Mark Slack: Growing up in apartheid South Africa

Mark Slack was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He grew up in a tiny mining community called Springs - which is near Johannesburg. Although many of his friends would attend private boarding schools, Mark went to his local state-run Springs Boys High School where he excelled academically. Mark attended the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and completed his postgraduate training in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Cape Town. Slack completed compulsory military service and spent time in Angola flying Medivacs. He also campaigned to end apartheid in South Africa. He began working as a doctor in England in the 1990s and has brought a number of innovative medical products to market. Mark is now chief medical officer and co-founder at CMR Surgical. In his spare time, Mark is passionate about sailing, rugby, drama and football.

Chris - Tell us about your life in South Africa and growing up there. It was an interesting time. What decade did your life begin in?

Mark - Well I was growing up in South Africa at probably one of the darkest moments of its history. Apartheid was in full swing, this was in the sixties, seventies and eighties. Because I was, I suppose, lucky enough to be born into a liberal, left-wing family, I had the negatives of it explained to me quite clearly from a young age.

Chris - In terms of academic prowess, academic performance, interest in science, are you from an academic family?

Mark - No, not at all. My father was in the mining community with no higher education. My mother was, again, not formally educated with higher education, but a very bright, intellectual person.

Chris - Presumably gold mining if you're outside Joburg?

Mark - Yes, very much gold mining. Those deep mines are not an understatement. I actually worked a holiday job at university on gold mines for a year or two, so had firsthand experience of it, yes.

Chris - Going down those shafts? They're five or six kilometres deep, some of them.

Mark - Yes. I think the deepest single drop is about one and a half kilometres, and then you get in a train and go to another one and you drop again. But I worked as a medical student in my holidays controlling the lifts that went up and down. You'd go up and down in them, they were dark, wet, cold, but some very interesting and funny experiences in doing it.

Chris - Sounds like some of the hospitals I've worked in.

Mark - Exactly!

Chris - But where did the interest in science stem from?

Mark - I suppose that's a sort of a personal journey as well. My primary ambition when I was at school was to run round a track two times faster than anybody else. I was a middle distance runner and that was my consuming ambition. Towards the end of school, I started getting injuries and then was shoved off to see a range of doctors because, as you probably know, in South Africa, sport is a religion. It's not a sport. When this young champion was no longer doing as well as he should have, I was sent to the great and good of medicine. It turned out that I had an underlying medical condition that contributed to the injuries.

Chris - But was that what inspired you then to become interested? Was it the science or was it the human side or was it both that made you think, well, maybe this is a career for me?

Mark - It's a combination. 1) I suddenly got exposed to all these people doing something that I thought, 'Gosh, that's interesting.' 2) I admired the people that were looking after me and fixing me. Around about the same time the teachers started saying to me, 'Now, you do quite well at school, you're quite bright. Why don't you do medicine?' And so the combination of the three sort of amalgamated.

Chris - You went to Wits University to do that. What was medical training like in South Africa? It's an interesting country because it has huge prominence, surgically - Christiaan Barnard being probably the best known, famous South African surgeon.

Mark - The training was incredible. We were so spoiled. I always say this with a tinge of remorse as well because my class was virtually 90% white, and so we were benefiting from the legacy of apartheid. The kids in my class were academically all totally capable - they all had straight A's - but we had a very well-funded education system.

Chris - It's changed now, though, hasn't it? Things have flipped around in some respects. I was in South Africa recently. I met a young woman, white woman, who was at the top of her class, but she couldn't get into medical school because there were not enough places for white people now.

Mark - Yes I think there has been a positive discrimination act, which I find very difficult to criticise given the decades where exactly the opposite happened to the black South Africans. And I think for South Africa to succeed, there has to be a degree of positive discrimination in favour of black South Africans. So I see the difficulty it creates for the individuals, and I feel very sorry for them, but I also see the need of the country to promote people who've been disadvantaged and their parents wouldn't have had the same education, etc. So I find that difficult to be critical of.

Chris - You don't think there's a danger of it going too far and the country will lose some of its skill, some of its finance, I suppose, because people will be pushed out and they'll take their skills and their money with them?

Mark - In some ways, they'll take a little bit of hope from the recent rugby World Cup. When South Africa got rid of apartheid, there used to be a facetious term talking of rugby players, the black Springboks, they would call them 'quotas' because there was a quota of having X number of black people in the team. And South Africa, as you know, has recently just won the World Cup with a team with a high number of black players who are 100% there on merit. I hope that the meritocracy will come back, that you need it for a while to right things but, thereafter, there are more than enough highly intelligent, talented black Africans who are capable of shining. It's a terrible loss to South Africa of some of its real talent and that's, unfortunately, for the low and middle income countries, an international problem.