VD Treatment and Educational Propaganda for Africans, 1910–50

Abstract

In his evidence to the Native Economic Commission (NEC) of 1932, Dr Alfred Bitini Xuma, a Rand medical practioner, criticised government inaction in respect of VD programmes for Africans. VD was ‘common to both communities of European and Bantu’, he pointed out, ‘but our method of approach to them in the way of treatment and treatment facilities has been more racial in its point of view than being dictated by public health principles’.¹ Several other African witnesses to the NEC complained that the government spent more money on the much resented cattle dipping than on African health, and if the government could afford supervisors to examine cattle it could invest in doctors to look after people.² Their observations were apt: VD treatment facilities for Africans were meagre and mostly concentrated in urban areas, and the ethos of these VD detection and treatment schemes was very different from that underpinning the programmes aimed at whites.