She is gone. Just like that.
I had known Pearl, Sowetan's executive editor, since the early 90s. She arrived at Rhodes University a couple of years after me, and like me, she studied journalism. Back then, she struck me as someone who often seemed lost in thought: there but not quite there, as if she were already thinking beyond the present moment, beyond the small-town buzz of campus life. She was quiet, but never cold.
Years later, we met again in the Business Day newsroom, back when Times Media Limited still operated from Diagonal Street, in that iconic diamond-shaped building in the Johannesburg CBD. The day she came in was heavy with recent loss. Mduduzi ka-Harvey, our friend and colleague, had just passed away in a car accident, and there was a funeral that weekend.
Dianne Games, our news editor then, told Pearl to come back on the Monday. When she did, she got the job filling the very gap left by Harveys sudden death. I believe she took over from me as night reporter, though not for long. She tried a beat or two crime, general news, politics getting the lay of the land, testing her footing. Then a copy-tasting position opened up, and she put up her hand.
I remember thinking she was making a mistake. I told her so. It was a stressful and often overlooked position, wedged between the editors and the sub-editors. But Pearl had a sense for where she was needed. She had seen something I hadnt. She stepped into that role and quietly became central to the production process: trusted, steady, a kind of quiet fulcrum.