NELSPRUIT – “If you take my picture, I am going to hit you.” Anybody who has been or is a journalist, knows these threats as part of the job. Usually they are not serious, but attacks on journalists are on the increase.
These are the stories of just a few courageous journalists who have put themselves in the line of danger, and of one who paid with his life to expose the truth.
Lowvelder news editor Nicolene Smalman recounted an incident when she was covering a story in 2008. A security company had supplied the police with information on a suspect who allegedly dealt in drugs. She accompanied officials of the company and the police when they arrested him at his home.
The police told her he was a Nigerian and she reported it as such. When the story appeared that Friday, all Lowvelders had been sold out by 08:00. It emerged that the suspect’s friends had bought up all the newspapers in an attempt to protect him.
Smalman did a follow-up. Three Nigerian men showed up at her office that Tuesday, demanding to speak to her. Being extremely threatening and intimidating, they demanded to know who her source was.
They said they were upset as the suspect in question was in fact Tanzanian and that the fact that she had written he was Nigerian, put them in a bad light. It became clear, however, that they questioned her to establish her source.
The Nigerians were so aggressive, screaming at Smalman, that a colleague who overheard the conversation, summoned Lowveld Media’s security company to the scene. CCTV footage of the Nigerians was shown to the police and they too were implicated in suspected drug dealing.
“I was actually more scared than when I was chased by three white rhino while I was on foot in the Kruger National Park,” Smalman laughed.
“I had also been attacked by a traffic official during a stampede at the local licensing offices in 2007. However, I knew it was part of the job when I embarked on my career. But nothing can prepare you for what you actually encounter.”
Another two journalists from the same newsroom, Joe Dreyer and multiple award-winning investigative reporter Landé Willemse, were also not immune to having their lives threatened.
Willemse once accompanied a security company to cover a farm attack, when a shootout ensued on the N4 between security and the suspects.
She was with them in the vehicle at the time the bullets hit the car.
She also covered a story in 2008 about two Al-Queda-affiliated Pakistani suspects linked to murders in Bloemfontein who had fled to the Lowveld.
After exposing the suspects in an article, she received about 12 phone calls in which the callers threatened to blow up her vehicle.
Once, while she was covering a protest at Mbombela Stadium with Smalman, security guards started firing shots into the crowd while they were interviewing the protesters.
Dreyer and Willemse covered the
Masoyi service-delivery protests on
February 14, 2012.
Dreyer said they had arrived at the scene where the protesters had already blocked the roads.
He decided to get out the vehicle and told Willemse to meet him on the other side of the road. Dreyer, the ever-optimistic action photographer, approached them to get the perfect shot.
Suddenly the crowd gathered around him while he was shooting, and one protester hit him on the head with a brick.
Mireille de Villiers, a new and upcoming journalist, was covering a story about a man who had apparently harassed his girlfriend on Facebook this year. After she covered the story messages such as “Mireille de Villiers is going to die soon” and “Mireille must be careful as I am back in Nelspruit” were posted on Lowvelder’s Facebook page.
De Villiers opened a case with the police, but the man kept using fake profiles on the social network. As yet, no one has been arrested. In neighbouring Mozambique, senior journalist and editor Fernando Lima who runs the publication Savannah, was illegally arrested by police last week but later released. A TV news editor and a cameraman were also attacked last month while covering a protest in that country. They were both assaulted and detained by government troops.
In June this year, according to a report, the University of the Witwatersrand honoured a heroic journalist who was killed because of his investigative work. Carlos Cardoso was born in Mozambique and schooled in Witbank and at Wits.
As a supporter of Mozambican independence and Frelimo, and a passionate opponent of colonialism, he was arrested and deported in 1975.
He then became a journalist in Mozambique, and within a few years, was the head of the government news agency, AIM.
Mozambique had little media freedom and Cardoso bridled against this. He was jailed for six days when he wrote about the Renamo rebellion in a way that deviated from the official line. But former president Samora Machel came to respect and trust Cardoso and he became part of an inner circle of journalists, though not a party member.
Devastated by Machel’s death in 1986, he was sharply critical of Frelimo’s new leadership, attacking those he said were serving only their own interests. He was concerned about the increase in corruption and started to push for a more independent and robust media.
In 1989, depressed and frustrated, he quit journalism.
Mozambique opened up its media in 1992 and Cardoso was one of a group of journalists who launched the country’s first independent publication, MediaFax.
His last editorial was an attack on a 1996 corruption scandal involving the state-controlled Commercial Bank of Mozambique.
On November 22, 2000 Cardoso was gunned down in Maputo. It emerged in the trial of his killers, that they had been hired by the family involved in the huge bank fraud.
It has been said, “Cardoso came to embody all that was best in Mozambican journalism, all that was honest, questioning, combative. He was admired, respected, loved – even among those subjected to withering criticism in his paper.”
At his funeral, former president Joaquim Chissano said, “We were used to arguing with Cardoso. We argued with him because he raised pertinent questions that demanded the attention of all of us. He forced us to think. Today, when he is no longer with us, who else will raise the questions with the force that he did!”
