Zubeida Jaffer has been a journalist for the past 27 years. She works independently from her home in Wynberg Cape and is an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for African Studies.

She holds an MSc degree in journalism from Columbia University in New York and bachelor degrees from the Rhodes University and the University of Cape Town.

She started her career at the Cape Times in 1980 and also spent a short stint at the Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg. She has written for a wide-range of publications in South Africa and abroad(see her full CV).  Her work has earned her numerous local and international awards. These include the Muslim Views Achiever Award as well as the Honor Medal for Distinguished Service to Journalism from the University of Missouri in the USA. She is also the first woman in Africa to have won the coveted foreign journalist award from the National Association of Black Journalists in the USA.

 Ms Jaffer is known too for her community activism which has earned her at least two spells in apartheid South Africa’s notorious detention centres.

Her memoir, Our Generation, eloquently tells the story of her emotional journey through the years of South Africa’s turbulence into a new democracy. Her latest book, Love in the Time of Treason, has been described as a tour de force.