History of courage: a tribute to the godmother of black nurses
First black nursing lecturer in SA joined the women’s march to Pretoria in 1956
Ruth Bomvana, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 98, was the first black nursing lecturer in SA and one of the country’s top nurses.
She became the matron of Baragwanath Hospital in 1976, just before the eruption of the Soweto student uprising on June 16.
She supervised the casualty ward as ambulances offloaded scores of dead, dying and badly injured young students shot by the police.
She said it was the most traumatic experience she ever had as a nurse, made doubly so by the fact that she was also a mother.
“I could feel the pain of every child who had bullets,” she said, in a voice that years later still betrayed her frustration at not being able to save more lives, and her fury at the brutality of the police, which she said left her “very devastated”.
She experienced this brutality close to home when a student in his teens who lived next door to her in Orlando East was running away from the police and crawled under a car, where they shot him.
Hearing the commotion, she rushed out but her young neighbour was already dead. There followed a memorable confrontation between the small, fearless Bomvana and burly policemen looking threatening with their guns. “Why did you kill him,” she screamed. “He was a terrorist,” they said with a carelessness that made her more furious than ever.
Bomvana was born on July 17 1922 in Bensonvale in the Eastern Cape, one of eight siblings in a staunchly Catholic family.
While completing her higher primary education at the local school, her acute intelligence was noted and she was sent to Taylor Street School in Durban, which was famous for its academic excellence.
Govan Mbeki was her Latin and science teacher, and his future wife, Epainette Moerane, taught her English.
She remembered they cultivated high standards and professionalism in their pupils, which stood her in good stead for the rest of her life.
Driven by her dream of being a nurse and the need to help her widowed mother support their large family, she started her training at the old Johannesburg General Hospital after completing her junior certificate.
She had to lie about her age because she was only 16 and candidate nurses had to be 21 before they could be admitted for training.
The interviewing panel suspected the truth but her enthusiasm and sharp intelligence won the day.
She was caught out a couple of years later when she had toothache. The dentist called the matron to look inside her mouth where her wisdom teeth were just starting to appear.
After belatedly asking for her birth certificate the SA Nursing Council decided she was too young to graduate. The matron told them she’d done everything required of her and had passed her exams, getting a distinction in her practical. And so she became the youngest stateregistered nurse.
When the Baragwanath nursing college was opened in 1948 the matron decided a black nursing teacher should join the all-white staff. Bomvana was chosen and taught a generation of young nurses from around the country.
In 1956 she joined the women’s march to Pretoria to protest against the extension of the “dompas” system to women.
But she had a different priority. While the marchers headed for the Union buildings she and a nursing friend went to confront the SA Nursing Council about plans to introduce Afrikaans and vernacular languages as mediums of teaching instead of English, and separate registers for black and white nurses.
Firm, articulate, logical and very persuasive, she argued that black nurses wanted the same standard of education as whites which meant being taught in English which was also the language most of their patients understood.
The council, which knew her record and held her in high regard, were won over.
English remained the teaching language at Bara and the idea of separate registers was scrapped.
Following the uprising she worked tirelessly with a team of nurses and doctors to reopen clinics which had been destroyed when protesting pupils set fire to them, and to introduce primary healthcare services at these clinics.
When she retired in 1983 (“retired but not tired”, as she put it) she started the Soweto Retired Professionals Society for retired professionals such as teachers, policemen, doctors and ministers of religion who needed high-quality, full-time nursing.
This grew into the Footprints Hospice which started in Orlando East in 1984 and is still going.
Bomvana said she was “disappointed” with declining standards of competence, care and discipline in the nursing profession, which she refused to blame on poor pay.
Nursing was never about money, she said. It was about helping the poor and the sick. It was a “calling”.
“Nursing in the past was nursing,” she said. There were rules and regulations which had to be obeyed. Nurses had to care for their patients and respect their feelings regardless of their colour or status.
A staunch Catholic, she believed religion had given nurses a grounding in ethics and morality. Because of its fading influence, she said, they now lacked this.
“Without religion there can be no good nursing,” she said.
In 2007 the Archbishop of Johannesburg, Buti Tlhagale, presented her with the Benemerenti Medal on behalf of Pope Benedict XVI for her services to the church.
Bomvana’s husband, Alfred Bomvana, a school principal whom she married in 1947, died in 1983.
She is survived by three daughters. Her son, Thamsanqa, a former district surgeon in Soweto, died in 2008.