By Sam Mathe
“I guess I with my pen must have been a small, but troublesome thorn in the side of the mighty regime or else I would not have been accorded the honour of a free five-month holiday at one of its guesthouses.”
Juby Mayet was a writer, journalist and political activist who blazed a trail for women in journalism and equal rights in the workplace. At the time when the media caricatured women as beauty queens, domestic workers and shebeen queens Mayet’s writings reflected a desire and advocacy for gender equality as well as social justice.
She was born Zubeida Mayet on 27 December 1937 in Vrededorp (Fietas), a so-called coloured settlement in Johannesburg. In high school she was a runners-up in a writers’ competition organised by The New Age newspaper edited by Ruth First. An avid reader and aspiring writer from early childhood, her favourite writers included Ernest Hemingway, James Hardley Chase and Stephen King.
After high school Juby was trained as a teacher at Fordsburg Teachers College but opted for journalism after graduating, a decision that displeased her parents. They had to be convinced by the proprietor of Drum Publications himself, Jim Bailey. She joined the Golden City Post in December 1957 as a cub reporter by-lined as Sharon Davis, a pen name from her school days inspired by her love for Sammy Davis records and the biblical line in the book of Song of Solomon: “I am the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys.”
She wrote news reports, feature articles, columns and short stories. Her children’s column, Sharon’s Gang was an institution and was later taken over by Bessie Head when she was away on maternity leave. Juby was also Betty Human and Pat Baker (cookery) and wrote Dear Dolly as the agony aunt although the column is mainly associated with Dolly Hassim who started as Jim Bailey’s secretary.
In this heady, exciting atmosphere she worked with an illustrious breed of writers and photographers including Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi, Nat Nakasa, Peter Magubane and Bob Gosani. A Malay by birth, in 1968 she was forced to be reclassified as Indian by the minister of interior under the Population Registration Act of 1950, an act that really incensed her.
In 1975 she joined the Union of Black Journalists (UBJ), founded in 1973 with a Nieman fellow Joe Tlholoe as its first president. The union served as a platform for black journalists and other media workers to express their dissatisfaction with the status quo under apartheid. This they did officially through the UBJ Bulletin, an in-house publication that was banned in 1976.
Her house was raided and copies were confiscated from a filing cabinet. On 19 October 1977 the Union of Black Journalists was banned alongside seventeen other organisations and publications in a clampdown meant to silence dissident anti-apartheid voices. Casualties included The World newspaper, edited by Percy Qoboza. He was detained with his deputy, Aggrey Klaaste. Mayet was also a member of Writers Association of South Africa, an organisation that rose from the ashes of the 1977 clampdown dubbed Black Wednesday.
She contributed to its journal, Asizothula (We Wont Be Silenced) and The Worker, a mouthpiece of the working class issued by the Media Workers Support Committee. Her political and trade union activities incurred the wrath of the state and in 1978 Juby was detained for five months at Johannesburg Prison (The Fort) under Section 10 of the Internal Security Act. Upon release she was served with a five-year banning order and house arrest. Between 1967 and 1979 she was refused a passport nine times.
His then twelve-year-old second-born son, Sam was also denied passport to leave the country and study at Waterford Kamhlaba in Swaziland. In July 1977 when Mayet was working at The Voice newspaper as deputy chief sub-editor, she was invited by a German organisation called Dienste in Overzee through the ecumenical news service of the South African Council of Churches, Ecunews, to visit Germany for a month in September.
This was another disappointing episode when she couldn’t go because she was refused a passport. Constant police harassment and surveillance made it impossible for her to continue practising as a journalist. In 1979 she was detained for four months and slapped with a five-year banning order. Despite the difficult circumstances, she said it was not all doom and gloom as she enjoyed taking the mickey out of apartheid and its pettiness.
One of the humorous episodes she remembered was when she gatecrashed the wedding of Harry Oppenheimer’s daughter by pretending to be a photographer. As a trailblazer and inspiration for women journalists, Juby Mayet’s contribution didn’t go unnoticed.
In 2017 at the ripe old age of eighty she was honoured with the Allan Kirkland Soga Lifetime Achievement Award at the Standard Bank Sikuvile Journalism Awards. Other accolades include the Lifetime Achiever Award for Women in Writing (2000) and the Steve Biko International Peace Award (2013).
Mayet passed away on 13 April 2019 at her home in Lenasia, Johannesburg where for many years she worked for The Voice newspaper. She left behind twenty grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. Freedom Writer: My Life and Times, an autobiography by Juby Mayet was released in 2022.
