LOOKING BACK

FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES 50 YEARS AGO

Dr. Danie Craven, president of the South African Rugby Board, told me yesterday that he was not — at the moment — in favour of mixed rugby trials. “Mixed trials, with all the attendant uncertainties, are something that I cannot recommend.” He was replying to the stand taken by the Coloured South African Rugby Union for non-racial football. “Man crawls before he walks, and he walks before he runs,” explained Dr. Craven. “We do not know whether we are still crawling or whether we are walking already. That must still be discovered. It may be that the time is not ripe yet. But what I can say is that one step leads to another if maturity has been reached in the first step.”

— May 21 1972

FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES 25 YEARS AGO

The matron of Ekombe Hospital in rural KwaZulu-Natal has no time for arguments about the demerits of Cuban doctors and their supposed inferiority to South Africans. Julie Shezi, who has worked at the one-time missionary hospital since 1967, says: “I cannot say how qualified South African doctors are because we’ve never had a chance to see for ourselves.” What she can say is that since three Cuban doctors arrived at Ekombe less than a year ago, the lives of 10,000 people served by the 200-bed hospital have been transformed. Before they came, she and her nurses, not to speak of the patients, would consider themselves lucky if a doctor visited them one day a week, or a fortnight. Scores of babies died because of the things mothers and grandmothers did to try to cure them in the absence of anything else. — May 18 1997