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When psychiatrist Frantz Fanon reflected on the role of doctors during the Algerian struggle for liberation in his 1959 essay “Medicine and Colonialism”, he emphasised the consequences of physicians’ class interests. More bluntly put, he tore into the colonising complicities of his ostensibly humanistic profession.
Although the physician presents himself as “the doctor who heals the wounds of humanity”, Fanon writes, he is in reality “an integral part of colonisation, of domination, of exploitation”. Both the European colonial physician and the native Algerian physician are “economically interested in the maintenance of colonial oppression”, which yields them profit and elevated status. One of the chief services doctors provide to the perpetuation of oppressive systems, Fanon notes, is the use of scientific objectivity to obscure the role of politics in driving the sickness and death they dutifully treat and then bury in medical statistics.
Daily Sun/ Lucky Morajane)
Just over three years ago, on 18 March 2018, Justice Dikgang Moseneke ordered the government to financially compensate the victims and families of the Life Esidimeni tragedy in which 144 people died at psychiatric facilities. The judge also ordered that the dead be memorialised.
To date R6.5 million of the R120 million budgeted has been paid out. While families involved directly in the arbitration have received compensation, others are still waiting. “The difficulty according to the premier’s office is that they are verifying the applicants and won’t pay out until this happens,” said the Democratic Alliance’s spokesperson for health, Jack Bloom.