Karima Brown passed away on Thursday and, while we all knew that she had been hanging on to life for the past two weeks, it still came as a shock. She had been battling COVID-19.
Karima was never a conventional journalist in the old liberal definition of a journalist. She grew up politically in the anti-apartheid youth organisations of the 1980s and this defined her approach to journalism.
She never believed in the objectivity that one gets taught at journalism school. For her it was always about the cause, always about using her very powerful voice – whether it was through print or broadcast – to shed light on the plight of the poor, working people of this country. She never hid her political beliefs which were aligned to uplifting the poor and, as such, she felt politically attracted to the South African Communist Party and, by extension, the ANC.
However, Karima was never one to blindly follow party lines and would often upset senior politicians who believed that journalists who question always have agendas, political or otherwise. Karima’s agenda has always been about creating a better country for the majority of South Africans. It was never about paying blind political patronage to anybody.
Sometimes, she endured criticism for being too open about her political affiliations. In 2015, for instance, the DA’s national spokesperson, Phumzille van Damme, lodged a complaint with the Press Ombudsman because Karima and one of her colleagues were seen wearing ANC colours at an ANC event. The complaint was dismissed.
I met the young Karima Semaar in the early 1980s when she was a high school student who lived in Westridge, Mitchells Plain. She must have been 16 or 17. She had become involved in the local branch of the Cape Youth Congress (CAYCO), of which I was in the leadership at the time, and its sister organisations who all found a home in the United Democratic Front.
In the late 1980s, when she was part of the CAYCO leadership, she was instrumental in the establishment of the South African Youth Congress, which eventually made way for the returning ANC Youth League.
Even as a young person, she had a beautiful mind and was always questioning everything, so it did not come as a surprise when she later became a journalist. Much of our political upbringing in the 1980s had to do with “following a line” that inevitably came through from Lusaka, but Karima only accepted “the line” after much interrogation.
As far as I can remember, she started her journalistic career at the SABC in the early 1990s. Among others. she worked at Business Day for many years as their political editor before being coaxed in 2010 to join the start-up newspaper, The New Age, which promised to tackle the white monopoly control of South Africa’s media.
Karima had been appointed as Deputy Editor of The New Age while Vuyo Mvoko was appointed editor, but the two of them along with three other senior staffers walked out in October 2010 before the paper had published an edition. To this day, there remains uncertainty about the reasons for their walkout. This is one episode in her life which I wish I had discussed with her in more detail.
Karima would later be appointed as Group Executive Editor of Independent Media, a position which made her responsible for the editorial direction of all the papers. She told me not too long ago that she left this position sooner than expected, partly because she felt uncomfortable with having to be a manager and sometimes having to take uncomfortable decisions.
It was in broadcasting that Karima found her voice, in more ways than one. She first took her feistiness to Radio 702. But she was fearless in her Sunday show, The Fix, on eNCA often making politicians and other influential people in society feel uncomfortable with her direct and incessant questioning.
I was fortunate that she invited me onto The Fix, not to be grilled, but to help her analyse the Sunday newspapers. But even then, she ragged me when I spoke too long.
She was an equal opportunities offender, giving a hard time to politicians irrespective of which faction of the ruling party they came from or whether they were members of an opposition party.
Former activist Ruby Marks, now South Africa’s Ambassador to Benin, wrote in a recent Facebook post how she often feared when she watched Karima asking difficult questions of influential people.
“Did you know that sometimes we, as your friends, have communicates quietly with each other over the years, and said, did you see what Karima said? or, does she have protection? when we worried about some irrational reprisal. But you remained fearless and determined to always speak your truth to power. In doing so you became a shero to some, and an enemy to others,” Marks wrote.
But Karima was more than a political being and a person who liked to debate. She was also a mother, a daughter and a woman who loved to party and who loved to cook.
In the past year or so, she became an important member of a Facebook group, the Lockdown Recipe Storytelling Group, which started off by people sharing their family recipes and evolved into a book project. She enjoyed the interactions with the group and also contributed to the book and magazines that started as a result of this group. Some of the members described her as their main cheerleader because of the way she always posted positive comments on the group.
In the early 1990s, my family and I moved to Johannesburg and Karima was one of the first people with whom we connected, often visiting her and her then husband at their house in Yeoville. She introduced us to her circle of friends in Johannesburg, which consisted of many people who we knew from Cape Town.
We continued our interactions over the years, maintaining a friendship that started in the struggle and continued way into our democracy.
The picture that I have attached to this story is from a small get-together of comrades at my house after the funeral service for Jessica Hendricks, who was a close comrade for many of us. In the picture are former Mitchells Plain activists Sharon Davids, Faiez Jacobs, Trevor Oosterwyk and Logan Wort.
I remember how shattered she was when her father, Achmat Semaar, passed away in April 2019. We spoke at the memorial service about how disappointed her father had become in the direction the ANC had taken in recent years, even though he remained a loyal and committed member of the organisation.
My last long interaction with Karima was when we invited her to facilitate a dialogue on the history of Mitchell’s Plain on behalf of the Mitchell’s Plain Action Collective (MPDAC), a group who had been set up to provide food security, but also to record the history of the area. She agreed without reservation.
Karima was absolutely besotted with her son, Mikhail, and often shared pictures of his achievements in the creative field. She recently shared pictures of the small 30th birthday party they hosted for him. The party was held under strict COVID-19 regulations, something Karima had insisted upon. She often spoke about how she was paranoid about COVID-19.
She became ill after a recent visit to Cape Town, was diagnosed with COVID-19 and was hospitalised immediately. For most of the past two-and-a-bit weeks, she has been intubated with family and friends hoping against all odds that she would survive.
But it was not to be. Early yesterday morning, the news we had dreaded came: Karima Brown has passed away. By the afternoon, she had been laid to rest in accordance with Muslim rites.
We will miss you, my friend and comrade. Rest in peace.
(Written for this website on Friday, 5 March 2021)
