Since I am dying I thought I
might remember some of my experiences in South Africa in the Fifties. I am a
Yank, and my mother married a South African doctor who was a general
practitioner. We moved to Johannesburg
and after completing a matriculation, I entered the Bachelor of Science Medical
science class at the Witwatersrand University.
Wits was an active place in those days.
My first assignment as a science
student was under the tutelage of Professors Strydom and Windham. Both had
trained at the University of Pennsylvania in environmental health. The SA
Chamber of Mines was having a severe problem sustaining a viable labor
crew. The Chamber of Mines group
recruited Africans from small villages. The recruits were between the ages of
14 to 18. They were brought to the mines in Johannesburg and sent down to
depths of 6 miles where they dug gold from the stopes. A stope is a shaft
between two tunnels. There is little air and the work is very hard. The boys
typically collapsed from heat stroke and the then therapy was to take them to
the surface and throw them into
cold water. Their body temperature was about 104 to 105 degrees fahrenheit. The
mortality was 50%. Strydom
developed a method where before going to the stopes the Africans were acclimatized. He worked out the
method on 6 of us science students. He placed us in a hot room with a red green
blinking metronome and had us shovel ore for a week. He observed our
temperatures and noted that it took about 3 days for our temperature to
stabilize at about 99 degrees. He then set a red/green light metronome in one
of the passage ways of the East Rand Proprietary Mine (6 miles down) and tested
this on new African recruits. The
method was scientifically successful and the mortality decreased to under 10%.
In retrospect how humanitarian was the approach?
I was lucky to have Raymond Arthur Dart as my lecturer in
Anatomy. He, of course, along with Phillip Tobias, was the discover of Australapithecus
Africanus. They both detailed for us the
anatomy and physiology of this
human “missing link,” which was discovered at Sterfontein, and explained
their thoughts on why it was a
missing link. These also detailed
the differences between the
present-day indigenous
African population and the
European population. For example, Africans had no platysma, their endocrine
glands were different and the size and shape of their skulls was different. I
have often wondered why world class scientists had to discuss issues of
apartheid.
The University of Witswatersrand, like most of the other South
African universities, had a great hall. I was privileged to see the first
public performance of “King Kong,” with music composed by Todd Matshikia, one
of the original journalists on Drum
magazine. Miriam Makeba sang a leading role. This show was a jazz opera with an all black South African
cast. The first such theatrical effort in South Africa, it was a fantastic
experience. The ushers tried
but failed to segregate the audience.
One other event at the great hall
that I remember distinctly was when my
Professor of Botany Eddie Roux, author of a history of South Africa
titled Time Longer then Rope,
and actively against the governments policies of apartheid, debated the question whether Christ existed as
history or myth. You must remember
the prevailing religious philosophy that pervaded the society was that Africans were “ hewers of wood and drawers of water.” The Dutch Reform Church to which most
Afrikaners belonged believed in a literal reading of the Bible. Of course this
took a lot of bravado on Professor Roux’s part to take on this establishment by
claiming that Christ’s life story was myth rather than fact. Roux debated with
a theology school professor at a noon lecture and won the debate. Almost
immediately afterwards, he was
house-arrested and his academic carrier ended. I believe that he died a lonely man.
Another memory concerns the way
some students tried to resist the apartheid system. I was a member of a U.S. student organization, which I
joined while enrolled at Reed College, prior to entering the University of
Witwatersrand. I believe this is why I was contacted by Allard Lowenstein,
later a Congressman from New York State.
Lowenstein ostensibly had come to SA to study the flora and fauna. Somehow he learned that my step dad’s
car a Ford prefect was permitted
free access to native
townships. My step dad was a
general practitioner whose practice included many Chinese patients who were
forced to live and work in these townships. The Chinese were the shopkeepers to
the Africans. Lowenstein asked me and some SA friends to drive him around the townships. I agreed to
Lowenstein’s request, despite the potential peril this might have caused my
step dad and his family in Johannesburg, and we drove through many townships
taking movies of the people and their living conditions. At about the same
time, Hans Beukes a Namibian
student activist from South West Africa, had been awarded a scholarship to a
Scandinavian university. The SA government refused to let him travel, so
Lowenstein and friends from Wits placed him in the boot of a car and drove him
to Swaziland. Beukes flew to Norway and then on to NYC,
where he detailed the need to make SWA an independent state and thedire
situation of non-whites in SA in a speech at the United Nations. The United Nations then censured SA.
The politics of apartheid even
entered the medical school curriculum at Wits; but sometimes we were able to
outwit the authorities. At school, 6 students were assigned to dissect one
cadaver. When we wanted a break,
my group of six would go to the movies at the “bioscope” (the South African
name for a movie theatre). One of
the students in my dissection group was a Chinese student; by law, Chinese people were forbidden from
going to white movies. We informed the ticket agent that our friend was
Japanese and he was permitted to
attend the films with us. This was
because South Africa, which did not recognize China diplomatically, had a
vigorous trading relationship with Japan and did not discriminate against
Japanese persons in the country.
I left South Africa after the
Sharpesville massacre in 1959. At
that time, most of the professionals I knew felt there was going to be a blood
bath in South Africa.
Michael T. Makler, MD
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