Books Statues and Storms: Leading through change by Max Price Tafelberg, 2023
Dr Max Price (MBBCh 1979, DOH 1993) is cur-
rently a non-resident fellow of The Centre for Global Development and consults in public health, higher education, strategic leadership, and crisis management. As former dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) at Wits from 1996 to 2006, he spearheaded a series of transformation initiatives, including the Internal Reconciliation Commission, which documented many of the discriminatory practices, including racism and the sense of humiliation that black students encountered, in the FHS. He also established a new graduate entry medical degree, academic programmes in rural health, bioethics, sports medicine, emergency medicine, and biomedical sciences. In his latest memoir, Statues and Storms, Dr Price provides an insider’s view, as Vice-Chancellor, of the
Rhodes Must Fall protests at the University of Cape Town. At the time, universities across the country were consumed by sustained, at times violent, demonstrations. He says the motivation for writing the book was to record a history and offer leadership lessons he’d learned around transformation. On a personal level, the memoir reveals the personal toll his job took on his family: struggling to sleep, planning escape routes out the house in the event of arson, packing photo albums and emergency supplies in the boot of the family car. Professor Adam Habib (BA 1989), current director of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and former Vice-Chancellor at Wits during the same time, praises the memoir for its empathy to the social justice agenda, whilst being “truthful about not only the inability of many activists to understand the complexities of institutional change, but also the malevolent actions of some who profess to be progressive”.
Right: A defaced statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes being tied by straps to a crane, before its removal at the University of Cape Town in 2015 Gallo/Getty Images
58 Wits Review October 2023
