It’s just so damned, incredibly unfair. Lying unattended on a pavement, broken and shivering, while someone else, perhaps less broken but of a paler skin and from the wreck of a classier car, has already been laboured over for 20 minutes, immobilised on a stretcher and put on oxygen.
They were scattered, the broken bodies, about 10 of them, mostly on the pavement of Oxford Road near where it branches from Johannesburg’s M1 highway. Most seemed to have been flung clear from their Toyota minibus as it ended its destructive streak.
The minibus, probably driving much too fast with its cargo of working-class passengers last Friday afternoon, careered out of control on two wheels after glancing against a cyclist. It trashed a shiny black Jeep behind me.
The driver of the Jeep must have been a young woman. Her head was twisted out of sight but a petite arm remained stretched to the steering wheel in a colourful sleeve. Strange how a body that was a moving, breathing organism only moments before could be so utterly inanimate.
Her passenger was young and fair like her, but alive. She moaned animal sounds of incomprehension, sorrow and desperation. I cannot begin to imagine what it must have felt like.
The Jeep, containing as it did the only death, seemed strangely devoid of spilt blood. Not so, behind it, the scene beside the minibus. A man sat swaying against the kerb, surrounded by pools of blood as more oozed through his matted hair.
A few steps away on the pavement lay a woman, sprawled and only half conscious, bleeding from her head and a long gash in her leg. Next to her was a large man who was conscious, but who breathed shallowly and remained as he fell.
Further down the pavement there was a woman with her cheek pulped and crying for “Cecilia”, whom I assumed to be the first woman. Half an hour later she was shivering and her condition seemed to be deteriorating rapidly.
Nearby was a battered man who looked up at me with an eye that was weirdly bulging. And then there were the “lesser” cases, like the tall man who seemed okay except for a broken, twisted leg and who said repeatedly, “Jissus, dis seer.”
I and some others tried to comfort the injured. I told them that help would arrive soon. That was a lie.
I was not there as a reporter, notebook in hand, so my accuracy stands to be challenged. But I think it took 10 minutes for the first ambulance to arrive. Not too bad. The medics swarmed to the surviving woman in the Jeep.
There weren’t enough medics to help more than one or two patients initially. Choices had to be made. Cursory glances were thrown at the minibus passengers, the human beings littering the pavement, but I saw no assessment being done to determine who needed help most urgently.
That happened later — I estimate 20 minutes after the arrival of the medics — once the fair-haired woman from the Jeep had been safely immobilised on a stretcher, oxygen and all. It was then that a concerned medic designated three or four of the minibus passengers as “priority one” cases and sufficient ambulance capacity was radioed.
Why was the white woman in the Jeep helped first? One explanation may be racism, fed by undertones such as that she was a “victim” while the minibus driver and his passengers were the “perpetrators”. For don’t all taxis drive dangerously?
But that is not the only explanation. It may be that class was the determinant. Why? Because the first ambulance to arrive belonged to one of the country’s two large private emergency rescue services. Both are affiliated to private hospital groups.
Private health-care providers have an ethical duty to help everyone in an emergency situation, regardless of ability to pay. But, of course, the profit motive means they are going to help their “own” patients first –those with medical aid or the ability to pay cash.
And how to decide who that is when, in a case like this, patients are not capable of coherent speech? Look at the colour of their skin, their style of dress and their vehicle: A sleek black Jeep or a Toyota minibus?
Pat Sidley, communications head at the Council for Medical Schemes and a vocal critic of private healthcare providers’ alleged greed, says class is the primary determinant, but “this is South Africa” where skin colour masks class. “Who’s more likely to have the dough; the black person who fell out of the taxi, or the white person in the car?”
In most circumstances we find racial profiling — making a decision about an individual based on statistical assumptions relating to his or her race — despicable. But is it any better when class becomes a determinant in situations where our very humanity is at stake? When one person is comforted and another lies shivering on the pavement?
Let there be no chorus of disapproval from the wealthy when creative proposals are mooted, such as a social health insurance, to improve the state health sector. For will the private sector ever care about the poor?