Trailblazer for women journos

Nearly two months ago, there appeared a photo on Methil Renuka’s timeline on Facebook. She’s with the late Winnie Mandela in the three-year-old photo taken at Soweto after a televised meeting, a year after Nelson Mandela’s passing. Winnie insisted on this picture, Renuka wrote, saying, “This is for your mother.”

Renuka would have many such stories to share, meeting and interacting with African presidents, global icons and titans of the industry. But Renuka, managing editor of both Forbes Africa and Forbes Woman Africa, is careful to stay grounded in everything she does. She has been a mainstream journalist for 22 years, growing up in Dubai, studying later in Kerala, travelling to different countries for work till she landed in South Africa. “In 2014, my husband and I made a conscious decision to seek career opportunities in Africa. He is a CEO with a foreign bank. Many years earlier, in 2009, I had visited South Africa on assignment and fallen in love with the country. So the relocation was an easy decision,” Renuka writes in an email interview.         

She was at the right place at the right time. She was introduced to the very successful Indian entrepreneur Rakesh Wahi through a mutual contact at an event in Johannesburg. He is the founder of both CNBC and Forbes in Africa. She was then interviewed by his senior team a week later and hired. They had just launched Forbes Woman Africa and were looking for a new editor. “I was given a free hand to give the magazine new creative direction, with a strong advocacy stand on gender. Thanks to the unstinted support from my management, I was able to take the brand further. I am happy to say we won five national and international awards last year for editorial excellence with a string of other nominations to boot,” Renuka says.

She also grooms and mentors bright young African journalists, mainly millennials. “When they come back with awards and recognition, you know you have done something right. It’s great to consistently unearth talent in the ‘Africa Rising’ story. I also consider being able to reach out to larger communities and networks in the business world as also in the development space an achievement. It’s good to see your work can have a pan-African impact, so it’s all the more important to make sure your work is ethical and collaborative. The fact that you have the ability to inspire change in the larger discourse around developing economies is a responsibility I take very seriously,” Renuka explains.

Since January this year she has been promoted as managing editor of both the pan-African magazines and she considers it a fortune to work in a company which has over 60 % women staff. “I operate primarily out of Rwanda, so this also gives me the opportunity to travel across the continent and come very close to the heart of Africa. When I was interviewed by the international editors at Forbes in the US, I was told that I am one of only three female editors for the brand in the world. I consider that a privilege,” she says. Women always have to work twice or thrice as hard as men to prove themselves, and this is a reality in any sphere, she says. “But as I have said before, I have been lucky to be part of a company that values diversity and sees women as natural leaders. Editing a women’s magazine, I am also privy to the problems and challenges existing for the many women I interact with and write about. The glass ceiling really does exist for most, but what is heartening is the new wave of feminism where even the men are joining in as allies for gender equality.”

Women in her family have all turned out to be outstanding professionals and mothers. Her elder sister Radhika lives in Boston and has been active in arts and education for a long time. She is now creating a grassroots advocacy organisation in Massachusetts to help kids with developmental disorders and learning disabilities. Her younger sister Devika, a well-known dancer, is the pride of the family, she says. “I have a lot of respect for her single-minded dedication, tenacity and determination to further her art. I guess we all got the creative genes from our mother, Methil Rajeswari, who is also a writer. Her first book Swargaratham was published in Malayalam by DC Books, a year after my father’s death in 2016. My father, the late N. Rajagopalan, was my true mentor and greatest support. Everything I do today, I do as a tribute to him.”

Home means a lot to her and her vacations are invariably in Kerala, at Palakkad, where her mother lives. She goes home at least four times a year. She adds, “It’s almost inexplicable being in the comfort of your own home and space, close to the temples, my village and near my mother. Fortunately for me, my husband Vimal also hails from Palakkad, so our trips are usually in sync. I get to be the dutiful daughter on these trips home and hopefully my mother agrees as well!”