The National Press Club and Unisa, in association with the Qoboza family, hosted the 14th Percy Qoboza Memorial on Wednesday night at Unisa. This lecture marked the 47 th anniversary of Black Wednesday, which commemorates the day in 1977 when the apartheid regime silenced independent voices by closing certain publications.
The memorial lecture is held annually in commemoration of 19 October 1977, the date on which the apartheid government banned The World, Weekend World and other publications. The lecture also honours the late Percy Qoboza, editor of The World and later of City Press newspapers. Percy Peter Tshidiso Qoboza was an influential black South African journalist, author, and outspoken critic of the apartheid government in South Africa during the early periods of world recognition of the problems evident in the racially divided land. His eloquent editorials did much to challenge white South Africans who were shielded from the horrors of apartheid as experienced by millions of black South Africans at the hands of the minority government This year’s lecture was delivered by a media executive and academic Phathiswa Magopeni under the theme under the theme “Freedom of Expression in the Digital Era”. Magopeni is a seasoned media personality, an expert in the communications field, she was the head of news and current affairs at the SABC in 2018.
