Deadly Medicine exhibit a grim reminder of racial categorisation
The Durban Holocaust and Genocide Centre is hosting Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race, a travelling exhibition from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum until 30 November.
BETWEEN 1934 and 1945, hundreds of thousands of people were murdered in the name of eugenics, the pseudoscience of racial hygiene that underpinned Nazi ideology and was later instituted in law.
The Durban Holocaust and Genocide Centre is hosting Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race, a travelling exhibition from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that traces the history of eugenics and its implications for medical ethics and social responsibility today.
The must-see exhibition features 28 large illustrated panels, plus several screens playing real footage from German television archives of the implementation of these programmes, as well as heart-wrenching testimonies from survivors of medical experiments at Auschwitz-Birkenau at the hands of the notorious Dr Mengele and others.
Unique to the South African exhibit is a display case of actual tools on loan from Stellenbosch University to measure Afrikaner, ‘coloured’ and other subjects for the purposes of racial categorisation. Articles include callipers used to measure facial features, eye and hair colour samples and a copy of a 1925 textbook outlining the practical and political uses of the instruments.
The opening of the exhibition on 15 October was attended by academics, legal professionals, health professionals, and a contingent of biomedical technology students from the Mangosuthu University of Technology.
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“The connection that I feel to the exhibition is unbelievable,” said keynote speaker Christine Nxumalo, a committee member of the Life Esidimeni victim families whose loved ones were forcibly removed from the private psychiatric facility in Gauteng last year and relocated to ill-equipped NGOs where their basic human rights were neglected.
The move resulted in the death of 144 patients and the trauma and torture of hundreds more.
Nxumalo recounted the harrowing and emotional process of tracking down her sister, who suffered from a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease and who died during the debacle. She was left unidentified in a mortuary for weeks.
“Some victims had their eyes gouged out or were missing limbs. Some were buried in the backyards of NGOs with no name markers,” revealed Nxumalo.
She said they were treated as less than human because of their mental health status.
“These were not people who could defend themselves,” Nxumalo continued.
Holding back tears, she appealed to those in attendance: “We need to learn the lessons that this exhibition is trying to teach us. No one has the right to take another life; no one has the right to decide who is superior or inferior. All people have rights! Please, teach our children to stand up for what is right,” she said.
Approximately 260 schoolchildren will be guided through the exhibition during its stay in Durban.
The exhibition is on display at the Durban Holocaust and Genocide Centre until 30 November. It is open to the public and entry is free.
Contact 031 368 6833 or dbnholocaust@djc.co.za.
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