Baldwin Ndaba remembered as ‘a newspaper man’s reporter’

The South African National Editors’ Forum has paid tribute to journalist Baldwin Ndaba, whose death on Friday has left colleagues, friends and South Africa’s media fraternity mourning the loss of a reporter remembered as fearless, humane and deeply committed to public accountability journalism. For those who worked alongside him, Ndaba was more than a byline. He belonged to a generation of journalists who believed journalism was not simply a profession but a public trust, one that demanded courage, humility and an unwavering commitment to truth. Veteran journalist Jovial Rantao described Ndaba as a “brilliant-cut rough stone”, drawing a poignant connection between the reporter’s beginnings and the city where his craft was forged. There was, Rantao reflected, a certain poetry in the fact that Ndaba learnt journalism in Kimberley, a city built on the harsh beauty of diamonds, where something rough was pulled from the earth, painstakingly shaped and revealed as something extraordinary. Ndaba cut his teeth at the Diamond Fields Advertiser, a newsroom long regarded as a breeding ground for some of South Africa’s finest journalists. Rantao said the newspaper recognised in Ndaba “a stone worth cutting through the unforgiving rigour of provincial reporting and through the grit and grunt of no-fear investigative work”. Out of those demanding early years emerged a reporter with both sharp instincts and a deeply human touch, “fearless yet grounded, incisive yet deeply humane”. His talent would soon attract the attention of Independent Media and eventually The Star, then regarded as the country’s paper of record. “He arrived at Sauer Street not as a man daunted by the bigger room but as one who had always known he belonged in it. “He carved out a formidable beat covering the sprawling, shadowy corridors of Gauteng provincial government and the legislature, territory fertile with intrigue, self-dealing and the slow erosion of public trust. From those corridors, he extracted scoo