Media & Journalism
Landmark
Geoffrey Nyarota
1951 – 2025
Broke Willowgate, and founded the paper that outsold the state's
Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the Zimbabwe Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
His reporting brought down five of Mugabe's ministers, and cost him his job. He started his own paper, it overtook the Herald in a year, it was bombed twice, and the government closed it.
Geoffrey Nyarota was born in January 1951 in Southern Rhodesia. As editor of the Bulawayo Chronicle in 1989 he and his deputy Davison Maruziva exposed the Willowgate scandal — officials buying cars at wholesale prices and reselling them at enormous profit. Five cabinet ministers resigned; Nyarota was removed from his post for what the authorities called overzealousness.
In 1999 he founded the Daily News under the motto "Telling it like it is". Within a year it passed the state-owned Herald at 105,000 copies a day. The paper was bombed twice, allegedly by the security forces, and closed by the government in September 2003. He was arrested six times as editor and survived an assassination plot by the secret police in 2000. He won the International Press Freedom Award in 2001, and the Golden Pen of Freedom and UNESCO's Guillermo Cano Prize in 2002. He left Zimbabwe in 2003, taught at Bard, held a Nieman fellowship at Harvard, and published his memoir Against the Grain in 2006. He died in Harare on 22 March 2025.
In 1999 he founded the Daily News under the motto "Telling it like it is". Within a year it passed the state-owned Herald at 105,000 copies a day. The paper was bombed twice, allegedly by the security forces, and closed by the government in September 2003. He was arrested six times as editor and survived an assassination plot by the secret police in 2000. He won the International Press Freedom Award in 2001, and the Golden Pen of Freedom and UNESCO's Guillermo Cano Prize in 2002. He left Zimbabwe in 2003, taught at Bard, held a Nieman fellowship at Harvard, and published his memoir Against the Grain in 2006. He died in Harare on 22 March 2025.
- Wikipedia — Geoffrey Nyarota
- Nieman Reports — Remembering Geoffrey Nyarota, titan of Zimbabwean journalism
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