Her childhood was good grounding for her dangerous reporting today in Zimbabwe, where she is one of the few freelancers gutsy enough to pursue political and economic stories. Thornycroft, 62, knows the country and the people. And she has gone to great lengths to continue her exposés, including giving up British citizenship in 2001 to become a Zimbabwean citizen in an effort to comply with the country’s new media law, which requires reporters working there to be citizens.
She knows the risks of reporting are high because Robert Mugabe’s government “doesn’t want us anywhere in Zimbabwe,” she said. She means that the Mugabe government does not want reporters – black or white – covering the country’s economic collapse and the political repression.
Dozens of Zimbabwean journalists have fled and are living in exile, including Sandra Nyaira, an IWMF Courage Award winner who had been political editor of the country’s leading independent newspaper, The Daily News. She now lives in Somerset, England.
In March, the government issued unspecified reprisals against Thornycroft and Jan Raath of The Times of London. On March 29, four armed men abducted veteran cameraman Edward Chikomba, formerly with the state-run Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation; he was found beaten to death two days later. In May, a prominent human rights lawyer who often represents reporters, Beatrice Mtetwa, was beaten by police after a protest by more than 60 lawyers outside Zimbabwe’s High Court. And in August, Zimbabwe put in place a sweeping surveillance law.
Thornycroft, who is white, ran up against the government in March 2002, weeks after the presidential election, when she traveled Chimanimani, 300 miles east of Harare, to pursue a story about “people having homes destroyed for being suspected of voting for the opposition.” She traveled openly as a reporter, despite not getting state accreditation and thereby violating the new media law.
She already had talked to dissidents and had set up an appointment with a local Mugabe supporter. “You have to get two sides of the story,” she said.
While waiting in a Chimanimani café for the appointment, Thornycroft noticed “that the guy opposite from me was on his cell phone and that he was making a phone call about me. But I didn’t run for my car. I didn’t try to avoid it.” Four policemen swooped in to arrest her. She spent five days in the country’s famously horrid prisons before being freed, after an outcry from the international media community about her arrest. No charges were filed against her.
Since then, she rarely spends nights at home but moves from one location to another, continuing her reporting. She has “a sixth sense of how to stay safe,” including when to take risks. She sometimes tells people, “I’m leaving now, if you have not heard from me in five hours, call a lawyer.” She has been known to break her own rules by forgetting to call home after getting engrossed in a story.
She also has myriad cover stories for when she is stopped by police, including stories about why she is in a particular place and the names of local whites she plans to visit.
None of these precautions helped, however, with government spies or the “non-uniformed agents,” such as the one who turned her in.
“The Zimbabwean CIA is bigger even than [the East German] Stasi. And because people are so much poorer, someone can make money from a tip-off – ‘a strange white woman is in town and here’s her license plate.’” It wasn’t being white, it was being a stranger in town, that put her at risk, she said, adding that a black reporter new to a town also would attract instant scrutiny.
She often was the target of attacks from the government-owned media, including a columnist’s reference to her as a “grandma lesbian.” She treated this name-calling as a joke.
“It’s when they accuse you of terrorism, something that carries the death sentence, then we went to a lawyer,” she said. She wanted to get across the message that “if you do that again, we’ll sue you. Then they turned to insults through columnists.”
Thornycroft said she rarely felt fear. But she had been hardened by reporting in Angola and the Congo, and, in South Africa, covering stories about apartheid, powerful gun runners and South Africa’s secret chemical and biological warfare projects.
Still, she said she can understand others’ fear. She said that Robert Mugabe has been more successful in stoking fear throughout his country than his predecessor, Ian Smith, or the worst of the South African apartheid chiefs. “You cannot live with fear, all the day. It’s exhausting. It’s not like the rush of excitement of a (shooting war), of covering people being killed. It’s a silent wall. You can’t see the guns. It’s the fear of not knowing what they are going to do, fear of the terrible discomfort in the state prisons.”
And the blatant brutality toward protestors has shocked her, especially the March 14 parading before TV cameras of the “grotesquely injured” Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, “staggering around, trying to walk to the courthouse...I couldn’t even recognize his face.”
In South Africa, she said, apartheid era police used to beat prisoners in the jail “but at least they were worried about their evil being seen. Here, they couldn’t care less about the cameras around. That was a terrible show.”
Thornycroft never expected to become a reporter. Her parents left Britain when she a child, “missed the plane to South Africa” and settled instead in southern Rhodesia, where they worked to build up a transport business and a tea estate. She recalled a lonely but exciting childhood. “We didn’t live in fancy houses either, like I read of the early white Rhodesians,” she said. She married a Zimbabwean, had a child, moved to Durban, South Africa, where her husband had a job, had more children and started a data processing company with her mother.
“But I had this thing burning inside my head. I had been reading a lot, was in the university then, and read about things that were familiar to me in Durban. I said to myself that I could do better than that.”
In 1973, she talked her way into a job at the Durban Daily News covering yachting. This was not about fancy folks and their boats but about telling the drama of “seeing these families battered by the Indian Ocean,” who had struggled during ocean crossings “to keep their children alive.”
She began to get an on-the-ground education about another drama: the revolt against apartheid.
“The white reporters then were completely conscious; but I had been living as a housewife, in a suburb, without much money, doing my thing,” she said.
Assigned to write a feature sidebar at a trial of a white man convicted of working with the African National Congress (ANC), she asked a colleague about a strikingly beautiful woman in the courtroom. He looked at her as if she’d been under a rock. He told her that the woman was Winnie Mandela.
She learned fast. The rallies for the jailed black protestor Steve Biko and the uprising in Soweto in the 1970s meant “you couldn’t avoid what apartheid was. My mother, who by now was in Durban, had no idea that you couldn’t travel except on buses that were reserved for whites; she had no idea that she was breaking the law by traveling on a black bus – and she didn’t care.”
Ultimately, Thornycroft worked for white-owned newspapers that challenged the government, including The Sunday Express, a sister publication of the Rand Daily Mail. Most were shut down or folded.
Then, she became a fulltime freelancer for British, U.S., Canadian and South African outlets, covering hot spots in Angola, Namibia, the Congo, as well as continuing stories in South Africa in the dying days of apartheid, including exposes of its secret chemical and biological warfare project, called Project Coast, and its scientists’ international connections. She helped expose international gun runners and mercenaries working in the region and also wrote about the early land seizures in Zimbabwe.
She returned to Zimbabwe to work from 1982 to 1991 and then continuously, after 2001. She was the first to write about Mugabe’s $10 million mansion, evidence of high living far beyond what his salary could finance, which most observers saw as tangible evidence of corruption in his regime.
In addition to reporting, Thornycroft has helped create a variety of nonprofit groups both in South Africa, before the 1994 elections, and in Zimbabwe in 1999 to help groom broadcast and print journalists for reporting challenges ahead. She has mentored journalists over the years and continues to do so today.
Thornycroft shies away from calling herself brave. She’s just a reporter, groomed in the “hard school of South Africa,” she said.
Her definition of courage comes from her second husband, Peter Wellman, news editor of the Rand Daily Mail, who went to jail rather than telling government investigators the identity of a banned Catholic priest.
“For many journalists, he set a benchmark,” she said. “ ‘You can’t collaborate with the state. We are journalists. They are policemen,’ ” she said.
As a reporter, Wellman shunned activism and advocated balance and fairness, she said. Thornycroft holds high those same values, “of being able to tell the difference between good and evil, between lies and truth.”