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. 

Orientation

If the walls could talk...Jameson Hall on Jammie Steps

The flashes of panic I was having about my impending academic journey had evolved into a more pervasive sense of bewilderment by the weekend.

Part of the bewilderment is that nothing is actually as it was – the library is not where I remember it, for example, and you can't drive down University Ave. And places are called by different names: The Steve Biko Lecture Theatre, The Molly Blackburn Hall...who would have thought? I feel like I have entered a parallel universe and someone has messed with my memory.

I was unprepared for the emotion I felt climbing up Jammie steps on Thursday on the way to the postgraduate orientation session. Thankfully, at 830 in the morning there were not many students around to see the middle-aged woman with wet cheeks pausing to soak up the moment. It seems like a lifetime since I first ventured up there.

It’s a long way from handwritten assignments in the Occupational Therapy department on the other side of the cemetery below Groote Schuur Hospital. At the orientation, someone from the library was talking about consultations by appointment, the writing centre person about developing writing and the IT manager about computer labs with uncapped bandwidth and free on-campus access to wireless.

Later I noticed that the change in student diversity has been as dramatic. Now it is only age that may make me stand out from the crowd but I am willing to believe that at UCT I will be treated with suitable irreverence. At least no one here will call me “Tannie”!

I haven’t met my whole group but probably the majority are half my age...and have been studying English and language and literature in the time that I have been raising children. I am envious of the ease with which they engage with lecturers and the certainty with which they are making choices.

After two tries, I have survived the registration process and am now in proud possession of a student card. I look forward to the week ahead when “all will be revealed”. Now I just need to remind my family that the toilet-paper fairy has left the building...!

On Turning 18

My daughter turned 18 two days ago. She is in her final year of school and the world is her oyster. Over the years she has put together quite an impressive CV. She has met queens and presidents, dug trenches in rural villages, been interviewed on television and the radio, and travelled to some of the most exotic places in the world. She is excited about registering to vote and getting her driver's licence. She has decisions to make about what and where she wants to study.  Someone asked me if I remember what it was like when I turned 18. It was nothing like that.

At 18 I had completed school (in those days we started school a year earlier) and was embarking on a very different voyage. In the apartheid days it was no easy feat being accepted to the mainly "white" University of Cape Town and I needed to acquire a permit. 

Entering university was such a cultural onslaught - I might as well have been in a different country. The campus was huge - I think my school could have fitted into the Jagger Hall. There were lecture halls and sports centres,  different campuses, buses shuttling back and forth, and more "white" people than I had ever seen in my life. And I was able to sit next to them in class, on the bus and in the library.  There were students from all over the country and beyond its borders. Read more about that experience by clicking on this link -  http://saaray-livinginsa.blogspot.com/2010/09/of-black-alumni-and-other-apartheid.html.

I caught buses and trains to campus, wrote out assignments (which I researched in the library in BOOKS!) by hand (or typed them on my dad's typewriter; and no, it was not electric). I could not register to vote. My identity book classified me by race. Overseas travel was some far off fantasy (in fact, I was almost thirty before I went overseas for the first time).

But how exciting to have lived in an era where there have been so many changes. How fortunate to be able to see our children have opportunities and privileges we only dreamt of. And how blessed to have children who use those opportunities and privileges to make a difference. 

Of Black alumni and other apartheid memories

The recent invitation to the launch of the University of Cape Town (UCT) Black Alumni Association, has me thinking about my time at UCT in the early 1980s. 

My fondest memory of my grandfather, who was  a delivery truck driver, was of him coming home, his pockets jingling with coins, which were to be deposited into the little money box in his cupboard for my "education". By the time I was ready for university, he had saved enough to pay for the first year of tuition. Being accepted at UCT engendered mixed emotions in me. I was the only person in my class at school to be accepted at UCT, (not many students from my year did in fact go to university) and I was proud to be the first person in my family to make it to university. But this was tempered by the humiliation of having to apply to the Department of Coloured Affairs for a permit to attend a "white" university. I was granted permission on the basis that the university for "coloured people" did not offer the course I wished to study. 

To say that attending UCT was a culture shock, is putting it mildly. In addition, I was based on medical campus which was known to be more conservative than the main campus.  Out of a class of 25, there were three of us who were "not white" and only two people who had blazed the way before us, as the first "non-white" occupational therapists to graduate from UCT. The only "white" people I knew were the Irish nuns at my school and one or two teachers who had passed through. So there we were, like flies in a jug of milk!

I think the general feeling among "black" students was that we should do what we came to do (be educated) but not engage in the "normal" life of university since our acceptance there was not normal. For example, we were discouraged from using the university cafeteria since we weren't generally able to eat in whatever restaurants we wanted to. We were also discouraged from participating in sport since how could we play normal sport in an abnormal society?

I cannot say that I experienced any overt racism in my class - we were a small department and generally got on well with each other. There were many parties at student's houses which, in itself, was almost schizophrenia-inducing since it was by no means normal for me to be socialising with "white" people. There was one girl who I became quite friendly with and I spent a lot of time at her house which, ironically, is about 5 minutes from where we now live, in a previously-"white" neighbourhood. However, I was shattered when she and her family  returned from their holiday in the US and reported that their American family was so impressed that their daughter had "a little coloured friend". Those words were like a slap in the face, like I was some kind of novelty. 

Going about the day to day life of becoming an occupational therapist was also fraught with the intricacies of apartheid SA. When it came to clinical practice in the hospitals, we were not allowed to treat "white" patients. In my third year I was posted to a very difficult placing in a psychiatric hospital which I struggled with - however, I could not be placed in the relatively easier ward that my fellow students were going to in the general hospital, since the patients there were "white". 

In spite of these obstacles, I graduated and was offered a job at the hospital that I dreamed of working at. I spent almost fifteen years loving what I was doing as an occupational therapist. I have two friends from university who have travelled the paths of studying, working, marriage, motherhood and more over the years with me. Both of them are still working as occupational therapists, one in the US and the other here in SA. From time to time I bump into other alumni and it is always good to catch up. 

I do believe, though, that my time at university could have been so much more, and I could have embraced much more of what such a prestigious university had to offer, if it were not for the times we were living in. I'm not sure that I want to be part of the Black Alumni Association. I'm not sure what it is hoping to address - a support for all of us who have bitter-sweet memories of our time at UCT? Perhaps there are some "white" alumni who would also like to be a part of that healing?