Page 40 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Chapter Three

On and over the Brink:

The MRC, 1985–1994

he MRC was not untouched by the convulsions which took South Africa
from insurrection to political democracy between 1985 (when a state of
Temergency was declared) and 1994 (when a democratic political order was
inaugurated). As a dutiful parastatal organization, its medical research agenda began to
change, in keeping with the attempts by the Government to reform and then abandon
formal apartheid.
Even Andries Brink recognized that the political wind was turning and showed
himself perceptive and adaptable enough to move in the same direction. He was ‘a
pragmatist, a closemouthed man who in the end did not close his mind to what was
happening around him’, judged a reform-minded activist who worked with him closely
in these years. 1
Even though he did not give up his belief in the inherent differences among the
‘peoples’ of South Africa, as full-time president of the MRC for four years before
retiring in 1988, Brink began to refer in public to the limitations of the MRC’s
2
emphasis hitherto on pathological, clinical and laboratory-based research to overcome
the country’s health challenges. ‘The focus has mainly been on particular diseases, how
they occur in different communities and ways of improving diagnosis and treatment’,
he observed. ‘The accent has rarely been on the availability of essential health care
to these communities and their need for primary health care … The MRC regards

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