Teen Printer Became South Africa's Top News Editor

At 17, Hoosen Kolia had nothing but showed up anyway, ready to work in the printing department of the Sunday Times in Durban.

He wasn't hired to write. His job was feeding paper into machines while massive presses thundered around him. But over three decades, through relentless hard work and unwavering dedication, the teenager from the printing floor became one of South Africa's most respected newspaper editors.

Kolia's rise from temporary worker to leading the Sunday Times represents the kind of career journey that seems impossible today. He learned journalism shift by shift, deadline by deadline, building expertise from the ground up.

His colleagues remember a man obsessed with staying informed. Charmain Naidoo recalls that Kolia slept with two radios on, refusing to let the world slip past him.

When Naidoo interviewed for her first job at the Sunday Times, Kolia had clear advice for the Rhodes University graduate. "Forget everything you've learnt," he told her. "Get ready for the real world of journalism."

Years later, when Naidoo became the paper's New York correspondent, she learned just how seriously Kolia took the work. She slipped away for a weekend in the Hamptons in July 1999 without telling him she'd be unreachable.

That weekend, John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane went down in the Atlantic. When Naidoo finally checked her messages, 13 increasingly angry calls from Kolia waited, demanding she file the story. She never lived it down, and he reminded her often.

Why This Inspires

Kolia's mentorship shaped careers across South African journalism. Clifford Fram, who worked with him for 23 years, remembers a senior editor who always made time for conversation and took younger colleagues out for prawn curry to talk about the work.

Kolia believed deeply in the Sunday Times' mission as "an independent voice aligned principally to the interests of the man and woman on the street." He reminded younger journalists about the paper's history exposing the Afrikaner Broederbond in 1963 and 1978, journalism that made enemies in the right places.

He tracked how his readership changed alongside South African society, watching the paper's predominant reader profile shift without losing its editorial mission. For Kolia, journalism meant serving readers first, always.

Before he passed away in July 2026 at 74, Kolia told his son Adam he had lived without regrets. He'd done everything he wanted to do.

He admitted one regret: not spending enough time with family when his children were young because he was always on duty. But he explained why he worked so hard. When he started out, he had absolutely nothing.

In the end, as his son said, he was victorious.