AIJC 2018

In May 2015, I sat across from an academic, who held a human skull in her hand and told me it belonged to one of the thousands of unidentified dead in Gauteng. It was the beginning of a storyline that I would follow for two years, from Hillbrow Mortuary, watching autopsies, to a pauper’s graveyard in Soweto, where I counted as babies’ bodies were stacked into unmarked graves. I could not let go of the idea that there were all these people out there who did not know that their brother or mother or husband or daughter was dead: how was it possible that this was not a national scandal?
The resulting story series won a gold Kavli award, the highest honour in international science journalism.