Zubeida Jaffer is detained, while pregnant, by the security police under Apartheid regulations

Zubeida Jaffer, former reporter from the Cape Times and her husband John Issel, were detained by the security police on 31 January 1986. Jaffer who was three months pregnant at the time she was put into isolation, with no access to a doctor, and her lawyer was also detained. At the time of her detention she was amongst 335 other people who were detained under the State of Emergency regulations.

Jaffer was detained more than once as she was also held in police custody between August-October 1980 in solitary confinement and charged with possession of banned books. She was released on bail and finally acquitted in February 1981.  After she joined the Cape Times, a Cape Town daily newspaper, within months she attracted the attention of the security police with an article that exposed police brutality on the Cape Flats in July 1980.

She was detained, tortured and poisoned by Spyker van Wyk. Officer Hernus JP ‘Spyker’ van Wyk is the individual most consistently associated with torture in the Western Cape over a thirty year period. In 1981 Jaffer left the Cape Times due to her discontentment with political interference in her work as a journalist. That same year her passport was withdrawn and she was not allowed travel to until 1990. In 1988 she was charged and convicted for obstructing a police man, but was acquitted on appeal. 

In 1994, Jaffer was the recipient of the Percy Qoboza Foreign Journalist Award presented annually to an African journalist by the US-based National Association of Black Journalists. She became the first woman on the African continent to receive this award.