Cape Town, South Africa (PANA) – Tributes have continued to pour in for popular television news anchor, Alice Chavunduka, who died Sunday after suffering an epileptic seizure in Johannesburg a week earlier.
The Zimbabwean-born media personality died at the age of 46.
She was reportedly discovered unconscious at her residence and rushed to hospital where she spent days in a comma.
Alice, the daughter of the late Professor Gordon Chavhunduka a renowned academic and former University of Zimbabwe Vice Chancellor, had earlier been involved in two serious accidents that are believed to have triggered the epileptic seizures.
She made South African television history by becoming the first black female news anchor on the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s main news channel which had only featured white presenters throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
But all that changed in 1992 when she teamed up with news readers Jane Hicks and Anand Naidoo for a news programme which was broadcast to millions of homes.
She subsequently became the popular presenter of the SABC’s morning breakfast show, Good Morning South Africa.
She remained a popular radio and television presenter until her death.
Her meteoric rise began at the age of 12 when she became Zimbabwe’s youngest presenter ever of children’s radio programmes on the Zimbabwean Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC).
SABC television news and current affairs editor Amina Frense said Chavanduka would be sorely missed, adding that she had “set the bar and raised the standards”.
Peter Ndoro, another presenter who also hails from Zimbabwe, said she had single-handedly broken down racial barriers.
