Where are the Nurses?: An ethnographic study of nurses - Seeking an explanation into their failure to redress chronic disparities in the late 1990's

Nurses have disappeared from the protest arena. Not so long ago, in the wake of Mandela’s return to the visible terrain of activism, they launched a series of strategies to resolve the arduous conditions they had long been actively resisting. Of these strategies, two stand out as being most distinct. The first was an initiative to unify the many nursing associations formed in response to National Party segregationist policies. Implementing these policies in 1983, the South African Nurses Association expelled black members and directed them to form homeland associations, which many of them did, subsequently to be organised by the League of Nurses of South Africa (LONASA), a body founded by SANA . In the context of a seriously eroded socio-economic landscape, the consequences of expelling nurses hasn’t yet been fully analysed, however it is clear that the fledgling homeland associations operated with fewer resources, yet were accountable to a constituency situated within the most disadvantaged health care sectors constructed through apartheid.