75th Anniversary Issue
As she lay dying, the widow of a Milwaukee newspaper editor made a gift that has now invigorated journalism for 75 years. Agnes Wahl Nieman, a well-educated woman with a fondness for bicycling, willed money to Harvard to “promote and elevate the standards of journalism.” That $1.4 million bequest (worth about $23 million in today’s dollars) funded the Nieman Fellowship program that has brought 1,442 journalists from around the world to Harvard for a year of study. To celebrate the Nieman Foundation for Journalism’s 75th anniversary, Nieman Reports tells the stories of 75 Nieman Fellows, among them pioneers in biography, documentary filmmaking, and investigative journalism.
After his return to South Africa, Qoboza (1938–1988) was detained and held for five months. The South African government shut down two black newspapers he edited, The World and The Post
The thing that scared me most during my Cambridge year was the fact that I had accepted injustice and discrimination as “part and parcel of our traditional way of life.” After my year, the things I had accepted made me angry. It is because of this that the character of my newspaper has changed tremendously. We are an angry newspaper. For this reason we have made some formidable enemies, and my own personal life is not worth a cent … But I see my role and the role of those people who share my views as articulating, without fear or favor, the aspirations of our people. It is a very hard thing to do.
From “In Memoriam: Percy Qoboza” by Dennis Pather, NF ’88, in Nieman Reports, Spring 1988
The thing that scared me most during my Cambridge year was the fact that I had accepted injustice and discrimination as “part and parcel of our traditional way of life.” After my year, the things I had accepted made me angry. It is because of this that the character of my newspaper has changed tremendously. We are an angry newspaper. For this reason we have made some formidable enemies, and my own personal life is not worth a cent … But I see my role and the role of those people who share my views as articulating, without fear or favor, the aspirations of our people. It is a very hard thing to do.From “In Memoriam: Percy Qoboza” by Dennis Pather, NF ’88, in Nieman Reports, Spring 1988
