Gwen Lister

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Gwen Lister, born in East London 5 Dec 1953, is a journalist. After receiving a bachelor’s degree from the University of Cape Town in 1975, she went to work as a journalist at Namibia's Windhoek Advertiser. In 1978 she co-founded with Hannes Smith, the Namibian weekly Windhoek Observer where as political editor she criticised South Africa's apartheid practices in her homeland. This led to several unsuccessful prosecutions and the 1984 banning of the newspaper. She successfully appealed against the move, but was demoted by the paper's management leading to a walkout and the dismissal of several colleagues. Despite draconian apartheid government efforts to frustrate her, she launched The Namibian a provocatively named independent paper in August 1985. The newspaper would expose human rights violations by South Africa's occupying forces. This resulted in more harassment, an advertising boycott, and in October 1988, an attack by the Afrikaner vigilante group the Wit Wolwe in which the newspaper's offices were burned down[1]. A few months earlier, while pregnant, she was detained, and confined to the Windhoek magisterial district. Her passport was confiscated and she was required to report to the police station several times a week[2]. It would later emerge that South Africa's notorious Civil Co-operation Bureau had planned to poison Lister[3]. Lister helped establish the Media Institute of Southern Africa[4]. In 2004 she received the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation[5]

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