Veteran Namibian journalist Gwen Lister, the first woman newspaper editor in southern Africa and press freedom activist, in Cape Town, South Africa on Jan. 26.Photography by Charlie Shoemaker/The Globe and Mail
This story is part of a series, Moral Courage, exploring the dangers journalists face around the world. Learn more below.
In her autobiography, Comrade Editor, Namibian journalist Gwen Lister writes, “Just before I reached my teens, apartheid hit me right between the eyes.” This political awakening was no mere abstraction – for it was soon followed by action.
The year is 1966. Life in South Africa is defined by the colour of one’s skin. Thirteen-year-old Gwen is travelling on a double-decker bus in Cape Town. In keeping with the country’s punitive laws ensuring strict racial segregation, the seats on the upper level are reserved for Black people while white people must sit below. An elderly Black woman gets on the bus, laden with parcels. What happens next is best left to Ms. Lister to describe.
“I see she won’t make it up the stairs, and so I get up to give her my seat. She takes it, and white passengers explode with abuse towards both of us. The hurt in her eyes strikes me like a bolt of lightning,” Ms. Lister writes. “In that instant, my life changed irrevocably, my conscience was fully awakened, and my passion ignited. I resolved never again to remain silent in the face of injustice in general and the oppressive reality of apartheid in particular.”
Let us pause and examine what she has written. First, there is the language that is forceful, direct, unequivocal. “Hit between the eyes,” “struck like a bolt of lightning” – descriptors like these leave the reader in no doubt as to the gravitas of what has taken place.
Language, however, is only the messenger. It is the message that is more remarkable by far, for it is coming from a young girl whose moral compass has been already set. Can a 13-year-old resolve never to remain silent in the face of injustice and then hold herself to that high bar over the course of half a century?
In her autobiography, Comrade Editor, Lister describes the moment of her political awakening as a teen that catalyzed her career as a journalist, and the long string of career-defining events that followed.
In Ms. Lister’s case, the answer is yes. What the child could not know at the time was the career path that would give her the means, in a very public and influential way, to follow the high moral ground. A precocious sensibility thankfully does not include clairvoyance – for the struggle that lay in wait would prove supremely taxing.
The year of Ms. Lister’s “aha moment,” 1966, also saw the assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd, the prime minister of South Africa and the ideological architect of apartheid. Verwoerd’s stabbing in Parliament shocked the nation, but never shifted the granite resolve of his Nationalist Party. This meant that by the time Ms. Lister graduated from her Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Cape Town, racial segregation remained deeply entrenched in South African society.
While she was impatient to help dismantle it, Ms. Lister also rejected violence and did not join Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of Nelson Mandela’s banned African National Congress. Instead, she settled on journalism and applied for a vacant position at the Windhoek Advertiser, a daily newspaper in the neighbouring territory of South West Africa – now known as Namibia. A former German colony, South West Africa had been placed under South African administration by the League of Nations after the First World War. Despite the United Nations revoking this mandate in 1966, South Africa continued to govern the country.
To Ms. Lister, a move to the territory was strategic and practical. Imbued with a strong sense of urgency, she reasoned that if apartheid were to be defeated, it would occur first in a mandated territory like South West Africa, rather than in South Africa, its ideological home. And if her contribution to achieving this would be through journalism, obtaining her political column with a beginner’s resumé would be easier and quicker in South West Africa than in South Africa – where the only position open to her was that of cub reporter.
Lister founded The Namibian in 1985 to expose apartheid atrocities and support the struggle for independence. As a result, she was jailed and faced death threats and intimidation.
She arrived at the Advertiser mid-morning for her interview to find the editor, Johannes Marthinus Smith, known by all as Smittie, already drunk. “Women belong barefoot in the kitchen or naked in bed,” he yelled at her. Recounting this episode in her autobiography, Ms. Lister writes with remarkable restraint that she had “never come across someone like him before.” It says much for her strength of character that she not only withstood the abuse, but was hired by Jurgen Meinert, the paper’s owner, despite Smittie’s chauvinistic objections.
She soon learned that behind the editor’s bullying bluster was a fiercely independent journalist, prepared to stand firm against the pressures being exerted on the Advertiser by the South African government. In time, an unlikely friendship would develop between the two.
Ms. Lister was moving to a country also roiled by racial tensions. The South West African’s People’s Organization, considered by the United Nations as the sole legitimate representative of the Namibian people, had taken up arms against the occupying South African military. Compounding the situation, neighbouring and newly independent Angola was being torn apart in a civil war fuelled by Cold War enmities that pitted the Soviet Union against U.S.-backed South Africa. Against this backdrop of superpower rivalries and local internecine feuds, the South African administration was working assiduously to demonize SWAPO and exclude it from the political discourse – a policy that the Windhoek Advertiser strongly criticized.
Smittie, despite his misogynistic misgivings, threw Ms. Lister into the deep end of Namibian politics. Her first political assignment was a SWAPO rally in Katutura, a racially segregated district reserved for Black people outside Windhoek. The name Katutura in the Herero language means “the place where people do not want to live” – a poignant encapsulation of what apartheid had brought to Namibia. In her memoirs, Ms. Lister remembers the rallies as “intimidating experiences … massive gatherings which often ended in violence as police would move in to tyrannise the attendees and disperse the crowds.”
Ms. Lister’s sympathetic coverage of SWAPO policies did not fit with the government’s narrative of demonizing the organization. The Advertiser was censored, and when that heavy-handed approach could not silence her voice, the government used a slush fund to buy out the paper and ensure the new owners followed the prescribed script. Smittie and Ms. Lister were given an ultimatum to do likewise. Smittie’s response was to resign and use his savings to start a new paper, the Windhoek Observer. It was a gamble, and he took Ms. Lister with him.
The Observer launched on May 4, 1978, the day South African forces attacked SWAPO’s Cassinga Camp in southern Angola, killing 600 people, many of whom were refugees. The escalating armed conflict was accompanied by more stringent media restrictions: Ms. Lister’s military accreditation was revoked. Her home was searched by security police. She was increasingly shunned by the white population in Namibia who regarded her as a “dangerous communist.” Her social circle dwindled to a handful of colleagues and a few progressive lawyers. People would cross the street to avoid her. She was mocked and caricatured in cartoons in government-friendly papers.
On her return to Namibia from a 1983 United Nations-sponsored conference in Paris in support of Namibian independence, where she met SWAPO’s exiled leader Sam Nujoma for the first time, she was charged under the Publications and Customs and Excise Acts and the feared Internal Security Act. She faced up to 20 years in jail. Her crime? Having SWAPO publications in her possession.
Ms. Lister’s trial was held in South Africa. The fear of a guilty verdict and a jail term, and the effect it would have on her three-year-old son, weighed heavily on her. A stellar legal team ensured her acquittal. But there was no letup in the harassment. Single editions of the Observer were banned followed by a total ban on the paper in 1984. Smittie was ready to quit, but Ms. Lister, with funding from the U.S.-based Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, travelled to South Africa and had the ban overturned.
Politics, however, influenced the purse strings and the Observer’s political stance had driven away advertising revenue from the predominantly white business sector. With the paper in severe financial trouble, Smittie decided to adopt a more conservative political stance. To bolster finances, he also brought on board a wealthy real estate agent, Thurstan Salt, who had aggressively importuned Ms. Lister for sex. A knee to the groin made a vindictive enemy. She was removed from her political beat. Nine staff members of the paper resigned in protest. Ms. Lister joined them.
Three months after leaving the Observer, Ms. Lister was arrested under the Official Secrets Act and jailed for exposing mail tampering by the government. While the case against her soon collapsed, she had reached a professional and personal nadir. She was out of regular work. She and her former Observer colleagues were blacklisted by the government which meant no local jobs were open to them. She had very little money. She was dependent on Bishop James Kauluma of the Anglican Diocese of Namibia for a low-rent house. And her husband had walked out on her. It would be the first of two failed marriages: As Ms. Lister told me, both husbands had been attracted to her for who she was, but once married, they could not adjust to the pressures that came with it.
The adversities Ms. Lister had had to contend with thus far steeled her for what came next. With the help of donors, she started a new paper, the Namibian, employing ex-Observer colleagues. The paper was established as a not-for-profit Trust, the first of its kind in Africa. It belonged to the public it served, immune to outside commercial interests, a fate which had undermined Smittie’s Observer. The first edition hit the stands on Aug. 30, 1985.
She now had editorial freedom, but that also meant that she was more firmly in the crosshairs of a belligerent government. She knew that late-night calls generally meant death threats, but what if they were work-related? She was so pivotal to the fledgling paper’s survival that the ringing couldn’t be ignored. New dangers surfaced as well. The paper’s offices were fire bombed. The bombproof glass that was installed was soon bullet-scarred. Tear gas was placed in the air conditioning. A triple-grenade attack, which included phosphorous, destroyed the office and most of the equipment.
Lister signs copies of her book after speaking to the Cape Town Press Club at the Kelvin Grove Club in Cape Town. Lister has won several international awards for her work, she was named a World Press Freedom Hero by the International Press Institute (IPI), and received a courage in journalism award from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
When I asked Ms. Lister how she coped with it all, she told me she was too busy fighting battles to allow time for her emotions to get in the way. “I did not have time to say, I am hurt, I am afraid,” she said. Given the magnitude of the struggle, she regarded introspection “as something of a luxury.” She would go to bed wondering if a hand grenade would be lobbed into her garden. As a result, she slept brokenly, peeping through the curtains on the lookout for assailants. “I became used to it,” she told me. “They would not get me down; they were the cowards.”
And then there was the gender factor. In the deeply patriarchal society, a woman’s character was smeared as soon as she showed independence. “I had to forget I was a woman. I could not let myself give in to my emotions, what people called ‘women things.’ I could not show weakness as a woman!” Ms. Lister told me.
An intense commitment to a cause generates its own gravitational pull. “The deeper I was in, the harder it was to give up,” Ms. Lister recalled. “Threats had a paradoxical effect.” She asked herself if she was prepared to die, and her answer was yes. “If it had to be, it had to be,” she concluded, but she hoped that those threatening her would have a conscience and spare her children.
When her friend Anton Lubowski, a charismatic lawyer and SWAPO supporter, was assassinated outside his home, a man calling himself White Wolf telephoned the Namibian with a chilling message: “Tell Gwen Lister she’s next.” To Ms. Lister, the murder, emotionally devastating, added another layer to her resolve: Now there were “just a handful of whites opposed to the government,” she recollected. “Our work became even more important.”
“The most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways,” observed Alexis de Tocqueville. Mr. Lubowski was killed three days before the South African government relented and sanctioned Mr. Nujoma’s return to Namibia after 39 years in exile. Five months later, Namibia was independent with a democratically elected SWAPO government led by Mr. Nujoma as president. At long last, Ms. Lister could openly let go of some of her emotions. She “wept unashamedly” as the Namibian flag was raised just after midnight on March 21, 1990.
But the story does not end here, although it could have with a lesser person. The political transition vindicated Ms. Lister’s belief that “really good journalism” was defined by its ability to bring about change.
Lister was one of the architects of the Windhoek Declaration, which enshrined a free press as an essential pillar of democracy. Today, Namibia ranks first in Africa for press freedom.
To the victors go the spoils of war and the new SWAPO government came bearing gifts: She was offered the post of Minister of Information and Broadcasting. She declined – as she did for other offers, including ambassadorial posts in Sweden and the U.K. and director general of the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation. From then on, Mr. Nujoma and some in SWAPO viewed her with suspicion. They could not understand her refusal, which was driven by her conviction that “for a journalist to be feted in the halls of power meant you were too close to where you shouldn’t be.”
It may come as a surprise to realize that Ms. Lister was only 37 years of age when Namibia became independent. Having kept her distance from SWAPO, she could hold the government and an increasingly authoritarian president accountable for their failings. When they attacked her for her criticism, she felt vindicated. At a 2003 UNESCO-sponsored seminar, she was one of the architects of the Windhoek Declaration, which enshrined a free press as an essential pillar of democracy. Today, Namibia ranks first in Africa for press freedom.
In 2011, Ms. Lister stood down as editor of the Namibian. “I felt I had amputated one of my limbs,” she told me. The intensity of this reaction may be understood in the context of another admission – that she reacts better under fire than to compliments. So, mindful of her sensitivities, I will shy away from encomiums and let the facts speak for themselves. What a story they tell.
They also beg a question, put to her by Ismail Mahomed, former chief justice of South Africa and Namibia: “What made a little white girl like you do what you did?” “Stunned” by the question, Ms. Lister struggled to answer it other than to say it came from deep within her.
So, let us return to that fateful bus ride in Cape Town, half a century ago, the year the architect of apartheid is knifed to death in Parliament. A child witnesses the humiliation of an elderly Black woman and is morally outraged. That indefinable thing she alludes to deep within her is her moral code that has been transgressed.
Doing nothing other than give up a seat on a bus in response to this morally injurious event would be an act of omission that only exacerbates the shame, guilt and anger that apartheid and other forms of injustice foster. A fierce moral courage is needed to assuage these emotions – one that must surmount being vilified, ostracized, firebombed, denigrated as a woman and feeling the pain of loss of a close friend’s assassination and two marriages that could not survive the vortex of a liberation struggle.
Half a century after the event that started it all, Lister's long and prolific career speaks to her moral courage in the face of adversity.
This precis of Gwen Lister’s life is, however, incomplete. It fails to acknowledge the sunlit uplands of moral courage reached by a temperament that does indeed thrive under fire. For she has raised two children as a single mother; forged intense bonds of lifelong friendships amidst shared adversity; started and sustained a newspaper that played a pivotal role in ending apartheid in South West Africa and the birth of Namibia; and laid the foundations for a free press that nourishes her country’s democracy.
There it is: the balance sheet of an extraordinary life; the pain of moral injury and rewards of moral courage laid out; the debit and credit columns interacting synergistically; the spur to action. And the answer to the chief justice’s probing question.
Moral Courage: About the series
Journalists are key to civil society, keeping readers, viewers and listeners informed of events both local and international. At times, this work entails exposure to grave danger. The factors that motivate journalists to continue this work despite these threats are many and complex, but central to it all is moral courage. Simply put, to some journalists, doing nothing in response to the egregious behaviour of corrupt or genocidal politicians, human traffickers and drug cartels is worse than the repercussions that come from exposing such crimes. These journalists are driven by a moral imperative to risk their own safety and psychological well-being for the story – and the price paid for this steely determination is invariably steep.
Anthony Feinstein, a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, is an authority on the psychological effects of conflict on journalists. Together with Dr. Feinstein, The Globe and Mail is running Moral Courage, a project that will feature frank and intimate interviews between Dr. Feinstein and a journalist working in hazardous situations around the globe. Each story showcases the work of these journalists, the factors that explain why they feel compelled to pursue such an all-encompassing mission, and the personal consequences their work entails.