THE GATHERING 2026: ‘We are South African’: Imtiaz Sooliman urges citizens to take ownership of their country

In a conversation at The Gathering held in memory of Estelle Ellis, Gift of the Givers founder Dr Imtiaz Sooliman reflected on the journalist who kept calling when people needed help — and on the ordinary South Africans he believes are still capable of changing their country.

The calls from Daily Maverick journalist Estelle Ellis were rarely casual.

When a crisis was unfolding in Nelson Mandela Bay or elsewhere in the Eastern Cape, Ellis would call Gift of the Givers founder Dr Imtiaz Sooliman with the kind of information that demanded a response: day zero was approaching; people were hungry; a fire had broken out; help was needed.

Sooliman knew what to do when the phone rang. “She did the research thoroughly,” he recalled. “When Estelle would phone, I wouldn’t think twice because I knew she’d done the research. She studied it properly.”

That relationship — between a journalist who sought out the stories of people too often unseen by the country’s leaders and a humanitarian organisation able to respond to what she found — became one of the quiet threads running through their work together.

It was a fitting way to remember Ellis at The Gathering in Cape Town on Friday, where Daily Maverick editor-in-chief Jillian Green spoke to Sooliman about her colleague, his decades of humanitarian work and the state of the country they both cared about deeply.

Ellis, one of South Africa’s most persistent investigative reporters, died suddenly on Wednesday evening, 5 August 2026, at the age of 51.

Sooliman’s first meeting with Ellis was at a Wimpy in Makhanda in February 2019. He remembers being struck immediately not only by her professional reputation, but by something he sensed in her.

“The moment I saw her, there was a spiritual connection. I fell in love with her, immediately, in the face, in the eyes, and in the soul,” he said, adding that what he saw was a compassionate journalist, but above all a true patriot.

Over the years, Ellis travelled with Gift of the Givers teams and followed crises across the Eastern Cape and beyond. She reported on drought, farmers and livestock, Covid-19 and the province’s hunger crisis. Sometimes her journalism did more than expose a problem.

Ellis told Sooliman that there were 5,000 wheelchairs outstanding in the province. Gift of the Givers launched a project to address the need.

Green said one of the qualities that distinguished Ellis’s reporting was that she could tell the stories of people whose voices were seldom heard while preserving their dignity.

“She gave people dignity in that, despite the conditions that they were finding themselves in. And the way she told their stories was to give them dignity,” Green said.

Ellis, Sooliman said, went into places where others would not go and wrote about “the human condition”.