A cyclone, a dancer, horses and a heist: delve into our award-winning journalists' work

Several TimesLIVE and Sunday Times journalists have been awarded for their work on topics including the Durban July, child rapists, and cyclone damage in Mozambique.

In the Western Cape regional of the 2020 Vodacom Journalist of the Year Award, Esa Alexander was named photographer of the year for a portfolio illustrating clashes in Cape Town city centre between police and refugees.

In the KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga regionals, Sunday Times photographer Sandile Ndlovu, political journalist Zimasa Matiwane and seasoned court journalist Tania Broughton were named winners, while Lwandile Bhengu was a Young Journalist nominee.

Ndlovu scooped the photography category for his front-page picture in the Sunday Times showing how this year's Vodacom Durban July was affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. The event was held behind closed doors and virtually for the first time in its history.

He said: “When the eThekwini municipality announced that the Durban July would for the first time be held virtually, behind that fence of the Greyville racecourse, photographers were suddenly left outside — there was no entry allowed.

“It had almost been a tradition that pictures from the Durban July would make a big feature in the Sunday papers, and despite this year being an anomaly in every way possible, I was not going to break that tradition.”

He captured a lone security guard armed with a thermometer, walking past a picture of horses. It looked as if the security guard was taking their temperatures.

In the investigative section, Broughton won for her series of articles that appeared in the Sunday Times on how an Umlazi magistrate showed mercy to child rapists and let them off the hook.

Matiwane impressed the judging panel in the politics category with her Sunday Times lead story in November last year titled Education MEC's 'faulty Merc' scam costs taxpayer R100k a month.

She looked at how officials answering to education MEC Kwazi Mshengu appeared to have forged a letter from a Mercedes-Benz dealership advising him not to make use of a one-year-old Mercedes-Benz GLE 350 because it was so unsafe it could kill him.

Meanwhile, at the Standard Bank Sikuvile Awards, Graeme Hosken won in the hard-news category for his reporting on the R300m Johann Rupert jewel heist.  

The investigation took readers inside the audacious heist that netted thieves R300m in jewellery belonging to the SA billionaire in a nine-hour operation described as the biggest jewellery theft in the country's history.

A country broken by force of nature

At the same awards, photographer Alaister Russell won in the category for feature photographs for his work in documenting the devastation left behind in Mozambique after deadly Cyclone Idai in 2019.  

Russell's work also formed part of a bigger, multipart feature titled Tales from Begaja: A year after Cyclone Idai, for which a team of our multimedia reporters won the Gauteng regional award for innovation in journalism at the 2020 Vodacom Journalist of the Year Awards.

Russell, Emile Bosch and Reinart Toerien, under the guidance of head of multimedia Scott Smith, were named as the winners on Thursday.

The feature, published on TimesLIVE in May this year, used pictures, videos, an interactive map and comparative satellite images to illustrate the impact of Cyclone Idai, which affected 1.85m people in central Mozambique in March 2019, and showed how those communities had moved on, one year later.

The storm left more than 1,300 people dead across Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi.

View the full feature:

“From the outset, we knew that a project like this would require blood, sweat and all of the tears,” said Smith. “Not only were our photographer and videographer [Russell and Bosch] going to operate in a foreign country, but they would also be travelling thousands of kilometres to reach areas that had essentially been wiped off the map by the cyclone.”

He added: “It was also touch and go whether the team would go at all because Covid-19 had just arrived in SA and the future was unknown. We made the decision, though, and the team returned home safely shortly before President Cyril Ramaphosa closed the country’s borders.”

Russell had covered the tragic scenes in Mozambique in 2019 shortly after the cyclone hit. The idea this year was to do a comprehensive multimedia comparison to show how communities and people were affected then, and how things had changed a year later.

The project was by its nature incredibly visual and emotional, said video editor Toerien. At its core were “before and after” elements, along with the deeply personal stories of the communities hardest hit by the disaster.

“We set out to have community members tell their stories through multiple videos and picture portraits,” he said. “One of the most moving stories came from Fatima Bernardo, a woman who, despite surviving the devastation, had to bury her son while her daughter’s body was never found.”

Watch this video:

Photos taken of landmarks, people and certain areas in 2019 were meticulously retaken in the exact same spots this year to highlight the devastation and show the recovery.  

The team also obtained satellite and Google Earth images to create interactive scrolling maps showing how the cyclone's flooding inundated landscapes and communities.

Bosch and Russell also tracked down geographic plot points of the graves of many of those who had died in the disaster, which then formed the foundation of an interactive commemorative map.

Spotlight on the stage

Also at the Gauteng regionals of the 2020 Vodacom Journalist of the Year Awards, the Sunday Times' Alon Skuy won in the photography category for his series of images titled Musa's struggle and search for the stage, showing professional dancer Musa Motha, who dances on crutches.

Motha was a rising football player when, at the age of 11, he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a type of cancer that affects young people in particular and produces immature bone. As a result, his leg was amputated below the knee.

Musa refocused his ambitions on his love for music, and took up dance. He has learnt how to use gravity and his crutches, together with the physical flexibility he acquired as a football player, to perfect his moves. He performs with the Vuyani Dance Theatre in Johannesburg.

“His story has inspired many people and he takes pride in proving what can be achieved if one puts one's mind to something,” said Skuy.

The following images formed part of Skuy's award-winning series: