Hoosen Coovadia, 83, force in fight for racial justice and HIV treatment in South Africa

Dr. Hoosen Coovadia, a pediatrician who used science to fight for racial justice in apartheid South Africa and later transformed the approach to HIV treatment for pregnant women in Africa and beyond, died on Oct. 4 at his home in Durban. He was 83.

His daughter, Anuschka Coovadia, a physician in South Africa, confirmed the death, saying he had been in poor health for two years and was further debilitated by a case of COVID-19 several months ago that kept him in intensive care for weeks.

Dr. Jerry Coovadia, as he was familiarly known, was a leader in the struggle against white rule in South Africa and campaigned for decades for the political transition that brought the African National Congress to power in 1994.

But when, four years later, President Thabo Mbeki began to deny that the human immunodeficiency virus caused AIDS, and asserted that new treatments for HIV were poisons he would not permit to be given to South Africans, Dr. Coovadia became one of the government’s fiercest critics.

“Never was a doctor so vilified as Jerry Coovadia in the ANC for his implacable and quietly militant stand against Thabo Mbeki,” said Zackie Achmat, the founder of the Treatment Action Campaign, a movement of people living with HIV that also battled Mbeki, who was unseated in a party putsch in 2008.

Dr. Coovadia and the activists he supported eventually won that fight, and he helped make South Africa a global leader in HIV care and research. He also mended some relationships with the government, although he remained a vocal critic of inequity in the post-apartheid years.

Hoosen Mahomed Coovadia was born on Aug. 2, 1940, in Durban. His parents, Mohamed Coovadia and Khateja Moosa, came from prosperous merchant families in Durban’s Indian community, though his father, a compulsive gambler, lost most of his wealth while Dr. Coovadia was still young.

He was admitted to the University of Natal medical college, set up by the apartheid government for Black and so-called colored students like Dr. Coovadia, but after a short time he concluded that the education it offered was inferior. He applied to study in Cape Town, but the government denied him the permit to travel that he required as a nonwhite student.

Instead, he traveled to India and enrolled at Grant Medical College in Bombay (now Mumbai). There he was exposed to anti-colonial ideas and met other South African students, with whom he organized a political association. Prominent leaders of the anti-apartheid movement visiting India would address them.

Dr. Coovadia, with a medical degree from Grant, returned to South Africa in 1966. Three years later, he married Zubeida Hamed, who had also graduated from Grant and was finishing her training in dermatology. Hamed shared her new husband’s growing interest in activism, and their home, in Durban, became a mecca for political meetings. Dr. Coovadia went to work as a pediatrician at King Edward VIII Hospital in Durban, an institution that could treat only nonwhite South Africans under apartheid, and later joined the department of pediatrics at the University of Natal Medical School (now part of the University of KwaZulu-Natal). He came under suspicion by the regime for conducting research on topics such as racial disparities in infant mortality in South Africa. He also joined the Natal Indian Congress, an anti-apartheid organization, and soon became a leader of it.

In 1975, Dr. Coovadia earned a master’s degree in immunology from the University of Birmingham in Britain. Returning to South Africa, he found opposition to apartheid there swelling into open revolt. He helped found the United Democratic Front, a coalition of more than 400 trade unions, religious organizations, and other civic groups opposed to white rule. In 1989, the police raided and ransacked his home in search of papers related to secret talks between the regime and the ANC.

A month later, South African secret police planted a bomb in front of Dr. Coovadia’s home. His son, Imraan, a novelist and professor of creative writing at the University of Cape Town, said his father had become such a prominent critic of apartheid abroad, speaking at scientific meetings, that the regime had decided to eliminate him. The bomb destroyed the second floor of the house, but the family survived. In addition to his son and daughter, he is survived by his wife and five grandchildren.

Dr. Coovadia wrote a textbook on child health now in its seventh edition, mentored dozens of students and researchers, many of whom became health ministers and key figures in global health, and conducted pioneering work on measles and pediatric kidney disorders. He advised successive South African governments from various positions, including a seat on the powerful National Planning Commission; led international research projects; published widely in scientific journals; and received awards, including the Star of South Africa, the country’s highest honor, presented by President Nelson Mandela.

But it was his work on HIV that had perhaps the greatest impact on global policy, and which drew him into an unexpectedly vicious political battle.

In the late 1980s, he started to see babies with HIV arriving at the hospital, prompting him to begin researching ways to stop the transmission of the virus from mothers to their children. “He considered it another form of oppression for these women, who were Black, who were poor, who were often rural — and on top of all of that, had HIV,” said Salim Abdool Karim, a leading authority on HIV globally and a former student of Dr. Coovadia’s.

In 2000, as he prepared to become a co-chair of a major global AIDS conference in Durban, the ANC government put immense pressure on him to present the denialist view.

Mbeki, as head of state, opened the conference and, to the horror of much of the audience, reiterated his denialist view. The government then demanded that Dr. Coovadia allow Tshabalala-Msimang to close the event.

Dr. Coovadia’s daughter recalled that 10 “thuggish” men came to the family’s hotel room the night before the conference ended and ordered him to a meeting with the minister. “When he came back, he was utterly shaken,” she said. “He didn’t sleep that night.”

Knowing it might mean both the end of his professional life and ostracism from the party for which he had fought for decades, Dr. Coovadia nevertheless refused the minister the platform.