Vanessa Noble

This article examines the construction and dissemination of two particular achievement narratives - one focused on high academic standards, the other on a Black Consciousness-inspired "Black pride" - that were produced by academic staff and students at the University of Natal's Medical School, South Africa's first apartheid-era black medical school in the highly racialised context of the 1950s to early 1990s. While quite different in terms of their producers and periods of origin, the article argues that both these narratives developed with a similar purpose: as counter-narratives, which intended to critique or challenge the pervasive and disparaging apartheid-era discourse that portrayed black South Africans as inferior. Indeed, both these narratives sought, in their own respective ways, to enable those producing them to reframe the dominant apartheid discourse, to offer alternatives, including more positive views about black South Africans, and to take an opposit...

Between the 1940s and the 1970s, the ‘achievement principle’ was intensely researched and theorised within a frame of Western rationalisation and of Western-driven notions of global progress especially in economics and the social sciences. In the first decades of this century, achievement orientation and meritocratic thinking have begun to attract research once more, this time across a wider disciplinary spectrum, but again, with an implicit focus on the global north-west.Achievement-orientation and its manifestation in meritocratic principles is a powerful aspect in cultural narratives across the globe that impacts on social and individual lives in multiple ways. It is present in African societies and in communities across the African diaspora. This collection of short essays seeks to initiate a conversation that can help generate a better understanding of the ways in which achievement and merit are defined, negotiated, represented and embedded, and of the connotations they carry in African contexts, among African social groups and strata, and in communities across the African diaspora, especially in Europe. The collection thus aims to draw attention to the existence of a diversity of concepts of achievement prevalent in these contexts and to embark on explorations into the question of their relations.

Abstract: This dissertation examines the history of the creation of a deeply divided and unequal medical educational and health care system in South Africa. During the 20 th century the training of medical practitioners and the type of health care services that they were to provide was ...

... A. Digby, 'Early Black Doctors in South Africa', Journal of African History, 46, 3 (November 2005); and V. Noble, 'Doc-tors ... S. Marks, Divided Sisterhood: Race, Class and Gender in the South African Nursing Profession (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994); KA ...

From the book's back cover: Durban's McCord Hospital, this book argues, is one of the most important hospitals of the twentieth century. Founded 'for the Zulu' in 1909 by American Christian missionaries, Dr James B. McCord and Margaret Mellen McCord, for more than a century it was a centre of affordable health care for the under privileged of many faiths, cultures and political persuasions. It also pioneered the training of black nurses, midwives and doctors and was supported by prominent figures such as John L. Dube and Chief Albert Luthuli. It initially faced, however, strong opposition from white factions in Durban and, by the 1960s was directly targeted for closure by South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd himself. McCords survived in part because apartheid forces did not understand that for several generations and for many communities, in had come to be a 'people's hospital'. This identity would help carry it through to the early twenty-first century with the conviction and courage, when necessary to stand up against the state when its policies threatened the health of all South Africa's people. This is a history of the religious, health, medical and political contexts of Natal and South Africa from the late 1899s to the 1970s. There are many stories of important firsts and milestones, but what emerges is more than simply a straightforward tale of heroism and triumph. Instead, we tell multiple stories of struggles, successes, failures, frustrations, sacrifices, and how, on occasion, difficult choices and compromises had to be made.

From the book's back cover: Durban's medical school has left an indelible mark on South African history and society. Although not the first institution to train black doctors in South Africa, it was the first to successfully provide a full biomedical training for black students as its primary mandate, and in the process, laid the foundation of the black medical profession in this country. During a time of repression and political unrest, it also offered students an education in politics and activism. Alumni - among them Steve Biko, Jerry Coovadia, Nkosazana Dlamiini Zuma, Malegapuru Makgoba, Zweli Mkhize and Mamphela Ramphele - went out from here to change the medical landscape, make history and set the tone of public life. Based on valuable original oral histories and a sensitive interrogation of archival sources, this book presents a detailed history of the school from the 1950s to our the post-apartheid present. It tells of the school's many successes and of the tensions and contradictions which played out within and around it. A School of Struggle offers insightful portraits of the school's pioneers and focuses poignantly on students struggling to overcome prejudice, structural hardships and discrimination to improve their lives, their institution and society.