Loose cannon: Robert Kirby
When, in 1990, FW de Klerk made that watershed speech in Parliament, I wonder if he realised how, in doing so, he was snatching the rug from beneath the feet of innumerable and worthy white liberals, those long snuffled ranks of good souls who had been living so well for many years off the grief of the South African land.
Whether he did is of little concern, because as it turned out, no sooner had the doors of Victor Verster prison flung wide than the same white liberals were clambering on to a brand new rug. This one was of an even denser fabric, of intricate weave and texture, getting longer by the day.
If ever there was a scruples growth industry, it is here. In the rainbow’s pallid afterglow, a veritable landscape of exploitable virtue still lies open for the picking; luxuriant plateaux of moral high ground to be explored and exploited, cold pools of sanctimony to be drained.
The generic term for this booming industry is “The Legacy of Apartheid”, which now serves both as a marketing logo and a warrantee for political conscience products. It is a sort of mixture of a “By Appointment to Bishop Tutu” and a South African Bureau of Standards imprint.
An essay into the market was made last week with the publication – in Washington, by God – of one of the first in a corrosive new strain of Truth and Reconciliation Commission studies. This one, called Human Rights – Health. The Legacy of Apartheid, was brought forth by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Physicians for Human Rights.
The author of this volume is a member of the aforementioned association, one Dr Audrey Chapman.
Looking like something they’d just wheeled in from the embalming room, Chapman was interviewed on television last week, an occasion she used to tell everyone how “appalled” she had been to witness the feeble public interest shown in the truth commission’s hearings into the “crimes” of the apartheid health system.
Among the recommendations in her report was that South Africa needs to impose “better selection criteria” at its medical schools. By Chapman’s adamant dogma, straight A’s in all six matric subjects ain’t nearly enough. Neither is the fact that about 60% of would-be doctors get weeded out in the first two years of a South African medical degree, and another 10 or so per cent drop out further along the line. Apparently our doctors are drastically short on humanism.
What Chapman didn’t say was what had already been made painfully clear in the introduction to the television piece. This by some SABC tosspot in Washington, calling himself Malcolm Brown. Clearly Brown had been briefed on the contents of the report by Chapman’s team, to include the renowned South African medical trampolinist, Dr Wendy Orr.
Brown opened with a memorable line. According to this report, he began: “… the apartheid health care system created two medical standards, a world class system for whites – one of filth and degradation for blacks.”
I imagine we should try to be forbearing of well-meaning clairvoyants who are paid large sums of money to quantify and assess us from such vast distances, and informed by such slim experience. But anyone with an inside knowledge of the South African public health administration during the apartheid days – to include Dr Orr – will recognise that for the preposterous libel it is.
That there were and continue to be vastly differing qualities in South African medical care is true – for most of the time.
Today this is not only a legacy of apartheid, nor ever was it solely “apartheid’s” fault. Economic realities, bumbling administration and many other factors played a part. But to lump the health care “apartheid” afforded to black people as generally one of “filth and degradation” insults the facts.
And to conclude, as Chapman’s discourse does, that the actions of the corrupt district surgeon who stood aside while Steve Biko was killed by police, led to a generalised relinquishment of ethical principles by the entire medical profession, is just absurd. Down Dr Orr! Down girl!
What is most disturbing about this treatise is that it was commissioned by the truth commission for use in the compilation of its final report. As in many other instances, the substance of the data, of the opinion supplied to or commissioned by the truth commission looks dubious. Remember all those quaint aviation experts it dug up, the squalls of other opportunistic shamans against whose rinky-dink avocations so much was calibrated?
And to which murky register might be added this latest concoction.