One of the many consequences of South Africa's history of racial discrimination is the impact it had on the training of black medical students. Blacks, and particularly those classified as African under apartheid’s racial classification, were restricted from entry to medical schools by a permit system introduced in 1959 and only rescinded in 1986.1 In 1967, the ratio of white doctors trained per million of the white population in South Africa was almost 100 times higher than the equivalent ratio for Africans,2 and although whites constituted less than 20% of the population, 83% of all doctors and 94% of all specialists in South Africa in 1985 were white.3 Not only were blacks largely excluded from training opportunities but, for those gaining access to medical schools, the conditions under which they trained were extremely onerous, and lacked the educational, recreational, accommodation and social opportunities afforded their white colleagues.1,2,4,5 A comment by a leading academic in 1988 on the state of medical training could have been applied to almost all of South Africa’s medical schools during apartheid: ‘. . . in spite of our much vaunted Academic Freedom, our policy and practice is heavily influenced, if not determined, by . . . an oppressive apartheid ideology. Why else have we produced so few African doctors; why else does the University . . . not have a satisfactory teaching hospital or residence for its [African] students?
