Page 8 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Preface

lways aware of a need to project a positive image in tune with the South African
state’s policies so as to ensure ongoing financial, administrative and political
Asupport by the government of the day, the South African Medical Research
Council (SAMRC), from its twentieth anniversary in 1989 onwards, commissioned
accounts of its history in some form at every subsequent end-of-decade anniversary.
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As the subtitles of two of these – ‘Twenty Years of Growth’ and ‘50 Years of Ground
Breaking Health Research and Innovation’ – illustrate, these generally emphasized the
MRC’s achievements and successes, though those produced after apartheid were very
critical of the Council during its apartheid years, seeking to distance the post-1994
institution from its previous self and show how much it had been transformed since
then. In this regard the post-1994 MRC was continuing its earlier stance of keeping on
the right side of the current government’s policies.
For source material almost all of these accounts drew extensively on the MRC’s own
annual reports, which had been compiled year by year with the same need to project
a positive image of the institution. Compared with these end-of-decade histories,
this history’s span is far longer and its sources far wider. Certainly they include these
annual reports, but also files in the MRC’s own archives, contemporary newspapers
and journals, and the oral testimony of nearly forty people with long links to the MRC
whom I interviewed. The result is intended as a balanced and more comprehensive
account of both the achievements and setbacks of the MRC, its steps and missteps
over more than fifty years since 1969. It is structured chronologically and is divided
into six chapters covering six eras in the MRC’s history, viz. its foundation in 1969–70;
the ‘aanmatiging’ or self-assertion years, when it grew to dominate medical research in
South Africa, with its highest priority being the health of whites, 1969–85; the years

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