An Effective Target

The organizers of this week’s hospital demonstrations in South Africa chose their target well. It is not that doctors and nurses should be a special target of anti-apartheid activists, or that hospitals are particularly egregious practitioners of the uncondonable policy of apartheid. On the contrary, doctors in South Africa often have violated tenets of the separatist doctrine in order to provide medical assistance to needy people regardless of their race or ethnic background.

No, hospitals were an effective target, because nowhere is the equality of human beings more evident than in hospitals. All worldly pretensions, whether ethnic, economic, social or racial, melt in the presence of death and disease. All human beings have the same ailment--mortality--which affects all equally without regard to race and imposes obligations on all regardless of race.

As black patients sought admission to hospitals designated for whites only, South Africa’s white leaders could not mistake the message: We get sick, too. You cannot deny our humanity.