Personne

Groenink, Evelyn

1960-

Evelyn Groenink (1960) started her journalism career in the eighties of the last century at a small left-wing newspaper in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. As correspondent in Central America during the mid-eighties her reports from that region won her ‘runner up’ in a Dutch award contest for young journalists. After 1987, partly as a result from her association with the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the Netherlands, her journalistic focus changed to South and southern Africa. She was deputy editor for Dutch Anti-Apartheid News when ANC representative Dulcie September was killed in Paris, France, in 1988.
It was this event that prompted her to start investigating how it was possible that an ANC diplomat was assassinated in a Western country that formally abhorred apartheid and was governed by a socialist president at the time. Gradually discovering that the subsequent murder of Anton Lubowski in 1989, and the murder of Chris Hani in 1993, showed similar patterns to what she had discovered in the case of Dulcie September -namely arms deals and related natural resource exploitation-, she developed a specialisation in matters of international arms trade. This led to her taking part in the South African research for the seminal work by Dr Peter Hug on Swiss military collaboration with apartheid in 2005, as a result of which she won a ‘Golden Key’ award for ‘best use of the South African Promotion of Access to Information Act.’ Se also collaborated with the Mail & Guardian with regard to a number of investigative publications on the South African arms deal in 2007.
Having started to collaborate with investigative journalists in other African countries on arms- and other cross-border trade investigations, she co-founded the Forum for African Investigative Reporters in 2003, which grew to a network of 70+ members in 24 African countries. She currently acts as investigative editor for the African Investigative Publishing Collective and its partner ZAM in the Netherlands. In 2016 and 2017, the partnership published transnational African investigations on inter alia the US-dominated “war on terror” on the African continent, witchcraft, land conflicts, misdirected development aid and plunder by African oligarchs.
Evelyn Groenink has published three books on South Africa through Atlas Publishers in the Netherlands (in Dutch): Wonderland, 1996; Dulcie, 2001; and ‘Bij de Blanken is het Beter’ (It’s Better where the Whites are), 2013. “Incorruptible” is her first book in English translation.
She is married to Ivan Pillay and the couple have two daughters, Devi and Vani.
(From the website of Evelyn Groenink: https://evelyngroenink.com)