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SUNDAY TIMES - July 1 2018
Insight Dentistry
Mandela Day is Denture Day On Mandela Day, July 18, the UWC dental faculty, which makes 5 000 sets of dentures a year, will provide 100 extra sets especially made for senior citizens. The faculty will also perform 100 minor surgical procedures from dusk till dawn on that day
Sunday Times
The University of the Western Cape’s faculty of dentistry is celebrating 40 years since producing its first crop of graduates in 1978. Two dentists look back at a time of bracing change
Out of the jaws of oppression The march was stopped in its tracks at the Modderdam Road gate by a dozen Casspirs and guns pointed at the marchers Jairam Reddy
IN THE VANGUARD In the turbulent 1980s, Professor Jairam Reddy of the University of the Western Cape’s dentistry faculty, far right, marched with senior UWC staff and about 4 000 students to the Bellville police station to demand the release of detained students. From left, Professor Jaap Durand, Professor Jakes Gerwel and Professor Richard van der Ross. Picture: Courtesy of UWC
Making family and academic history
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t is 40 years since the University of the Western Cape saw its first intake of dentistry students capped. Smiling back from the historic photograph is Dr Soraya Yasin Harnekar, the only woman student in the first class of UWC dental graduates. “It made me a little lonely, being the only woman in the class, but the guys looked after me quite well,” says Harnekar. “One professor used to address the class as ‘Ms Yasin and gentlemen’ and then the guys would say: ‘But she is an honorary gentleman.’ ” It was 1978 and South Africa was knee-deep in apartheid. “There was unrest, our classes were suspended, but we continued,” says Harnekar. And there was tragedy. During her fourth year of study, her 23-year-old brother went missing. “For two days we couldn’t find him. We looked at all our friends’ houses, at all the hospitals. No sign of him,” says Harnekar. Eventually, they made the trip that no family ever wants to make: to the morgue.
By TANYA FARBER
“We found him there and identified him.” They discovered that he had gone to the unemployment office in Cape Town and then for a walk on the Parade. “He loved walking there, but on that day he happened to be there when violence erupted,” says Harnekar. “He was shot dead by the authorities. We were not informed, they just took his body away.” On the day they identified his body, Harnekar, then 21, had to write a test. She did so despite her grief and shock, knowing her brother would want her to carry on. She was the first person in the history of her family to attend university. Harnekar was enrolled for a BSc when she heard that UWC had opened a dental faculty. “I can’t say I always wanted to do dentistry, but I said let me just go and see what it’s about. I applied, and I have never looked back.” She vividly remembers graduation day and wishes her brother could have been there to show his pride in her. UWC didn’t have a hall, so the ceremony was held
When I started at UWC, it looked like a military camp Dr Soraya Yasin Harnekar
Dr Soraya Yasin Harnekar Picture: Esa Alexander
at the Baxter Theatre. “When we got our results and I saw I had passed, I smiled so much my cheek muscles were sore. I think that is the only time in my life I have smiled that much.” But the job still makes her happy. “It is such a wonderful place to work,” she says. She focuses on children’s dentistry, a field which she says is not an official area of specialisation but one which they are “working on getting recognised”. For her, children’s teeth are evidence of how things
have changed in South Africa. Four decades ago, she says, no effort was made to save children’s teeth — they would be extracted for the slightest problem. The year before he died, her brother had come home in agony after a dentist pulled 24 teeth in one sitting. “When I started looking after children’s teeth, I told them we could save the teeth,” says Harnekar. “They don’t have to be extracted.” She is one of nine children and her six younger siblings still have all their own teeth. The university itself has also changed dramatically. In Harnekar’s day all but one of her professors were white and facilities were dismal. Today, there is a state-of-the-art conference facility and a privatepractice simulation clinic. There is great diversity among faculty members and students, more than half of whom are now women. “When I started at UWC, it looked like a military camp,” she says. “Today it looks like the most beautiful university. It will be wonderful for people at our reunion in July to see how it has developed.”
Apartheid shaped my academic career
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matriculated in Durban in the late 1950s and chose dentistry as my career for reasons that are still not entirely clear in my mind. This was when apartheid was being implemented with increasing intensity. Having been denied entry to the school of dentistry at the University of the Witwatersrand — a denial for persons of colour that preceded the pernicious Separate Universities Act of 1959 — I had to seek admission elsewhere. I decided to try the UK. After a 21-day sea journey on the Athlone Castle from Durban, I arrived in Southampton in August 1958. The Wits letter denying me admission in part facilitated my acceptance to the University of Birmingham in 1959. Five and a half years later I graduated with the degree of bachelor of dental surgery. Following an internship at the Royal Dental Hospital, I returned to Durban to establish a practice in an area designated for persons of Indian origin, as compelled by the Group Areas Act. Three years later, I developed a yearning for postgraduate study but was again denied admission to Wits. A scholarship took me to the University of Manitoba, in Canada, where I obtained an MSc. In 1974 I obtained the fellowship in dentistry of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. Homesick, I applied for an academic position at the University of the Western Cape, where a faculty of dentistry had recently been established for persons designated coloured. In January 1977, I became senior lecturer in the UWC’s department of oral medicine and periodontology. The first class of UWC dentists
By JAIRAM REDDY
graduated in 1978. There was one dentistry faculty for Stellenbosch University and one for UWC. Two faculties, differentiated along racial lines but housed in the same building, resulted in unpleasant problems. UWC staff and students were requested not to use the white entrance of Stellenbosch University. Our faculty was largely English-speaking; theirs was staunchly Afrikaans. Courses in general medicine and general surgery were provided by Stellenbosch in Afrikaans and this was a matter of continued tension. Despite this, many staff from both faculties interacted productively, offering joint courses and collaborating on research projects. The period 1977 to 1987 was volatile and a time of great instability in South Africa. Opposition to apartheid intensified on all fronts: economic, sports and university boycotts; the formation of the United Democratic Front; the armed struggle waged by the ANC and other groups. UWC and other historically disadvantaged universities were at the vanguard of the struggle. Students demonstrated on campuses while police invasions, detentions and arrests were common. On one occasion, vice-chancellor Professor Richard van der Ross, accompanied by senior staff and 4 000 students, began marching to the Bellville police station to demand the release of detained UWC students. The march was stopped in its tracks at the Modderdam Road gate by a dozen Casspirs, with guns pointed at the marchers. Political events often disrupted classes. The
Professor Jairam Reddy with Nelson Mandela during a visit by the then president to UWC.
completion of clinical work and patient appointments were a particular problem. With the departure of Neville Owen in 1984, I was appointed dean of my faculty.
We made many progressive changes in the faculty, including the introduction of specialist postgraduate programmes, which until then had been largely the preserve of white students. A research culture was progressively established and staff members were encouraged to present papers at the South African division of the International Association of Dental Research. In 1985, Professor Jakes Gerwel replaced Professor Van der Ross as rector and vice-chancellor of UWC. Under his leadership, UWC became known as the “University of the Working Class” and the “intellectual home of the left”. In the same year we hosted eminent US professor Richard Simonsen. He dined at my home and we briefed him about the struggle to end apartheid. He visited Crossroads and other segregated areas and later spoke of his visit to UWC as life-changing. In 1987 he wrote an article titled “Beauty and the Beast” in which he noted the beauty of South Africa while observing the beast in the racially segregated doctrine. For example, the University of Pretoria’s school of dentistry provided comprehensive treatment for its white patients but only extractions and emergency treatment for black patients. Simonsen did a great deal for the liberation struggle and in 1996, when he met Nelson Mandela, UWC conferred an honorary doctorate on him. A seminal event in 1986 was the visit of a delegation of largely UWC personnel to meet the ANC in exile in Lusaka, Zambia. This was risky as the ANC was still banned and any meeting with its members
was regarded as a criminal offence. As a member of this delegation it was a great privilege for me to meet Thabo Mbeki, Alfred Nzo, Chris Hani and many senior ANC members. Shortly after, I accepted the position of dean at the new faculty of dentistry at the University of DurbanWestville, and with much regret resigned from UWC. Since then there have been significant developments. The UWC faculty of dentistry incorporated the Stellenbosch faculty and moved as one unit to Mitchells Plain. UWC’s dentistry faculty has grown in stature, becoming a World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Oral Health and introducing many postgraduate programmes. Today, UWC has the largest dental faculty in South Africa, training more than 80 dentists a year, offering postgraduate programmes to students from around Africa and doing research in many fields. My decade there stands out as the most transformative and memorable of my experience. In addition to shaping the political discourse, it was deeply enriching in the relationships I established with students, staff and friends. ✼After UWC, Professor Jairam Reddy became the vice-
chancellor of the University of Durban-Westville (1990-94), chairman of the National Commission of Higher Education (1995-96), chairman of the council of the UN University, Tokyo, Japan (2000-02), director of the UN University Leadership Institute, Amman, Jordan (2004-09) and chairman of the Council of the Durban University of Technology (2007-2016)