Media & Journalism
Landmark
Edna Machirori
1942 – 2024
The first Black woman to edit a mainstream Zimbabwean newspaper
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
First Black woman news editor in the country, then the first to edit a national paper outright — and she did the first of it under Rhodesian rule.
Edna Machirori trained as a journalist in the 1960s, when Rhodesian newsrooms were white, male, and closed to her on both counts. She got in by persistence and by taking the jobs nobody wanted, working on the African-readership papers that the mainstream press regarded as a sideline.
She became the first Black woman news editor in the country, at a point when that meant directing white male reporters who had never taken instruction from a Black person in their lives. After independence she rose to edit the Bulawayo Chronicle's sister titles and then, at the Financial Gazette, became the first Black Zimbabwean woman to edit a national newspaper outright.
She worked through the period when Zimbabwean journalism went from colonial censorship to a brief opening and then to a new set of pressures, and she was consistently among those arguing that a press owned by the state was not a free press whoever was in government.
She mentored a generation of Zimbabwean women journalists, many of whom have said they had no other example to follow, and continued writing and training into her seventies. She died in 2024.
She became the first Black woman news editor in the country, at a point when that meant directing white male reporters who had never taken instruction from a Black person in their lives. After independence she rose to edit the Bulawayo Chronicle's sister titles and then, at the Financial Gazette, became the first Black Zimbabwean woman to edit a national newspaper outright.
She worked through the period when Zimbabwean journalism went from colonial censorship to a brief opening and then to a new set of pressures, and she was consistently among those arguing that a press owned by the state was not a free press whoever was in government.
She mentored a generation of Zimbabwean women journalists, many of whom have said they had no other example to follow, and continued writing and training into her seventies. She died in 2024.
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