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In the blood-soaked political landscape of KwaZulu-Natal during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when apartheid-sponsored violence between the ANC and the IFP was tearing communities apart and claiming lives by the hundreds, one man chose a different kind of power — the power of bringing people into the same room. That man was Khaba Mkhize, veteran journalist, playwright, peace broker, and the first black regional manager of the SABC in KwaZulu-Natal.
His legacy came into sharp focus recently at a memorial lecture held at the Umhlanga KZN Sharks Board, where former KwaZulu-Natal Premier and current chairperson of the portfolio committee on Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Dr Zweli Mkhize, delivered a deeply personal tribute to the man he regarded as a big brother. Khaba passed away on 24 July 2016, aged 70, but the weight of what he built — in newsrooms, in communities, and in the silences between warring factions — continues to resonate.
Dr Zweli Mkhize, who first met Khaba as a young medical student and later worked alongside him professionally, described him as someone whose influence defied any single category. “He believed in peace and reconciliation. He has written his name on our hearts,” Zweli said. That is not the language of a eulogy. It is the language of a generation that watched one man hold a fractured society together with nothing but conviction and conversation.
For young Africans navigating today’s equally fractured information landscape — where social media amplifies division as fast as it spreads news — Khaba Mkhize’s story is less a history lesson and more a blueprint. Journalism, at its most powerful, does not just report on the world. It changes it.
