Page 20 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Aanmatiging (Self-Assertion): The MRC, 1969–1985

Wittingly or otherwise, it echoed apartheid ideology when it declared that it was
intent on undertaking research on ‘problems affecting the health of the peoples [sic]
of the Republic’ or, as the director of one of its research institutes openly labelled the
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majority of the population, the country’s ‘Bantu nations’. Underlying these problems,
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Brink explained, was the fact of ‘diseases and conditions unique to, or uniquely prevalent
in, our country with its own special historical and multi-ethnic background’. Its
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‘different population groups [were at] different levels of development’ and, as a result,
‘our health problems are in excess of any Westernised country’. He argued that this
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meant that ‘We are faced with all the diseases found in the developing world as well as
all of those found in the developed world’. This produced a significant advantage in
that it made South Africa, ‘with its wide variety of population groups and animals …
a vast natural laboratory’, which put local researchers ‘in a unique position to examine
the causes and prevention of disease’.
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The crest of his power: Andries Brink receives a framed copy of the MRC’s coat-of-arms
presented to him by the Council to mark the conclusion of his first term of office as president
in 1974. Left to right: Council members Professor S.M. Joubert, Dr J. de V. Lochner (MRC
vice-president), Brink and Professor B.C. Jansen.
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