TRIBUTE: In Memoriam: Estelle Ellis, Daily Maverick’s ‘lisquito’-in-chief, is laid to rest

{JSON.stringify(article.attachments[0], null, 2)} --> ‘Estelle’s compassion shone through her writing and made me a more caring person too — her life was too short, but her memory will be a blessing!” Readers remember a journalist whom one calls the Mother Theresa of South Africa. An author, philanthropist, humanitarian and journalist, Estelle lived to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Long live Estelle’s spirit, long live.

As our colleague Estelle Ellis is laid to rest later today, we remember what one reader calls our “Inkanyezi” – our firefly, a small light bringing relief in the dark.

Estelle herself saw the spirit animal of journalism as being the “lisquito”. Say what? A combination of a lion and a mosquito – a lion for the powerless, a mosquito badgering the powerful to be better. We will all strive to be lisquitos in her honour.

Thank you for your wonderful words. We publish them here as a long ribbon of love for Estelle.

I’ve been reflecting a lot over the last few days on Estelle’s legacy, and I just wanted to say two things.

The first is that journalism, as we all know, is a brutal industry. I recently read that the average time someone works as a journalist in the US before leaving due to burnout is under 10 years.

For Estelle to still be a working journalist after three decades – and not just any working journalist, one of the hardest-working journalists I’ve ever met – says an enormous amount both about her personal resilience and her incredible commitment to this job. Estelle was a journalist’s journalist: one of a kind whom we seem to find less and less, whose relationship to journalism is less that of a job or a profession and more like something akin to a calling.

I don’t think I have ever met a journalist more truly committed than Estelle. Someone who was genuinely, sincerely not in it for awards, or glory, or status, or job titles, or salary. Someone who just cared with every fibre of her being about doing what she could to improve life for ordinary people in this country she loved so deeply.

One of the major lessons for me has also been that in our industry, sometimes we pride ourselves on a kind of default cynicism and scepticism as an attitude. Estelle was the opposite. She spent as much time consciously digging up the good, the inspiring, the positive, as she did uprooting the bad and the rot.

The second thing is that in South African journalism over the past few years, we have lost some of the best and brightest among us far, far too young. I’m thinking of the likes of Mandy Rossouw, Eusebius McKaiser, Tshidi Madia, Ufrieda Ho and now, of course, Estelle.

And I cannot recall ever seeing the passing of a journalist accompanied by such overwhelming, universal expressions of love and respect and sadness, from every corner of our industry and beyond. Journalists often tend to be polarising figures. Yet there was simply none of that, no trace of any ambivalence, evident in the responses to the loss of Estelle. She was simply adored.

I cannot truly imagine that it is possible for one short life to have had more positive impact than Estelle’s did.

My deepest condolences on this loss.