An Uneasy Story

The title reflects the unhappiness of the mission hospital doctors of South Africa in facing up to their contradictory attitudes to the challenge of expanding health services in the face of a takeover of their hospitals by the apartheid government. The first chapter describes life at All Saints Hospital, in the Eastern Cape, South Africa; the second, work at the hospital and how it grew; the third, how it was financed before the takeover. The main account recovers the details of a negotiating process, drawing carefully on the author’s archive of more than 600 documents of many kinds – minutes of meetings, memoranda, circulars, and letters. The debates at a national level grew from discussions within regions. In this account most of these derive from proceedings within the Diocese of St John’s of the Church of the Province of South Africa (Anglican) and proceedings of the Transkei & Ciskei Association of Mission Hospitals.