In an attempt to understand his father’s death from asbestosis, Francois Loots returned to his hometown of Prieska to face the sickness and its consequences
March 2000. My father complains of a lack of energy and shortness of breath. He is diagnosed with mesothelioma, also called asbestos cancer. Little is known about mesothelioma. It is caused by inhaling a microscopic asbestos fibre released when mining or processing asbestos. The sickness has an incubation period of about 40 years, it attacks the lungs and there is no cure.
My father was born in 1926 and grew up in Prieska in the Northern Cape. Cape PLC, a British mining company, mined blue asbestos at nearby Koegas, from where raw asbestos was transported to a mill in Prieska to be processed before being railed to urban factories.
One did not have to work in the mines to be exposed to asbestos fibres. My father lived across from the trucking company that transported raw asbestos. At night the loaded trucks lined the street. When the west wind blew, raw asbestos was strewn over the town. Asbestos was used in the construction of roads and as fill on the golf course. At school the long jump pit was filled with it, as was the high jump pit.
In 1941 a Prieska doctor realised the link between asbestos and a dying patient and alerted the government health authorities. At the time the pre-apartheid government was banking on the mines providing much-needed employment and assisting them to resettle poor communities; hence the doctor was told in no uncertain terms to shut up. He was apparently even threatened with Adolf Hitler’s concentration camps. He chose silence.
In 1963 and 1974 the Medical Research Council continued the silence when it decided not to release a report on the impact of asbestos mines and censored a medical scientist linking asbestos mining and death.
January 2001. My father’s body wastes away at an incredible speed. No flowers at my funeral, he asks; for him asbestos cancer was too bitter a reality to be adorned by beauty. He withdraws from the world and passes away. I feel exhausted, numb.
April 2001. Time heals numbness. Uncertainty about who gets asbestosis and who doesn’t has me in a panic, and I work my way through a pile of newspaper articles about the sickness, Prieska, Cape PLC and the legal battle against the British mining company.
I come across startling and debatable figures: 10 deaths a week in 1999, in Prieska alone a total of 3 000 dead. You can get the sickness from swimming in the Gariep river, they say, the wind can blow fibres 106km westwards. In the swirl of limited scientific knowledge and ever-present hearsay, it is difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction, reality and sensation. Trying to unravel what’s what, I head back to Prieska.
After unusually heavy rains, the Northern Cape veld is green, but the town seems as hot and sleepy as ever. Tired of negative publicity, some of the people I call don’t want to meet anyone from the media. But because I come from here, they agree to talk to me.
Dr Schoeman meets me in his consultation room. He wears a short-sleeved brown shirt, a stethoscope hangs around his neck. We talk about the two kinds of sicknesses caused by exposure to the fibre, mesothelioma and asbestosis.
The latter can be described as a hardening of the lungs and causes shortness of breath, like emphysema. He tells me that Prieska is over the worst. The mill closed down in 1959. Its dumping ground was rehabilitated by Potchefstroom University in the early 1960s and the nearby Koegas mine closed in the late 1970s. Asbestos- related deaths are on the decline, and as the older generation passes away, numbers should dwindle.
“Of course there still is a risk,” he says, “but recent tests have shown that you are equally at risk if you live in a big city.” Asbestos has infiltrated all of our lives; walls, roofs, heaters, even the roof of Cape Town station is made of asbestos.
But medically there has been no progress. We still don’t know why some get ill and others don’t, and a cure is light years away. Because so little is known about the sickness, there is a sense of both panic and preparedness. People will come and see Dr Schoeman because of the slightest pain; while those who get the sickness know exactly what they’re up against.
“People go through denial at home,” he says, “and once they come and see us, there is a level of acceptance. Because it is a small town, we know the patients, their thoughts, and we don’t need to beat around the bush.”
I remember the terrible blow my father’s diagnosis had on the family. All we were left with was the hope that the final stretch would be painless.
The matron of the hospital, Yvonne Roux, confirms Dr Schoeman’s understanding. She strikes me as a strong, practical woman who could have been a farmer. She talks from the heart, telling me how traumatic it was working in Prieska in the 1980s. “There was a time when I could always count people dying from asbestosis on one hand,” she says, “but the sickness is over its peak.”
Despite the relief, painful memories linger. Because Prieska is a small town, Roux knew most of the victims. She tries to suppress a rush of tears as she tells me that “we are dealing with people,” not cold impersonal statistics, “and they are living, until their last breath”.
I stare at her guiltily. During the last two months I found my father’s sickness unbearable. Skin and bone, braving painful days with the help of ever larger doses of morphine. I had thought that such a life wasn’t worth being called a life. She helps me out of my discomfort by telling me how easy it is to grow cynical of the media set on sensation.
Because Cape PLC has the power and the money to play for time, the lengthy legal battle between it and the victims has no end in sight. Victims are represented by two legal companies that have opened up offices in Prieska.
The former headmaster of the coloured high school, Martin Sawall, retired when diagnosed with asbestosis and spent more than two years doing voluntary work for Malcolm Lyons Inc, helping victims file claims.
Sawall was a childhood role model. For many years my mother, a white woman, taught under him, and so did I as a student. By simply being there he showed me that racial segregation was wrong and that there was hope. The matron tells me how sick he has become, and I want to go into denial. Please God, not him, but I reluctantly go and visit him anyway.
Sawall spends six to eight hours a day on an oxygen machine, and yet remains a bundle of energy.
Compensation is important for various reasons, he explains. Most victims come from the poor coloured community; although they can get free basic medical care, they have to support families with a small disability grant as they “have lost their ability to work and provide an income”. But no matter who you are, “if, like your father, you have been affected by your environment, you have just like the mineworkers a right to life”.
Compensation is also about a principle, which explains his determination to help victims despite his ailing health. Sawall is a realist, but hopes that by winning this legal battle, mining companies will become more cautious before valuing profit higher than human life.
We talk about the past; how he played on the mill dumps as a child and how he thought he might be spared as his colleagues died one by one.
“People didn’t speak about their sickness in the early years,” his wife Dina, tells me. “There was a degree of denial; you didn’t want to be marginalised and have the stigma of being sick. But with the claims we realised how deeply the sickness really ran.”
And coupled with the claims went education; to educate people about the little we do know about the sickness. “It has made people more supportive,” the Sawalls say. “The less advantaged will approach you more easily, and the whites show compassion they’ve never expressed before.”
The conversation turns to his sickness and he tells me about his unwavering faith, how he remains grateful for every day, and looks forward to tomorrow. There is an air of joy and expectancy as I say goodbye.
I dreaded seeing him sick, and yet I leave on a high. Later at the Dutch Reformed minister’s home, Dominee Michael Rautenbach smiles when I tell him this. “I’ve also experienced that high,” he says, “when a person has completely accepted his mortality and has made peace with his Creator, you go away infused with energy, an appreciation of life. There is nothing good about this sickness, but in it you discover little things; mercy, meaning.”
I smile as I recall the times when it seemed that my father’s sickness brought him and my mother closer, as if they’d suddenly discovered a new form of love.
Rautenbach finds the Prieska community incredibly supportive “unlike anything I’ve witnessed in other places. And there is a great deal of acceptance, until you get asbestosis.” Then you go through stages of denial, anger, bargaining, loss, hope, acceptance just like everyone else, but in an individual way. Not everyone travels smoothly towards an end. “If you see God as a superman, you will struggle to come to terms with your own mortality. And we’ve always learned that we may not get angry at God. If we accept and recognise our anger, there is a possibility of healing.”
Anger seems to hold many in Prieska ransom, certainly some members of my family. “Your family’s anger and resentment is part of a process,” Rautenbach explains, but adds that “someone has to get the blame”.
Dr Schoeman smiles when I ask him about anger. Sometimes doctors are at the receiving end of a displaced anger, but he has learned not to take it personally. Few people in Prieska know about the doctor who kept quiet, but among those who did, because he was threatened, he was elevated to the status of victim.
The Medical Research Council is an abstract body that we in Prieska know little about, and only the mining company remains an obvious target.
Because there is so much we don’t understand in the murky grey between fact and fiction, says Dr Schoeman, our incomprehension is linked to money.
“Many families simply need financial assistance, but money also helps us work through our experience of loss, even if we choose to waste it on drink, as some fear might happen. Should compensation not materialise, we will take a step back in working through the scares asbestos has left.”
Perhaps it’s the anger or the seriousness that talk of death demands that turns the conversation and we start reminiscing about the quirky antics of people in Prieska like the woman who lied to a TV news team about suffering from asbestosis just because she wanted to be on the box.
I meet social worker Cecil Skeffers in his office, which is based in the coloured township. Despite the heat he wears a long-sleeved shirt. He introduces himself as Prieska’s community development worker and tells me about the work of the Environmental Development Forum and the Concerned People against Asbestosis.
He paints a gloomy picture: “Prieska is a living graveyard.”
Some locals object to such statements, arguing that they scare people away, but Skeffers says his struggle “will end the day there are no more asbestos-related cases”.
Yet his struggle, and probably his father’s recent death from asbestosis, have also left Skeffers drained. He is telling me of possible action against the state-run Medical Bureau for Occupational Diseases for deliberately concealing the sickness with wrong diagnoses, but interrupts himself by confiding that there are days “when I don’t even want to go and see people. One feels helpless. All you can do is pray.” And lobby, which he seems to do well. A letter- writing campaign is taking off, urging Cape PLC’s shareholders to help settle the court case.
“We’ve also written to Cape PLC,” he says, “we want them to come and look at Prieska, see that we are human beings.” Needless to say, Cape PLC never replied.
And Skeffers tells me of Northern Cape government visits, how encouraging they’ve been “a sign of hope”.
Mayor Lillian Valacia confirms this. Despite a busy schedule, she makes time to meet me. “I want to see Prieska change,” she says. As Prieska’s first female and black mayor she is already laying foundations for change.
She believes in doing rather than talking, and her concerns are practical. Half of the houses in the coloured township have asbestos roofs, so does the hospital, and they need to be replaced. But these problems are not unique to Prieska. What is unique here is that “we have to take away the fear visitors have. Tourism should be encouraged.”
When I take my leave, Valacia shows me out of the municipal buildings. We pass a glass case with different minerals and semi-precious stones found in the area. “Look,” she says, pointing to a blue asbestos stone. “The killing stone.”
She tells me that her father was one of the mineworkers who worked at Koegas and lived in the now demolished housing compound. So far he’s been spared the fatal diagnosis.
I visit the site where the mill processed the “killing stone”, bordering on the west of the village, a block away from Asbestos Street. In other areas asbestos sites were covered with vegetation, but Prieska and Koegas’s rainfall is insufficient for this solution. Even if we could dam up all the tears we had shed, we wouldn’t have enough water.
Rumour has it erosion has taken its toll, the rehabilitation done 40 years ago has become undone and the town is once more exposed to the lethal fibre. Prieska is divided over this issue: the professionals deny this, but the man in the street believes it to be true.
Negative publicity, hysteria or realistic concern? I decide to ask Koos van Heerden. He worked for an insurance company covering the mine employees and spent many a working day at the Koegas mine. He has been living with asbestosis for the past 10 years, spends a good 16 hours a day on an oxygen machine. Only 60, he has moved to an old-age home for the 24-hour care it offers.
He tells me of the times my father visited him and I get a glimpse of the thoughts and feelings my father concealed from us as children.
When I ask him about negative publicity, he refuses to give me a simple answer. “We should keep the name Asbestos Street, to remember.” And publicity? His sizes me up before he answers. “We carry a scale in our hands. We weigh human lives against economic development. What did they decide in 1941? Have we learned anything since then?”
Because I have been breathing this air since the day I was born, I desperately want to believe the professionals, even if it means denial. “Nature will do its job,” Martin Sawall explains, “the wind and the rain will clear the mill’s site and in 15 years’ time the small risk of exposure that still remains will be something of the past.”
I make one last visit. Mattheus Philander worked on the mines as a young man, thereafter spending the rest of his working life employed as a farmworker by my father.
When I was a child he taught me about the Karoo plants. Those that cure toothache, those that are good for the stomach. And he taught me about the sky and the stars. He was diagnosed with asbestosis in the mid-1980s, yet still roles the occasional Boxer tobacco cigarette and “has given everything over to God. He will see to everything.”
He lives on a pension and has his heart set on compensation. Something that will enable him to buy his own house, and provide for his wife, should he go first.
Philander tells me how he never thought my father would go before he would, and about the dreams he has about my father. His words startle me: two months after my father’s death I have also started having these dreams. We share some of them, and then we sit looking at the sky. Once I thought it was clean and pure; now my eyes scan the pale blue hoping for answers.
Cape PLC has some of them, but never answered the invitation to visit or explain. Suddenly I wish they would. Not only would they see that we are human, but so would we. It would help us to understand our anger, ourselves, perhaps even the doctor that kept silent all those years and was after all part of our community.