ABSTRACT
Historically, strike action by nurses has been, and still is, quite unusual. But moments of crisis and confrontation expose issues otherwise obscured by such factors as the ordered hierarchy of a hospital, the distribution of power between White and Black, or inequalities between men and women. In the case of the Sulenkama mission hospital, to be discussed in our case study, the causes of disaffection among these young, Black nurses revealed a complex layering of issues, so that an unpublicized event at an obscure mission hospital serves as a lens to clarify some of the stresses within the South African nursing profession. The first section of this chapter places South African nurses in historical perspective, highlighting the growth of qualified Black nurses, and the way in which mission hospitals played an important early role in their training; the second section provides an analytical narrative of the incidents at Sulenkama and the final section brings these two perspectives together in reflecting on professional development within a context of transcultural nursing studies.
