Lest We Forget

Photo taken at District Six Museum 2015

I am reading William Pick’s The Slave has Overcome, and the humiliation of being a student in the medical faculty of the University of Cape Town during the 1980s, has coming sweeping back in waves over me. Professor Pick is the former head of the School of Public Health at Wits University and President of the Medical Research Council and holds a string of other awards and accolades including a fellowship from Harvard University. He tells his story as a descendant of the historically-repressed indigenous Khoisan people who overcame the barriers of apartheid to become an internationally recognised leader in the field of Public Health. 

Prof Pick studied medicine at UCT in the 1960s. It was painful to read of the discrimination he faced and to be reminded of the same issues which I experienced 20 years later – the difficulties of travelling from the Cape Flats to campus, the awkwardness of being able to sit next to whites in lecture theatres when we couldn’t sit next to them in restaurants, not being able to treat white patients, not being able to dissect a white cadaver…

In the hospital you were able to work out the race and sex of your patient without even seeing them – the folders were green for blacks and pink for whites, a number in the corner of the name labels classified patients according to race and sex with number 1 being equal to "white male", 2 for "white female", 3 for "coloured male" and so on until the classification at the bottom of the hierarchy was "black female". 

I remember having great difficulty as a third year student on my first psychiatry placement at Valkenberg Hospital in the coloured ward where a mix of neurotic and psychotic patients had been dumped together because of a lack of facilities. My supervisor sympathised with me but said her hands were tied because I couldn’t be placed in the white ward at Groote Schuur Hospital. 

In the last while I have been disturbed to hear opinions that this government is worse than the apartheid government. I, too, am angry at the slow rate of transformation, but sympathetic at the overwhelming burden of the apartheid legacy of gutter education, inferior health care and segregation at every level and I am insulted when I am told that apartheid wasn’t that bad, that it’s over now and we must move on. 

To say that apartheid was better than what we have today is to dismiss the suffering and humiliation of millions of people, the death and torture of thousands more and the brainwashing of generations of people who believed that they were inferior or superior and had a right to treat fellow human beings in a certain way because of the colour of their skins. To say that apartheid was better than what we have now is to minimise the suffering of all those forcibly removed from their homes, those denied entry to university. To say that apartheid was better than what we have today is to give the perpetrators permission to pat themselves on the back and smile smugly because they were justified in treating black people the way they did. 

I salute Prof Pick and the countless others who, like him, have overcome the legacy of apartheid to excel in spite of the barriers. 

Maya Angelou's Autobiography - all six volumes

 I first read Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings many years ago. I clearly remember the hardships of growing up as a black child in the American South of the 1930s that she described - the discrimination and poverty as a background to the trauma of her parents' divorce and her rape by one of her mother's boyfriends.

Recently, I came across the reprint of all six volumes at the local bookstore and decided to tackle them all. I loved reading the first volume again and it remains my favourite. I didn't find the last two as interesting, even though it dealt with the civil rights movement and the deaths of her friends, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. It seemed to lack a certain depth - like she had left something out on purpose.

Perhaps I missed the beautiful descriptive passages which were so abundant in the earlier volumes and which made me feel like I was looking through a window to her past.

Below are some of the gems from her first book...

...barbers sat their customers in the shade on the porch of the Store, and troubadors on their ceaseless crawlings through the South leaned across benches and sang their sad songs...

...the pickers would step out of the backs of trucks and fold down, dirt-disappointed, to the ground.

...the old ladies took up the hymn and shared it in tight harmony...the humming crowd...like tired bees, restless and anxious to get home...

The summer picnic gave ladies a chance to show off their baking hands...chickens and spareribs sputtered in their own fat and a sauce whose recipe guarded in the family like a scandalous affair...

Maya Angelou has lived a rich and varied life as waitress, singer, actress, dancer, activist, writer and poet, in the US as well as in different countries in Africa. Her books celebrate her life.

The other volumes in the autobiography are:

• A Song Flung up to Heaven
• Singing and Swinging and Getting Merry like Christmas
• All God's Children Need Travelling Shoes
• The Heart of a Woman
• Gather Together in My Name