Zubeida Jaffer

Zubeida Jaffer was born on 26 January 1958.¹ In her own account of her identity she writes, "I was born into a Cape Muslim family."² She is a South African journalist and author who began her career at the Cape Times in 1980 and was twice detained and tortured under apartheid.³⁴ She became group parliamentary editor of Independent Newspapers and has published three books, among them the memoir Our Generation.⁴³

Jaffer obtained a bachelor's degree in journalism from Rhodes University in Grahamstown in 1979.⁴ She started her career at the Cape Times in 1980 and also spent a short stint at the Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg in the same year.³ In 1980, aged 22 and working as a journalist in Cape Town, she received a message from Nelson Mandela urging her to keep writing, saying her stories were giving prisoners hope.⁵ The South African authorities detained her for two months in 1980 after she exposed police killings; in detention she was held in solitary confinement, tortured and beaten.⁴ In 1986, after editing community and trade union papers, she was detained again while several months pregnant, was released at the time of her baby's birth, and was re-arrested nine weeks later and jailed again with her infant.⁴ She headed the media department at the University of the Western Cape between 1987 and 1989.⁴ Between 1990 and 1995 she worked as a correspondent for South African and Canadian news agencies, and she was a member of the Independent Media Commission for South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994.⁴ She received a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1996.⁴ She was political editor of the Daily News from August 1996 to April 1997, and has worked as group parliamentary editor of South Africa's Independent Newspapers since May 1997.⁴ She met Mandela the day after his release from prison in 1990 and on several occasions afterwards.⁵ In 2018 she delivered the Nelson Mandela Lecture at Penn State University, titled "In Hope of Peace, Not War".⁵ She is a research fellow attached to the Department of Communication Sciences at the University of the Free State.³ She lives in Wynberg, Cape Town.³

Her memoir Our Generation tells the story of her journey through South Africa's years of turbulence into the new democracy, and it has been translated into Arabic.³ Her second book, Love in the Time of Treason, was published internationally under the title On Trial with Mandela.³ Her third book is Beauty of the Heart, a life of the political activist and religious leader Charlotte Mannya Maxeke.³ South African History Online also lists her earlier works, among them The Story of BiBi Dawood (1990) and For the Freedom of Our Daughters (1997).⁴ She is the publisher of The Journalist, a multimedia website telling the stories of forgotten pioneers of journalism in South Africa and on the continent.³ In 2021 she registered a company called Number 10 Publishers to take ownership of her three titles.³ Her work has earned her the Muslim Views Achiever Award and the Honor Medal for Distinguished Service to Journalism from the University of Missouri in the United States.³

This section sets out different positions as reported in the sources. It is not a verdict by the museum. In her essay "On Being South African", Jaffer describes herself as "a child of God", born into a Cape Muslim family, and writes, "I am neither white, nor black, nor pink, nor blue. I am a human being, part of a common humanity."² The same essay presents her as a journalist committed to growing "a country free of racism, sexism and poverty".²

• Zubeida Jaffer — South African History Online biography⁴
• Zubeida Jaffer — profile in Muslim Portraits: The Anti-Apartheid Struggle¹
• Zubeida Jaffer — Time of the Writer biography (University of KwaZulu-Natal)³
• On Being South African — Zubeida Jaffer²
• South African author, journalist to deliver 2018 Nelson Mandela Lecture — Penn State⁵
• Zubeida Jaffer — Wikidata Q130550859⁶