Factors affecting a decision on cadaveric organ donation in Black African families

Bibliography: leaves 45-49.Black Africans continue to be the group with low consent for cadaveric organ donation However, the number of African Black patients with organ malfunctioning or failure continues to rise. Feelings associated with death and the novelty of the concept of organ donation to Blacks hinder the process of organ donation. Previous research indicate that although organ removal is not new in the Black African culture, its use for medical purposes is a recent development . This study explores factors that have affected the decision of Black African families regarding cadaveric organ donation . It focuses on families which have been requested to donate by the Groote Schuur Hospital (GSH) transplant co-ordinators from 1994 to 1996 Further, it examines whether the attitudes held at the time of the request have changed. An understanding of the factors and recommendations are offered at the end

Coloured subjectivies and black Africanness.

ABSTRACT Racial identities in South Africa reflect a highly complex history of how people have related to each other. They also illustrate how power has been used to validate different identities, along a racial hierarchy that attached the most value to whiteness and the least to black Africanness. These structural validations have played themselves out in everyday interactions between people both in terms of how they are seen and how they see themselves. In particular, this study draws on psychoanalytic literature to help to explain the workings of race and the recalcitrance of racism. In South Africa, conceptualizations of blackness and whiteness have dominated discourses on race and on racism. Set in Cape Town, this study by contrast, focuses on coloured identities and how these are experienced and understood particularly in relation to black Africanness. It uses participants’ life histories to explore the workings of race and racism in coloured households and communities, examining relations between family members in this regard in particular. It illustrates the tensions that characterize coloured subjectivities especially in the post-apartheid era, showing how coloured identities articulate themselves in opposition, as well as in relation, to black Africanness. Importantly, this study reveals how associations with black Africanness have threatened the security of many people who identify as coloured. The thesis also explores indices of sexuality and gender as they relate to the broader topic of race and racism. The key argument of the study as a whole is that by exploring the meanings of race racism in the realm of the intimate, or the intrapersonal, we will come closer to understanding these notions and practices and in the case of racism, some of the reasons why it persist after social and political transformation, even as its meanings change