By Kemiso Wessie
Anthea Garman’s self-description is as succinct as it is revealing. “Curious,” she declares, before qualifying, “Easily bored.” It’s a trait that demands constant stimulation. “I need something to get my brain working,” she explains. Without such intellectual engagement, she confesses, she’d be left feeling flat and uninspired but in a decade-long career as a journalist she found her match.
Today she identifies as an ex-journalist, having found a passion in academia. As a professor in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown), South Africa, she has discovered the joy of shaping young minds.
Garman describes the process of witnessing a student’s growth, development, and increasing authority as they accumulate knowledge and capability as “a wonderful privilege.” Her enthusiasm for her role is infectious, “I really love working with young people,” she beams. Unlike many of her peers who lament feeling out of touch with younger generations, she relishes the constant influx of new perspectives in the waves of new students.
Born and raised in Johannesburg, Garman reminisces about her childhood spent playing outside in suburban Kensington. She later pursued a BA degree at the University of the Witwatersrand, navigating a period where she felt torn between her interests in math, science, and literature. School’s tendency to pigeonhole students into rigid categories: the arty type, the literary type, the science type, or the sports type, left her feeling undecided. A meeting with a course counsellor, who suggested journalism would be a good fit, changed her path. In journalism, she discovered a space where her diverse interests could coexist and flourish.
Garman’s career began at the Rand Daily Mail, part of South African Associated Newspapers. “I started as a cadet, a trainee journalist,” she recalls. “They sent me to Cape Town to work on the Cape Times and then back to Joburg to work on the Sunday Times.” After three years, a job offer in Pietermaritzburg piqued her interest. “I thought, that sounds interesting. I’ll see more parts of the world.”
She moved to Pietermaritzburg, joining African Enterprise, a church-based NGO involved in reconciliation work during the tumultuous 1980s in South Africa. “South Africa was living under the states of emergency, the last days of apartheid,” she reflects. After five years, she transitioned to the Natal Witness (now called The Witness), where she spent 13 formative years reporting, sub-editing, running the features section, focusing on layout and design and eventually as an assistant editor.
In 1997, sensing a shift in the newspaper industry, Garman made a pivotal decision. “I had an early feeling that things in newspapers were changing,” as digitisation was starting to take hold, and people were losing their jobs. “So when a job at Rhodes University came up, I came for an interview and got the job. I’ve been here ever since,” she adds.
Teaching at Rhodes has presented Garman with constant challenges as each new wave of students brings fresh concerns and perspectives. “Today, we deal with young people who have lived their entire lives in the digital age. When I first arrived, we didn’t have ubiquitous cell phones or internet access,” she explains. “There have been very big changes in how we consume and create media.”
Despite these challenges, Garman finds teaching immensely rewarding. “It’s a constant challenge,” she admits. “Sometimes, it feels almost too big. We don’t always know what’s going on out there or what we should teach. She adds that the question of whether people will still be journalists is a real one, but it’s these challenges that keep the work engaging.
As a researcher, Prof. Garman’s interests include: talking and listening in the public sphere, citizenship and the media, creative nonfiction writing, creativity and the imagination,, and journalism practice.
Journalism isn’t just about conveying information, “It creates a public space where we can talk, discover, and make decisions,” she explains. Garman was fascinated by how reporting could uncover hidden truths and influence policies.
Her interest in the media’s role in citizenship grew when Herman Wasserman joined Rhodes University (now at Stellenbosch University). The two proposed a project on media and citizenship, exploring how media could enable South Africans to feel they had a stake in the country.
A conference encounter with Australian ‘listening theorists’ further influenced her work. They posed a crucial question: What if people speak and nobody listens? This idea, that those with power must listen, shifted her perspective, “It made me realise the power of listening,” she states. This focus on listening was evident during the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall movement. “We saw that when people listened, things happened,” Garman notes. This eventually led to a project called “License to Talk,” which explored how people communicate in public, particularly on social media.
Through her diverse research interests and experiences, Garman underscores the critical role of both speaking and listening in shaping a more engaged and empathetic public sphere.
For Prof. Garman, a good journalist embodies a blend of curiosity, empathy, and a sense of service. “I think it’s got to be somebody who’s very interested in how the world works,” she says. “It’s got to be somebody who wants to learn, who doesn’t have a preconceived idea of knowing what’s going on.” She sees journalists as proxies for the public. “You have to bear in your heart who those other people are,” she says. “I am asking these questions on behalf of whom I serve, not just for my own curiosity or career.”
The most important lesson Prof. Garman has learned throughout her career didn’t come from a single piece of advice, but rather from the collective wisdom of those around her. Over time she has learned the value of patience and reflection leading her to a quieter, more contemplative stance. “Weirdly, I’ve become less loud,” Garman muses. Through this journey, she has embraced the power of thoughtful silence, allowing her to listen and respond more effectively when it truly matters.
If Professor Garman could host a dinner with three figures, her guest list would reflect her engagement with ideas that challenge conventional wisdom and foster creative thought. “I’m always interested in people who upend our comfortable understandings of the world,” she says.
First on her list is David Graeber, the late anthropologist whose The Dawn of Everything alongside David Wengrow challenged the idea of a linear progression from egalitarian to hierarchical societies. Next would be Elizabeth Gilbert, whose Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear profoundly shaped Garman’s views on creativity. Lastly, she would invite Kopano Ratele, author of The World Looks Like This From Here and a theorist of masculinity whose research on gender-based violence is humane and innovative.
Outside of academia, Professor Garman finds solace and inspiration in several personal hobbies. Gardening stands out as a particularly therapeutic activity for her. “It’s very much a place where a lot of the anger and sorrows of the world get buried in the soil,” she says. The act of digging, clipping, and planning helps her unwind and recharge. Collage making and swimming are other passions, though Garman admits she does not get to swim as much as she’d like. She is an avid reader and writer, having previously run a writing group, bringing together poets, playwrights, journalists, and academics once a week to create and critique low-stakes creative writing.
If Professor Garman could choose a superpower, it would be flying. She attributes this desire to her childhood experiences living in high-rise apartments, where she relished the expansive views, the feeling of being above it all, and seeing the world from a new vantage point, “You get to see how it all works,” she adds. Though her choice of superpower is flying, one might argue that she has already given others the power to soar in their understanding of human communication and journalism.