Giving to RU

Francis Mdlongwa: Director

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Francis Mdlongwa

Francis Mdlongwa is head of Rhodes University’s Sol Plaatje Institute (SPI) for Media Leadership. He joined the SPI -- Africa’s only university-level institute which trains graduates and editors in media leadership and management – in 2004.

Mdlongwa distinguished himself as an international desk editor, bureau chief and senior roving international correspondent of Reuters, the world’s leading news agency, which employed him in several world capitals, including London, Nairobi and Harare, in the 1980s and 1990s.

He broke the story of the 1991 overthrow of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and covered Africa’s civil wars and peace in diverse countries stretching from Sudan and Ethiopia in the North to Angola and Lesotho in the South. He reported on landmark elections in the 1990s which ushered in multi-party democracy in countries such as South Africa, Malawi and Kenya.

Mdlongwa has headed several African media. He has been Group Editor-in-Chief of Associated Newspapers, publishers of Zimbabwe’s Daily News, which was banned by the government in 2003; he was Editor-in-Chief of the Financial Gazette, an authoritative financial newspaper based in Harare, for nearly a decade; and he was head of news and current affairs at Channel Africa, the external news service of the Johannesburg-based South African Broadcasting Corporation.

He is a media consultant who has run journalism and media management training programmes in the former Eastern Bloc nations of Serbia and Montenegro, and in many African countries such as Botswana, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa and Zimbabwe, working on behalf of the International Research & Exchanges Board based in Washington, DC, and the Reuters Foundation.

For four years since 2004, he taught journalism courses such as news and features writing; news analysis and editorial and opinion pieces; and economics, business and financial reporting at Addis Ababa University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Between 2009 and 2010, he led a team of international academics which designed and established the first media management training programme in the Middle East. Based at Cairo University – Egypt’s oldest university -- the programme was taught by several international academics, including Mdlongwa. He holds an MBA in Global Management from Durham University in the United Kingdom.

Selected Academic Publications:

A few selected non-academic publications:

Last Modified: Tue, 06 Aug 2019 16:35:17 SAST