Oasis town basks in surgeon’s reflected glory

Press, 30 November 1987, Page 6

Oasis town basks in surgeon’s reflected glory

By RUTH PITCHFORD through NZPA Beaufort West, South Africa The oasis town of South Africa’s outback is basking in the reflected glamour of its most famous son, high-technology surgeon, Dr Christiaan Barnard.

His home town of Beaufort West in the Karoo semi-desert has set up a museum to the international socialite who once ran barefoot there as the child of a controversial clergyman. Before Dr Barnard carried out the world’s first heart transplant 20 years ago, Beaufort West’s main claims to fame were the highest annual rainfall in the Karoo — 150 mm — and the only pear treelined high street in Africa. Motorists passing through on the highway between Cape Town and Johannesburg can now stop off there to see pictures of Barnard with Italian actress Sophia Loren, or a signed accolade to him from the former president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos.

Dr Barnard, now aged 64, left his strictly religi-

ous home in 1941 to make the 480 km journey to medical school in Qape Town.

Since then his taboobreaking transplants of human hearts, his jet-set lifestyle, two divorces and his current plans to wed a woman 40 years his junior have kept the town’s 4600 white residents agog. “We are not saying we don’t keep up our standards,” the deputy mayor, Magnus Grant, said of his council’s decision seven years ago to honour Dr Barnard with the museum.

“But we are not so verkramp (narrowminded) that we cannot see the man has the right to live his own life. Chris has brought honour to himself and to Beaufort West.”

Dr Barnard’s autobiography, “One Life,” describes how he went barefoot as a child because his father served as a missionary to mixed-race (Coloured) people, earning some social ostracism and a third of the salary of the white congregation’s minister.

The Rev. Adam Barnard preached to his congregation in a modest building a few doors away from the main, white Dutch Reformed Church whose steeple dominates

the town centre. Grant says Mr Barnard was highly respected and he and other residents deny that the family was any poorer than the norm among Dutch-descent Afrikaner whites in the 19305. -

On the other side of the railway tracks, where the oasis greenery and tarmac roads run out and the Coloured township begins, Daniel van der Linde remembers differently. Van der Linde, born the same year as Christiaan Barnard, said: “I knew Chris. The (Rev. Barnard’s) sons used to come to our church, but not the other pastors’ children after him.”

He added: "They were very poor. At that time the white Reverend was clearly superior to the ’coloured’ Reverend, you had to know that” Asked about the lifestyle of the minister’s son, he said: "He wouldn’t fit into this dorpie (country town) now. He is a man of the world and he has done damn well, that’s for sure.”

Mr Barnard was known as “liberal-minded," fighting white plans to deconsecrate his church and confine Coloured worship to the township. When he retired, the plans went

ahead and at one stage the church was used as a badminton hall. It is how restored m a museum to all the town’s Dutch Reformed congregations, including Barnard’s. The adjoining manse, a sprawling bungalow where Christiaan Barnard grew up, has been refurbished in the sparse style of his childhood.

Next door, the former town hall houses citations and gifts to Dr Barnard from patients, universities, political leaders, the Rotary Club of the South African mining town of Carletonville and the Order of the Buffalo Hunt of Winnipeg, Manitoba.

The Museum’s curator, Erica Smith, said: “We asked him if he had time to forward a few things for the museum. Next thing this big removal van arrived, full, right out of the blue.”

Dr Barnard’s occasional visits to top up the museum vaults are a major event South Africa’s press thrives on stories of his love-life and a skin cream he promoted to stop wrinkles.

"When he comes through, we all have a bit of a chuckle (about the stories),” said one young woman. “But he is still ever so good-looking, tor his age.”