ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the historical and political contours of the region, and the hospital’s place within it. It argues that the experiences not only of marginality but also of autonomy are important for understanding nurses’ nostalgic reflections on earlier times. These also influence their experience of professionalism – an ideology also deeply concerned with questions of autonomy. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, in a climate of declining colonial power, missionaries experienced increasing antagonism from governments around the world, writes David Hardiman. The ideology of professionalism shares some of the same associations with these earlier modes of respectability, encouraging an ‘opt out’ attitude to politics that Brandel-Syrier describes. By the time the hospital was taken over in 1982, Zulu ethnic identity had emerged as a major social and political force. The mid-1990s witnessed an astonishing transition to majority rule. Over the course of this transformation, the homelands were dissolved and their hospitals reintegrated within the national health-care infrastructure.
