Page 15 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

A Widening Idea of Health: The SAMRC from Creation to Covid

of Afrikaans medical terms. At bottom, for all Brink’s lip service to objective, value-
17
free science and impartial administration, this Broederbond member #7419 was an
Afrikaner nationalist, determined to advance the interests of his fellow Afrikaners,
their language and their culture in the field of medicine and also to remain in tune with
the National Party’s policy of apartheid. Indeed, in anti-apartheid circles he was seen
as having deliberately ‘championed the cause of Afrikaner science’ and sought to make
the MRC into ‘a project which would valorise Afrikaans as a discourse for medical
science while tackling diseases amongst white people’.
18
Certainly, for most of his 19 years as president, this was the case as he fashioned
‘his’ MRC into an Afrikaner male-led institution where bilingual English-speaking
whites were accepted as long as they did not dominate the organization. For blacks,
however, there was no place save as menial workers. All facilities, from bathrooms
to tearooms, were racially segregated. Indeed, this apartheid view of the population
echoed a clause in the MRC’s founding Act which referred to the health of ‘the peoples
of the Republic’, a concept which Brink himself continued to use in public until he
19
left the MRC in 1988. 20
If what research the MRC itself conducted until the late 1980s bore the stamp of
Brink’s assessment of the country’s medical priorities, where it did this – and still
does so today – reflects his decision over fifty years ago as to its ideal location and his
determination to implement this.
Already reluctant for ‘his’ MRC to be located within easy reach of the Department
of Public Health’s headquarters in Pretoria or to remain there as ‘a small sister’ in the
shadow of the CSIR, Brink was strengthened in this view by the difficulty which the
21
MRC encountered in finding suitable land in the vicinity of the CSIR’s ‘Scientia’,
where it was provisionally housed. When, on top of this, the MRC was offered ample
land at no cost to it, adjoining the site where Stellenbosch University’s new teaching
hospital (Tygerberg Hospital) was being built in Parow, Brink’s mind was made up.
That he had long academic ties with that university, along with the presence not far
away of two other universities, UCT and the University College of the Western Cape,
surely made the decision even easier for him.
To overcome the Government’s desire that the MRC should be based at ‘Scientia’,
Brink therefore turned to Prime Minister Vorster, seeking his permission to move the
MRC to Parow. According to Brink, Vorster did no more than ask him, ‘How will
research fare in the Cape?’ When Brink assured him that it would ‘flourish’ there, the
22
matter was settled, despite strong opposition from the Department of Public Health,
which even tried to bar the removal of the MRC’s office equipment to Parow. Some
claim that threats were actually made by senior men within the Department of Health

8