Trained black medical personnel in South Africa
Herbert Kaiser, a Foreign Service officer who in retirement raised $27 million to pursue a second career as president of a nonprofit organization that trained more than 10,000 black medical professionals in South Africa, died March 30 at his home in Palo Alto, California. He was 94.
The cause was heart ailments, said a son, Tim Kaiser.
Kaiser spent 33 years in the Foreign Service, including assignments in Eastern Europe and South Africa, before retiring in 1983. Soon after, he and his wife, Joy, formed Medical Education for South African Blacks, aimed at rectifying what he said was a shocking imbalance of health care infrastructure for black citizens in apartheid South Africa.
In a country of more than 20 million blacks, he once said, there were 350 black physicians, fewer than 120 black pharmacists and fewer than 20 black dentists in 1984. During its years of operation from 1985 to 2007, MESAB trained more than 11,000 South Africans as medical professionals, including doctors, nurses, midwives and hospital assistants.
The impetus for his group, he said in a 2004 commencement address at his alma mater, Swarthmore College, was the “superb medical care available to whites but denied to black South Africans. In Pretoria in 1971 I was treated successfully for melanoma, a vicious form of cancer. Several years later the white South African surgeon who saved my life wrote me that he was giving up his private practice to train black doctors.”
Tim Kaiser remembers his parents huddled over a table in the kitchen of their Washington home, poring over maps ands lists of foundations, charities, advocacy groups, and potential corporate and individual donors. They made fundraising cold calls, most of which were rejected, but they always asked for suggestions of who else might be open to a solicitation.
Especially in his early fundraising years, Kaiser faced opposition on two fronts: an unsympathetic white government in majority-black South Africa and factions in the United States opposed to doing anything in South Africa as long as the apartheid government was in power.
In 1989, a $100,000 donation from the Marjorie Kovler Institute for BlackJewish Relations, a Jewish group that worked to support bonds between black and Jewish Americans, was a turning point for MESAB, leading to ample corporate donations.
“I recently visited Soweto and other townships in South Africa and have seen first hand the desperate conditions there,” Sen. Paul Simon, D-Ill., chairman of a subcommittee on African affairs, said in a statement at the time. “This grant will shine a light into that gloom.”