Page 15 - Bulletin 23- 2020

12

Bureau of Public Health in Paris, which issued monthly bulletins on outbreaks of epidemics
globally.

If, despite these precautions, an epidemic did reach the country, the Department of Public
Health sought to prepare further contingency measures too. Local authorities were prodded to

draft emergency plans to deal with a recurrence of Spanish flu, while NGOs were encouraged
to offer to the general public courses in basic nursing and first aid so that the country would

not again be found lacking in nursing skills as in 1918. Several Afrikaner cultural organisa-

tions and popular periodicals like Die Huisgenoot and Die Boerevrouw took this idea even
further by providing elementary instruction in health to their community. “There is not a

place in our country where, in the last three months, we did not discover that we are very
clumsy and ignorant in times of sickness”, noted the Afrikaner Christelike Vrouevereniging

(ACVV) early in 1919. “Now the flu has at last shaken us awake, and suddenly we recognize
25
how ill-equipped we are in the sick-room.”

To redress this it also sponsored the publication of simple medical and nursing manuals in
Afrikaans, which were meant to “contribute to making our children and ourselves healthy and

26
strong so that we can win the battle to survive.” If “volk” were to overcome the loss of life
in the South African War and now Black October, such knowledge was vital.

“Germs recognise no colour bar”

But even deeper socio-economic intervention was needed to deal with the wretched living

conditions of so many town-dwellers, which the house-to-house visits during Black October

had revealed. This was necessary not only for the sake of those residents themselves, but also
to curb the risk of infection which they posed to the better-off classes. “Germs recognize no

27
colour bar”, a leading Cape Town churchman had warned, a point taken by authorities at all
levels.

Already in 1919 building houses for their poorer residents, especially if they were white, was

therefore high on the agenda of go-ahead municipalities like Cape Town and Bloemfontein, a

task made easier when the central government passed the Housing Act the following year,