The Migration of South Africa’s Professionals

Quadrant readers will probably have some familiarity with South Africa’s unusual history of colonisation: first by the Dutch East India Company’s establishing a provisioning base at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, then by the slaves brought in from Batavia by Dutch ships plying the spice trade, then by the British imperialists in 1805 and finally by Indian labourers, brought in mostly from the state of Gujarat, to work the cane-fields of Natal. To this amalgam were added, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, European fortune-seekers following the lure of diamonds and gold, and many Jews escaping the travails of persecution, revolution and war. The most recent colonisers have been displaced European settlers from elsewhere in Africa as Europe’s colonisation of the continent gradually collapsed.

They will also be aware that there has been a significant emigration, primarily to English-speaking North America, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand, of mainly “white” South Africans, both during the apartheid era and since its demise in 1994. One consequence of this emigration is that it is draining South Africa of its professional and highly-skilled artisan classes. While official South African data are incomplete, the host countries have recorded hundreds of thousands of skilled immigrants.

The 2006 Australian census recorded 104,000 persons born in South Africa. Clearly not all are professionals. However, a 2007 study of a large sample of the 15,000 Jewish migrants from South Africa revealed that 89 per cent have professional tertiary education or higher degrees (71 per cent) or certificated trades or diplomas (18 per cent). There is no reason to suspect that the non-Jewish immigrants from the same privileged “white” background are any different, while many, if not all, of those immigrants who had been classified in South Africa as “Coloured” would have gained entry in the “skilled migrant” category.

Australia has, of course, welcomed many professionals as immigrants since 1788. But never before has it experienced a mass migration of English-speaking professionals. There has been mass migration of English men and women over the two centuries; and some migration of non-English-speaking professionals fleeing Europe immediately before or after the Second World War—but never a mass migration of English-speaking professionals, which characterises the South African immigration.

The professional group I was readily able to study was the medical profession. The publishing arm of the Australian Medical Association maintains a database (the Medical Masterfile) which records every doctor who has ever practised here. As a former editor for many years of the Medical Directory of Australia (the paper version of this database), I was granted access, on a confidential basis, to the data.

Not only was I able to compare the 2200 South African medical graduates with the total 66,000 medical practitioners in Australia, but I could compare the 2200 with the sample of 469 South African doctors who contacted me in response to notices in the journals and newsletters of the alumni organisations in South Africa, the Australian Medical Association, the Medical Journal of Australia, the various specialist colleges and associations, as well as by word of mouth.

The seventy-six questions inquired, amongst other things, into age, ethnicity according to South African law, education, qualifications, work in South Africa and Australia, reasons for leaving South Africa and for choosing Australia, dates of leaving and arriving, recruitment of other doctors and family reunion; and invited comments about their migration in general and about their professional experiences. The outcomes of this study have recently been published.

The analyses of both this survey and of the earlier survey of 608 Jewish South Africans revealed that, whatever the specific reasons driving each individual to emigrate during the past six decades, there was an underlying determinant of their lives in South Africa—their “racial” classification. How individual South Africans were classified determined which doors were open to them. It is essential, in looking at this unique migration, to understand this underlying factor.

Already in 1942, after visiting South Africa, George Calpin had written his book There Are No South Africans. What he meant was that there were “white South Africans”, “black South Africans”, “coloured South Africans”, “Afrikaans-speaking South Africans”, “English-speaking South Africans”, “Indian South Africans”, “Jewish South Africans” and so on. The people he met identified themselves as being members of one or other of these groups: none was simply a “South African”. After 1948, apartheid legally classified people into these groups and enforced their separation, other than in the workplace, where, by law, “whites” were always the bosses. 

Looking at the migration history of South African doctors to Australia, it becomes clear that they have moved in five distinct waves. The earliest and smallest wave followed immediately on the election of the “white” Nationalist government in 1948. A few, appalled at the election of erstwhile Nazi sympathisers, protested promptly by emigrating.

The iron rule of the police and the military maintained, at least for the “white” population, a peaceful existence until 1960, when the mass shooting of “black” people in Sharpeville prompted many to leave a country which tolerated such inhumanity.

A third wave followed after 1976, when the police opened fire indiscriminately on “black” school students protesting in the south-western townships of Johannesburg, “Soweto”, killing dozens and wounding hundreds.

With Portugal’s loss of its colonies to become what is now Angola and Mozambique, war entered South Africa from without. States of emergency were declared in 1985 and 1986, with conscription of “white” youth into an army now fighting resistance movements based on foreign soil. Rather than fight an unjust war, or to avoid conscription of family members, many South Africans migrated in this fourth wave.

The last wave, which continues to this day, followed on the realisation in 1989 that Nelson Mandela was soon to be released from jail and that his political party, the African National Congress, was to be recognised as a legitimate political entity, as were the other “banned” political parties. From that moment on, it was clear that the country would soon have a “black” government and that the privileges accorded to the “whites” by apartheid would be abolished. A powerful additional incentive was the growing menace of an unprecedented murderous crime wave.

By the mid-twentieth century, Calpin’s different categories of South Africans found their life choices limited, either legally or socially. While the “whites” had all the privileges, with almost nothing denied to them (other than the freedom to enter “black” areas without permission), they were nevertheless socially constrained, especially by language and religion.

Apartheid South Africa had two official languages—English and Afrikaans (derived from the Dutch spoken at the Cape at the time of the British occupation in 1805). Schools for whites were in either English or Afrikaans and excluded “non-whites”, whom the regime forced into racially exclusive and inferior institutions. An edict that “black” students be taught in Afrikaans or a Bantu language, rather than in English, was a major cause of the Soweto uprising.

The demographic make-up of the migratory waves of doctors to Australia clearly reflects these policies. In English-speaking Johannesburg and Cape Town, with their large Jewish populations, medical students attended, respectively, the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town. By contrast, Afrikaans-speaking students attended the Afrikaans-language medical schools in Stellenbosch, Pretoria and Bloemfontein. The medical school at the University of Natal was open only to “non-whites”.

The English-speaking “white” universities tended to be “liberal” in their politics and opposed to apartheid. Both had a few “non-white” medical students until the mid-1960s, when these final remaining “non-whites” were excluded by the government. These two campuses had been the only places in the country where black and white could mingle socially without police interference.

By contrast, the Afrikaans-medium universities had been established in patriotic defiance of the almost exclusively Anglophone nature of academia. Staff had been brought in from Germany and the Netherlands to augment local Afrikaners. The Afrikaans universities were the breeding grounds of the Afrikaner intellectuals who dominated the National Party throughout the apartheid regime. They provided the philosophical and religious rationale for the policy of white domination.

The small numbers of “non-white” doctors graduating from the University of Natal, and the few permitted to study in Johannesburg or Cape Town, were perpetually frustrated by discrimination. All medical and hospital practice was segregated (and unequal, with lower salaries), offering fewer opportunities for postgraduate studies. Legal emigration was out of the question, as “non-whites” were not citizens and passports were all but impossible to obtain. Accordingly, only a handful of “black” doctors have emigrated. In recent years, a number of “Indian South African” doctors, frustrated by what they perceive as continuing discrimination under the new regime, have emigrated.

In summary, the patterns of professional migration reflect this politically, philosophically, socially, geographically and educationally partitioned country. The 1948 wave was clearly an idealistic protest by liberally-minded intellectuals against the potential regime which they foresaw and of which they wanted no part. The waves after Sharpeville (1960) and Soweto (1976) were, in part, motivated by repulsion at the behaviour of the police and the government, and in part by a foreboding of worsening violence and even, perhaps, civil war. The wave during the states of emergency in the mid-1980s was not only motivated by this foreboding, but also by avoidance of a war on behalf of an unjust cause. The final wave, continuing into the present, has largely been motivated by the unprecedented crime wave. With the downfall of apartheid, the police and the military have lost control of the streets and the borders, with massive immigration of people from Zimbabwe and the other nations to the north, and resultant unemployment and crime. Few South Africans have not had family members held up, stabbed, shot, carjacked or murdered. Doctors have not been immune from the crime wave, with hospital residents stabbed, shot and killed.

Further reasons underlying this medical emigration include a decline in health service infrastructure, including lack of maintenance of hospitals and hospital equipment, shortage of needed medications, and government-sanctioned policies (until recently) favouring beetroot juice instead of antiretroviral drugs to combat the rampant HIV-AIDS epidemic. Many doctors also now fear for the educational opportunities for their children.

There is currently no lessening of the rate of migration of South African doctors to Australia. The post-apartheid wave is continuing, at a rate of at least ten doctors a month. There is no reason to forecast any lessening of this influx. Almost half of those now coming have been trained at the Afrikaans-speaking medical schools, whereas barely fifty Afrikaners had migrated in the five decades before 1990.

The contribution of South African doctors to Australian health care has already been significant. Twelve have received Australian honours for their contribution to medicine in this country. Many more have rendered equally valuable service, especially in rural areas and academia. Just what the overall impact on Australia of these highly skilled migrants and their families will be is for future historians to determine. 

Dr Peter Arnold’s book A Unique Migration: South African Doctors Fleeing to Australia was published earlier this year by Amazon.com. He thanks Professor Laurie Geffen AM for his assistance in the preparation of this article.