We’ll always have Qunu

It was 3.30am on 6 December, 2013, the morning after Nelson Mandela died.

I had been outside his Houghton home when, about three hours before the official announcement was made, my then deputy editor Hendri Pelser told me to make the call on whether to stop the presses.

It was a decision that could have cost the company hundreds of thousands of rands and reputational damage, had it been wrong, and I had only been at The Citizen for two months.

Well, I made the decision to stop printing; he did, and that night was when I discovered the steel inside Yadhana Jadoo.

Yadhana anchored the office, and, between her, Hendri and the others who came in voluntarily after an already long day at the office, we put out a powerful package that did justice to the great man.

Afterwards, when everyone had left and the building had returned to its spooky emptiness, Yadhana turned to me while we were enjoying a cigarette and said, “Good job. You know we have to go to Qunu, right?”

And that was Yadhana.

Always planning ahead, always looking for the next great story, to bring tomorrow’s news to readers today.

The trip duly happened, and as these things go, it was epic.

But right from the start, Yadhana, Alex Mitchley, Refilwe Modise, Ngwako Modjadji and I walked straight into a shitshow.

Lost in the utter darkness of a stormy Qunu night, stuck in the mud, torrential rain, exhausted, tempers flaring, we eventually found our lodgings early in the morning.

Our poor host was completely unprepared and wanted to give her bed up for us, but Yadhana refused.

I landed up on a couch pullout bed, while Yadhana bounced between sleeping next to me and the truck we had travelled in.

The next day, after experiencing traditional rural life’s rigours of washing in a bucket and using a long drop, a group decision was made to find somewhere we could at least charge our devices because we felt so guilty about using up our host’s prepaid electricity.

The simplicity and peace of her home, which our host so willingly shared, touched all of us, with hardly a word spoken on the 60km trip back to the raucousness of town.

With accommodation at a premium, Yadhana and I shared a room with a single double bed while the guys made their own plan, which involved someone sleeping on a couch.

There’s more, but editorially, we nailed the funeral. We also nailed more than a few bottles of wine and beer, and I still use the decorative tin I bought my Jack Daniels in.

It was a trip for the books and anyone’s cry of “Quuuunnuu!” at odd hours was enough to send us into paroxysms of laughter for months after the event.

After the trip, our friendship gelled and expanded to beyond the newsroom, where we shared in each other’s lives and of our lives with each other.

We would drive home together after work to ensure each other’s safety, plot stories, angles, critique each other’s work, feed off each other and push each other to do better, be better, all the time.

Yadhana was relentless about doing the best she possibly could.

In 2014, Yadhana won The Citizen’s top award: journalist of the year. I unexpectedly won it in 2015, tried to compete with her in 2016 and was utterly exhausted by the friendly competition between us in 2017 when she again won so effortlessly.

When news would break at 4pm ahead of our 6pm deadline, Yadhana always knew who to call and, possibly more importantly, what questions to ask.

There were times we would team up on stories, or on putting the paper to bed and, with her temperament, it was soon evident she could get the most out of our team while I handled the operational side.

And this was the essence of Yadhana: her love for people and her craft.

The telling of people’s history in their words was her particular project and the death of Ahmed Kathrada, someone she greatly admired, hit her particularly hard. As did news of her father’s failing health.

In true Yadhana style, she shot off home and helped nurse him back to health, while still contributing to the paper.

Yadhana had an indomitable spirit and, when she asked me if she would succeed in the position of news editor, I said there was no one better or who I would be more willing to support in the position.

For anyone who’s never been there, it’s the hardest job in the newsroom and will chew you up if you let it.

Yadhana was promoted to the position and had just begun stamping her authority on the paper.

It was no secret the newsroom had been tumultuous of late and Yadhana’s appointment as news editor brought calm to a place that has seen its fair share of upheavals.

Under new deputy editor Brendan Seery the paper had already seen an uptick in sales and I knew, with Yadhana in the saddle, The Citizen would begin clawing back much of what we had lost.

Pure love, strength of character and purpose coupled with a steely resolve were her gifts to us.

Now, even with a Yadhana-sized hole in our universe, it’s up to us to carry on and do better, be better.

And we’ll always have Qunu.

This article was written in memoriam of Yadhana Jadoo, who passed away aged 34 on 25 April after suddenly taking ill while attending a training course for young African journalists in Egypt.

She was laid to rest in Pietermaritzburg this weekend.