Beverley Roos-Muller on The Role of Fearless Journalism

Dr Beverley Roos-Muller is a former academic who lectured in the Humanities Faculty at the University of Cape Town, after spending her earlier career as a young journalist at the CapeArgus. She remains a broadcaster and writer on social, political and literary matters. As an anti-apartheid activist in the 1980s, she was the spokesperson for the multi-organisational Open City campaign opposing the Group Areas Act, and was a delegate to Lusaka with the Five Freedoms Forum in 1989 during pre-negotiation discussions.

Her book on the Boer experience of the war, Bullet in the Heart: Four brothers ride to war 1899-1902, was published 2023 by JBall. She co-authored and edited Vuur in sy Vingers, about the poet NP Van Wyk Louw, with Louw’s son-in-law, her late husband Prof Ampie Muller,(published in 2020).

Her latest book reveals the full story behind the killing of seven young men by police in Gugulethu in Cape Town In 1986. The nation was told as part of a false narrative that they belonged to a terrorist MK cell plotting an attack on a police unit. An inquest followed, then a dramatic trial against journalist Tony Weaver in 1987, and a second inquest in 1989 that again exonerated the police. Finally, ten years later, Eugene de Kock Vlakplaas unit was exposed at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for having organised the cold-blooded killings. Yet it was their only Cape expedition; that, and their real purpose, still remained hidden. In her latest book, Hunting the Seven, Beverley Roos-Muller reveals her own decades-long connection to the case, and her search for the truth about their executions that remained shrouded in lies and mystery until now.

Beverley joins the Cape Town Press Club to talk about the role that fearless journalism played.