CLARENCE MINI

● Clarence Mini held many titles, from Umkhonto weSizwe freedom fighter to doctor and HIV/Aids activist. But for his son Luyanda, the title was “hero”.

“When I was a teenager my dad was my hero. For a lot of kids that is a dream that fades quite early. But my dad has always been the man I aspire to be,” he said.

Mini, chair of the Council for Medical Schemes, died this week at the age of 68 after contracting Covid-19. In the days before his death his Covid tests actually came back negative, but the disease had already taken its toll.

In his youth, Mini left the country to join the armed struggle, cut his teeth in Angola and trained as a doctor while in exile. Later, while Luyanda and his siblings attended private boarding schools in Grahamstown, Mini and his wife, Nancy, opened a practice in Germiston where they treated HIV/Aids patients for free.

“From an early age he taught us about the importance of stopping the stigma of HIV. I remember being in grade 1 and all my stationery was emblazoned with ‘Stop the Stigma’ while everyone else had stuff with Power Rangers on it.”

Luyanda said his father, an avid reader, would give his children holiday assignments.

“We’d have to pick one of the books he’d read, and after he’d come home from a long day at work, we needed to play back to him what we had read during the day,” he said.

“In grade 7 I was reading Stephen Hawking and in grade 8 I was reading Karl Marx. He wasn’t asking us to read Harry Potter. He wanted substance.”

In his last six weeks, as Mini fought Covid-19, his family were kept at arm’s length.

“We couldn’t sit at his bedside and talk to him; we couldn’t get the church to get people to sing to him while he was sedated. Even now, burying him will have to be done at a distance,” said Luyanda.

“I have seen people complaining about some of the milder inconveniences of the lockdown. Our family are dealing with the real consequences of this pandemic.”