The South African journalist Jeremy Gordin campaigned to release innocent prisoners wrongly convicted in flawed trials. In 2008 he co-founded and became the first director of the University of the Witwatersrand Justice Project. Given his concern for the proper application of criminal law, it is a cruel coincidence that his death, aged 70, came through a break-in at his home in Johannesburg.
The Justice Project was an initiative of the university’s journalism department, in which students investigated dubious convictions, torture and abuse of prisoners, and overcrowding in detention facilities. Their findings helped to highlight previously unreported cases and resulted in many releases of men sent to jail for mistaken reasons.
They focused on controversial doctrines such as “common purpose”. South African law holds that if several persons form a common intention to prosecute any unlawful purpose, each of them is party to every offence committed by any one of them.
The Justice Project also drew attention to the catch-22 involved in parole decisions under which release was only granted if prisoners showed remorse. This meant that prisoners who insisted that they had not committed the offences for which they were convicted were forced to lie or else forgo the chance of parole.
In one successful case pursued by Gordin and the student journalists he was mentoring, the project won freedom in 2011 for Fusi Mofokeng and Tshkolo Mokoena, two men who had been arrested in 1992, towards the end of apartheid, for killing a policeman, on the basis of false statements. The actual killers went to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998 and were granted amnesty while Mofokeng and Mokoena spent 19 years in jail.
Gordin’s interest in using journalism to undo miscarriages of justice flowed from a long career in South African newspapers, in which he edited the leading financial title Business Report as well as the Sunday Independent, and from 2012 until 2015 was publisher of the Daily Sun, South Africa’s largest daily paper.
Born in Pretoria, Jeremy was the son of Micky (Mary) Awerbuch, a teacher, and Elias Gordin, a pharmacist. They were descended from Lithuanian and Latvian Jews who emigrated to South Africa from tsarist Russia. Gordin attended local schools in Pretoria except for a four-year break from 1960 in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam, where his father worked for the World Health Organization.
He completed his secondary education at Damelin college in Johannesburg before enrolling at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1971 for a course in English and philosophy. When the university closed temporarily because of the Yom Kippur war, Gordin went to Sweden for two years.
He returned to South Africa in 1977 to start a wide-ranging career in journalism, which included editorships of tabloids as well as serious broadsheets. His first job was with the Rand Daily Mail. Between 1981 and 1983 he was business editor of the weekly magazine Financial Mail.
Appointed managing editor of South Africa’s leading bookshop, Exclusive Books, he led its expansion to the country’s major cities. He was headhunted to edit Playboy’s first venture into South Africa, a shock for the country’s straitlaced pro-apartheid regime, but which Gordin celebrated by posing nude in the Johannesburg Sunday Times, with a copy of Playboy strategically placed. In another zigzag, a few months later he moved to edit Business Report.
From 2006 until 2012 he edited the Sunday Independent before taking charge at the Daily Sun, an investigative tabloid that developed a largely African readership. In one scoop, which was widely picked up by the foreign media, the paper published video images of a Mozambican immigrant being tied to the back of a police van in a small town near Johannesburg and dragged to his death after parking on the wrong side of the road.
Gordin found time to publish three books of poems and three award-winning biographies. A Long Night’s Damage: Working for the Apartheid State (1998) was a collaboration with Eugene de Kock, one of apartheid’s most notorious killers, which showed that De Kock was not an out-of-control police commander with sadistic tendencies as most media reports suggested. He was taking orders from top politicians to murder African National Congress activists.
In 2008 Gordin wrote a biography of Jacob Zuma on the eve of his becoming the country’s president. Some reviewers accused Gordin of being a Zuma apologist. He had easy access to the ANC leader for interviews and conceded that he was “sympathetic to Zuma and therefore to some extent malleable”, but felt it was important to explain the future president’s attitudes.
However, during Zuma’s two terms as president and the five years in power of his successor, Cyril Ramaphosa, Gordin became a severe critic of corruption within the ANC, to the point that in a recent column, written in the form of a letter, he advised his adult children to follow the Jewish diaspora model: “When things are clearly falling apart and the general moronicism, greed and lack of care grow very annoying … you, who have your whole lives before you, seriously need to consider going to live elsewhere. We’ve been doing it for centuries, after all.”
For the last seven years, Gordin put the wisdom he had acquired through decades of living in what he called Seffrica into a popular weekly column for Politicsweb. It was a unique combination of quotations from literary sources, short phrases in Yiddish or Afrikaans, jokes about pedantic rabbis, references to philosophy, reminiscences of chaotic teenage and student years, and memories of his parents and grandparents. But inside this weekly ragbag of witty allusions and irrelevancies readers would always find a hard core of seriousness and principle about a key issue of the day.
While house burglaries and street muggings have plagued South Africa for decades, it is rare for high-profile personalities to fall victim to apparently random murder; Gordin’s death brought many tributes from colleagues, who admired his versatility and openness to new ideas as well as his enthusiasm for mentoring young reporters.
In 1993 Gordin married Deborah Blake, then working for a book distribution company and now a journalist on the newspaper the Sowetan. She survives him, along with their children, Jake and Nina.
• Jeremy Gordin, journalist, born 6 September 1952; died 31 March 2023
