Gloria Negri was preparing for a reporting trip to South Africa for
The Boston Globe. Days before she was about to leave, she slipped on ice
and broke her leg. A doctor told her the trip was out of the question.
Negri decided otherwise.
It was early 1975, a time when editors in US newsrooms were still
reluctant to send women to the world’s trouble spots or let them report
on complicated topics such as apartheid. Negri headed out and wore a
cast for the first three weeks of an assignment that would take her from
Parliament in Cape Town to the slums of Soweto, to interviews with
government leaders, freedom fighters, banned people, and oppressed
township dwellers.
“I knew I needed to go right away, or else they’d send someone else,” she recalled Thursday.