14 minute read
Global Witsies
Kenichi Serino: Rooted to journalism
Kenichi Serino (MA 2009) is the deputy news editor for digital at PBS NewsHour in Washington DC. He shares how his experiences of Johannesburg, remain part of what he values, writes Heather Dugmore
Kenichi Serino had graduated from George Washington University in the US and, to top up his starting income in a media job, was working at a Japanese restaurant in Washington DC. Sitting in the bar after his shift one day, he started chatting to a woman who had grown up in South Africa.
“We exchanged emails and corresponded, and some time later when I was thinking about where to do postgraduate studies, I got chatting to her about this,” he says.
“I wanted to go somewhere new, and she suggested South Africa and Wits, where she had a friend in the Wits Journalism Department, Professor Lesley Cowling (BA 1983, BA Hons 1984), who coordinates the master’s programme. So I applied, got accepted and off I flew to Johannesburg in 2006.”
Serino booked into the Braamfontein Hotel for the first three days, then found a place in Melville and subsequently in Yeoville. So began his South African sojourn. He completed his master’s and worked as a journalist in Johannesburg, covering stories for a range of publications on subjects from sexual violence to race and rhino poaching. From 2013 to 2016 he returned to Wits to lecture in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies. “I loved it that Wits and South Africa in general have such lively public platforms and spaces for discussion and thinking,” he says. “In the US at the time, issues like race and equity were not mainstream as they are now.
“Also, while Joburg is not an easy place to live in, the camaraderie of Joburgers is really special, and the connecting of so many cultures and people from all walks of life appealed to me.”
The neighbourhood where he now lives in DC reminds him of what Yeoville was like in 2009 when he lived there. “I live in Columbia Heights, which is a very mixed neighbourhood, with a combination of young professionals, wealthier professionals with families, black Washingtonians and a large immigrant community, many from El Salvador. The restaurants, eateries, bars and shops reflect this mix.”
It takes him an hour to get to work each day.
Prior to joining PBS NewsHour (NH) he worked in media in New York, Detroit and the US Virgin Islands and freelanced for numerous news outfits worldwide.
“PBS NH is a public media organisation and we have a strong ethos of informing the public rather than pandering to them or chasing ratings and web hits. As an editor and writer I’m committed to solid journalism. It’s a great job and a privilege to be able to ask people whatever you want and they answer you.
“The problem is that solid journalism is dying because of the pressure from many news media owners about the business side. South Africa is very familiar with this. The traditional advertising side of the business has blown out because of digital platforms, and many media companies have moved to subscription models or they offer content for free.
“The problem is the quality sites cost money to read and all the terrible sites are free. Quality journalism needs to be properly financed, it always has, and it is terrible to see good journalists being laid off. Social media companies also don’t want to take responsibility for what they put out because it’s expensive to do this. All this has an impact on well-researched, responsible journalism.”
Serino’s journalism roots can be traced to his childhood in the village of Vanderbilt in northern Michigan where he was born and raised, and where his father was the mailman and ran the community newspaper. His interest in news and what affects people’s lives grew from here.
His name, Kenichi, is Japanese as his mother is Japanese; her family is from Hokkaido. His parents met after his father was honourably discharged from the US air force – he was stationed in Japan during the Vietnam war and stayed on afterwards. They married and moved to America in 1977. “I’ve been to Hokkaido several times to see family. It’s a beautiful natural environment with lots of forests.”
Cherry blossoms are synonymous with Japanese culture and the annual Hanami ceremony in Japan celebrates the fleeting beauty of the blossoms, and the association with mortality. Serino is able to experience this at home in DC’s West Potomac Park with its magnificent display of cherry blossoms in spring from thousands of trees. The Japanese government gave the American government the cherry trees as a gift of friendship in 1912.
He enjoys the fact that “DC culture” is a mix from all over the world.
In his downtime Serino cycles, goes to gym, reads a lot, hangs out with friends and frequents one or two bars, despite not being a drinker.
“I’m currently reading The Djinn Waits A Hundred Years by a South African friend of mine, Shubnum Khan, who lives in Durban, and Vincent Bevins’ new book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.”
Bevins looks at the 2010 to 2020 period, when more people participated in protests and uprisings worldwide than at any other time. Yet this has not led to more just, democratic societies.
“I’m interested in what the alternatives are, including alternative economic models,” Serino says. “I’m currently writing about zero growth, based on the idea that GDP growth is not a useful metric for measuring growth at a time when we should be freezing growth in the West and focusing on living within planetary boundaries.”
Many animated discussions on alternative political and economic systems take place at one of his favourite bars, Lyman’s on 14th, which he describes as “a hangout for younger generation comrades and socialists who see the inadequacies of the current system and are trying to figure out what could replace it.”
In the meantime Serino has figured out something far more immediately gratifying: how to make biltong. “I really enjoy it,” he smiles. “I researched a lot of recipes after I left South Africa and I’m currently drying some in my apartment.”
Jenny Gray: The zoo wizard
Dr Jenny Gray (BSc Eng 1986; GDE 1988; MA 2008), the CEO of Zoos Victoria in Australia, tells Heather Dugmore she draws on her background in ethics to guide her life and work.
As if on cue, as we start talking a kangaroo hops through Dr Jenny Gray’s garden at her home in Mount Macedon in the hills outside Melbourne.
“We’ve been here for a year as we felt like a country change. Before this, home was a ninth-floor apartment in the inner-city area of Port Melbourne. Now we’re on one acre and surrounded by animals and trees.”
Mount Macedon is a 45-minute drive for Gray to her office in Melbourne at Zoos Victoria where she has been the CEO since 2009. Zoos took Gray to Australia in 2008 when she made a career move from the Johannesburg Zoo, where she was CEO for four years.
“My husband Richard is Australian and we lived in South Africa for 12 years before moving to Melbourne, so it was an easy transition and I’ve been able to do a lot of wildlife conservation work here, which I really love.”
She had a diverse career before joining the world of zoos. She worked in municipal governance, banking and transport, and has a string of associated degrees. In addition to her Wits degrees she has a master’s in transportation from the University of California Berkeley, US (1989), an MBA from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (1996) and a PhD from the University of Melbourne (2015).
“I focused on ethics for my master’s and PhD because I like that it poses the question ‘how should I live a good life?’ while morality asks ‘how should I treat others?’. Working with people and animals one spends time thinking about both.”
Gray has studied her entire life. “I always wanted to start off studying civil engineering because it teaches you to think and problem-solve across sectors. This has afforded me the privilege of career choice, for which I have Wits to thank,” she explains.
“I loved being at Wits, I loved the camaraderie and the spirit of learning and growing, and I played a lot of hockey at a social level right through university.”
She was one of three women in her first-year undergraduate class of 60. By fourth year there were still three women but only 20 men. “Not a lot of women chose civil engineering then, so I suppose you had to be really good at maths and science to be admitted to the programme,” she laughs.
After graduating, she joined the Johannesburg City Council, which gave her the opportunity to study at Berkeley: “The City of Johannesburg ran a bursary programme and would send young staff to study abroad. I applied to do my master’s in transpor tation engineering at Berkeley, which was the leading school in this field at the time. I was on a fully paid,
full-time master’s bursary for a year, which was an incredible time. I got to see a bit of America during the breaks and the programme set me up for computer modelling of transportation systems which I did within the Johannesburg and Durban city councils.”
In 2003 she joined the Johannesburg Zoo where she developed a 10-year strategic plan to drive its upgrade and growth, and achieved an increase in visitors from 285,000 to 440,000 in three years.
Today, Gray is a key player in the international zoo community, and past president of the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums. She has been instrumental in transforming Zoos Victoria into a world leading zoo-based conservation organisation. Victoria Zoos’ four diverse zoos include Melbourne Zoo, Healesville Sanctuary, Kyabram Fauna Park and Werribee Open Range Zoo – the latter is a conservation area where the animals roam free in large habitats, and where they are currently relocating the elephants from the Melbourne Zoo.
“Through zoo-based conservation we use our skills to look after critically endangered animal species in Victoria,” she explains. “We are like an intensive care unit for species. With some of the species there are literally only a handful left in the wild. We care for them on our properties, breed up the numbers and work with the state-run parks and private landowners to make sure there is suitable habitat for them when we return them to the wild. It’s the most incredible experience to release them and to revisit areas where they were almost extinct and see them thriving again.
“We are currently working with 27 indigenous species, one of which is a small reptile called the Victorian grassland earless dragon which hadn’t been seen for 54 years and was thought to be extinct. We found it in February 2023 and now we have 22 individuals at the Melbourne Zoo that have started to breed, so we could have 100 or 200 in the next few years.” She naturally doesn’t say where they found it, other than that it was in Victoria, because there is a huge illegal global trade in reptiles and this is the most endangered on the planet.
In addition to the conservation work, they focus on achieving excellence in animal wel fare, making sure the animals receive the best possible care and environment, and that the visitors have the best possible visitor experience. During her time with Zoos Victoria, the annual visitors have grown from 1.5 million to over 2.6 million visitors. And annual memberships have increased from 72 000 to 365 000.
To achieve public support and keep improving the zoos, she says, she works very closely with staff. "I listen to what they think needs to be done and I walk around the zoos with them to address issues together and make sure we’re all doing our best to have everything running as it should. I’ve done this throughout my career. When I worked in municipal bus transport in Durban, I would go to the townships to see how the buses were running; you have to be out there to see how the business you are in is operating, to be part of it, to see what level of service your customers are experiencing.”
For example when she was at the Johannesburg Zoo she shared her vision of how the lawns should look. “My approach is that every part of the zoo needs to be well managed, and it gave me great pleasure during a visit to South Africa to see small school children relaxing on those same lawns.”
An important part of her work is engaging with the community to share what people can do to reduce the threats to species and the natu ral environment. “We do a lot of education with kids who become such wonderful little champions of conservation,” she says. Her team also works with zoos worldwide to help address the state of captive animals in countries without resources and sufficient knowledge of animal care.
“We work with the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums and organisation such as Wild Welfare, which has a strong presence in Africa, Brazil and the Far East to develop skills and work on what good animal care and a good zoo should look like. At Zoos Victoria we have a sister relationship with zoos in Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and the Uganda Wildlife Centre. Our respective staff visit each other and we do skills exchanges.”
For her contribution Gray has received a Public Sector Medal for "outstanding public service in the field of improved animal conservation and modern zoo management in Victoria", the San Diego Zoo Global award for conservation. Most recently, she was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in January for her “significant service to wildlife management, and to zoological industry organisations.”
Having lived in Melbourne for 15 years now, and she’s gained a bit of an Australian accent but you can still hear her home roots coming through.
“I’ve really enjoyed living here. It’s a very cosmopolitan city with lots of art, culture and sport. We attend the Australian Open tennis each year and it’s special to see the big names up close in your hometown. Roger Federer has come to the zoo with his children and no one harasses them. It’s an easy place to live... But I also adore South Africa, so this isn’t a comparison.”
She adds that they are geographically well positioned for scuba-diving: “It’s a joy here as we are so close to Indonesia and the coral triangle, and some of the most incredible diving in the world is a couple of hours away.” They have dived all over the world, including on South Africa’s south coast during the sardine run, which she describes as “mind-blowingly spectacular”.
They visit South Africa fairly regularly as they still have friends and family here and they always make a point of visiting one of the game reserves. “A bit of wildlife and a bit of friends. Sometimes they coincide,” is how she puts it.
She misses South Africans: “There are so many incredible people and I miss the singing and the laughter despite the hardships, and that people tell you straight out when they are angry. I’m also so proud of how far South Africa has come in so many ways. I know the problems but when he Wits Vice Chancellor Zeblon Vilakazi says the university is all about creating the citizens of the future and I see all the talent and potential of young South Africans, it strengthens my enduring hope for the country and for humankind.”
