By Andile Lungisa, ANC NEC Member

Tshidi Madia’s death is not merely a personal loss; it is a wound in the national spirit. She stood as more than a journalist — she was a patriot whose loyalty was to truth, to people, to the unfinished promise of freedom. She understood what too many forget: that journalism in South Africa has never been a neutral craft. It has always been a battleground, first against apartheid’s censors, now against the suffocating grip of capital, patriarchy, and imperial arrogance.

Tshidi belonged to a generation forged in protest. The tremors of Fees Must Fall sharpened her conviction that journalism cannot serve elites and still claim integrity. She carried that fire into the newsroom, confronting power wherever it sought to hide, in Parliament, in corporate boardrooms, in foreign embassies. Who can forget when she stood toe-to-toe with the arrogance of the Trump administration, refusing to let South Africa be reduced to a colonial satellite? In that moment, she embodied our sovereignty. She spoke not just as a reporter, but as a defender of the dignity of a nation.

Yet Tshidi was not alone in this struggle. She was part of a new cohort of fearless journalists who have refused silence, who refuse to be bought, who are carrying forward the liberation tradition of Ruth First, Nat Nakasa, and Zwelakhe Sisulu. With her stand side by side with Sifiso Mahlangu of The Star Newspaper, Mawande AmaShabalala of the Sunday World, Lizeka Tandwa and Kgothatso Madisa of the Sunday Times, Samkele Maseko and Natasha Phiri at the SABC, Nomazima Nkosi at the Herald Newspaper, Queenin Masuabi at the Daily Maverick, Thando Maeko at the Business Day, Siyamthanda Capa and Sithandiwe Velaphi at News 24, Norman Masungwini at the City Press, Junior Khumalo at Newzroom Africa, Ziyanda Ngcobo at eNCA, Aphiwe Deklerk and Asanda Nini at the Daily Dispatch. They, like Tshidi, understand that to write in this country is to fight for accountability, for truth, for the people.

And beyond them, the flame is being taken up by the new arrivals in the field, the ones whose voices are only beginning to carve their place, but whose pens already burn with defiance: Lunga Mzangwe and Mandisa Mashego at the Mail and Guardian, Lunga Simelane at City Press, Alpha Ramushwana at EWN. These are not just names; they are the future of a journalism that refuses capture. They are proof that Tshidi’s fire did not die with her; it spreads.

To honour Tshidi is not only to mourn her. It is to recognise that she has passed the torch. The question is whether we, journalists, activists, and citizens, will have the courage to keep it burning. South Africa does not need journalists who bow before boardrooms or play stenographer to the powerful. It needs truth-tellers who understand that to love this country is to demand better of it. It needs patriots who refuse silence, who know that democracy lives and dies on the willingness of its people to hold power accountable.

Tshidi Madia’s life is therefore not only memory; it is a mandate. To her comrades still fighting in newsrooms across this land, and to the newcomers sharpening their pens, her message is clear: Do not bow. Do not be captured. Do not be silent.

Rest well, daughter of the soil. Your fire has not gone out. It burns now in those who stood with you, and in those who come after you. From your silence shall rise a thousand voices, unbought, unbowed, unafraid because you understood Karl Marx in his key work, Capital, published in 1867, when he explained that “the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production”. The colonial white capitalists found that people would not sell their labour to them if they could make a living from the land. They needed to be forced to work and thus involuntarily enter into a capital-wage dynamic. So, everywhere land dispossession has been necessary for capitalism to create a class of wage workers, the exploitation of whom is the source of all capitalist profit. Marx described land dispossession (or “primitive accumulation”) as capitalism’s “original sin”. Lala ngoxolo, Tshidi Madia. You were the people’s journalist and the nation’s conscience.

Aluta continua!

 The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.

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