Commentary: Cautionary Notes on Interpreting History from Additional First-Hand Observers of Poverty, Health and Policy in South Africa

Abstract

In an interesting and innovative approach to the study of poverty, health and policy, William Pick, Laetitia Rispel and Shan Naidoo have summarized three important commissioned government reports generated during the racially segregated apartheid years in South Africa. They seek thereby to evaluate both the background factors and the social context under which these reports were generated, and to evaluate effects of both on policy. In doing so, the authors usefully review material perhaps too infrequently examined in subsequent decades. However, the degree to which these three commission reports truly serve as landmarks in their effects remains an open question. Having lived through the period under review, we cannot but doubt whether in themselves these commission reports promoted or even reveal the central historical developments and links between poverty, health and policy over the past century in South Africa, as the writers suggest they do. First, consider the two figures accompanying the text. Figure i shows the decline in infant mortality over the period 1929-198 3 among whites only. No comparable national data were available for blacks (indigenous South Africans, by far the majority; South Africans of mixed descent, so-called coloured people; and South Africans of Indian origin). This figure, thereby necessarily limited to