TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Chapter 9

Subsection 40

In the health sector: a mini-Commission at the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand

136 At the health sector hearing in Cape Town, Professor Trevor Jenkins of the Medical Faculty of the University of the Witwatersrand spoke of his institution’s commitment to a “mini-TRC [Commission] process”:

For the [Commission] to be effective, to be fully effective, requires that the processes be taken into the places where people live and work and interact. We need, in fact, a mini-[Commission] in our institutions, and we believe that this mini-[Commission] process has already been triggered within our faculty in these last few weeks.

A great deal of hard work though, and creative thinking will undoubtedly be needed if members of the faculty are to be reconciled with one another. The privileged members of the faculty, who were not the victims of apartheid in the teaching hospital settings, must listen to the accounts of their black colleagues and former students. They must be reminded of the many ways in which they wittingly or unwittingly collaborated with the system. They must be prepared to experience and share some of the pain and hurts which their colleagues of colour experienced because of an accident of birth. In such a process, we believe we will all undergo changes and experience healing, and only then will the faculty be able to develop into a cohesive structure capable of producing well-trained health care professionals motivated to serve the South African community. So, we can’t really over-emphasise the importance of this submission being a beginning of a process which we are committing ourselves to pursue.

137 This commitment led to a formal announcement, on 5 May 1998, of a “programme of reconciliation” in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The first element in this “internal reconciliation process” established by the Faculty Board is an Internal Reconciliation Commission (IRC).

138 The objectives of the IRC are:

a To record the history of racial discrimination in the faculty;

b To record the history of resistance to apartheid by members of the faculty;

c To allow those who were discriminated against to tell their stories.

139 To achieve these objectives, the IRC will collect archival material, obtain written and verbal reports from any interested parties, and publish a final report summarising the findings and recommendations.

140 The announcement by the Dean, Professor Max Price, expresses the hope that “this process and the ensuing report will lead to a public acknowledgement by the Faculty of its record of discrimination and collusion with apartheid and also its opposition to racist government policies, and will begin the reconciliation process within the Faculty and the alumni. It will feed into the Faculty’s Equal Opportunities Programme which aims to redress past inequalities. And, it will also lead to recommendations for undergraduate teaching – to promote a human rights culture in health science graduates”.