Grahamstown and Port Elizabeth [now
Makhanda and Gqeberha] were full of poets, artists and cultural workers with new and exciting work.
“It was a dark time because of the death of Steve Biko, but also a very vibrant time because of people connecting in order to act.”
Jaffer was part of a group of students who tutored other young people in the township.
But as a student classified as Cape Malay (or black), she faced terrible exclusion.
“We couldn’t socialise with other students. We couldn’t go to the movies — it was for whites and Indians only.”
Until this day, Jaffer says she can’t go to a Wimpy.
“My parents brought me here on a Saturday.
“We had left very early in the morning and driven all the way from Cape Town.”
What the family really needed was a cup of tea and a sandwich and they found the Wimpy, off High Street.
“They wouldn’t serve us,” Jaffer recalls.
The following year, in line with apartheid legislation, the university excluded black students from its residences.
“That was September 1978. We didn’t know where we were going to stay.”
When the university announced the establishment of a black residence and invited Jaffer to be its subwarden, she refused.
“It felt like an insult and like they wanted me to lead other black students into it.”
She then found a property with an abandoned outside building which she and a fellow student fixed up and rented.
Jaffer worked for the community newspaper Grassroots and was a key organiser of the UDF.
She was arrested and detained without trial twice during the 1980s.
She obtained her MA from Columbia University in 1995, and is the author of three books.
She is the first woman in Africa to win the foreign journalist award from the National Association of Black Journalists in the US and recently received the Allan Kirkland Soga Lifetime Achievement Award.
Zikhona Tshona, who graduated in 2011, didn’t suffer legislated barriers but financial exclusion.
“I would get R300 a month from my mom and if I had to come up with R50 for an unfunded group assignment, it was really difficult.
“My main focus was to get that degree and get out because I knew what a struggle it was for my family to keep me there financially.”
As far as student politics was concerned, “They were small fights — but part of a much bigger picture.
“The Grahamstown name change was a big thing then. And parking.”
Kathryn Cleary had a journalism baptism by fire as student press Oppidan editor in 2016 during the #Feesmustfall protests.
“It was six weeks of gruelling reporting that showed me how violent a space the university had become to black and nonbinary people.”
Cleary went on to report on the crisis of mental healthcare in the Eastern Cape, and Makana’s water crisis as it unfolded from 2016.
In 2019, she won the Vodacom Journalist of the Year Regional Award for Data Journalism, and in 2020 was the overall winner of the IsuElihle Awards for child-centred journalism.
Since 2021, she has been engagement co-ordinator for the Internews Health Journalism Network.