Cecilia Makiwane (1880-1919)
This pioneering African nurse was born in 1880 in MacFarlane Mission (of the Free Church of Scotland) in what is now South Africa. Although her mother died when she was three, she came from a family of pioneers. Her father was only the second black Presbyterian Minister to be trained in South Africa, her sister Daisy was the first African woman to achieve a degree in mathematics and her niece Noni Jabavu became a well-known novelist.
Makiwane studied at home and then went to Lovedale Girl’s School where she obtained a teacher’s certificate. She then worked as a ward nurse for several years at the Victoria Hospital (or Lovedale Mission Hospital), founded in 1898, which became part of the Lovedale mission in Alice, a small town in the British Cape Colony near her birthplace.
Although the South African colonial nursing college in Kimberley (founded 1877) did not admit black students, the Victoria Hospital started an experimental course open to black nurses and in 1902 Lovedale College started a three year general nursing course. In 1903 two African students enrolled on this course and Makiwane was the first to pass her examinations in 1907. The Cape Colonial Medical Council approved her license as a nurse in 1908.
She worked at Lovedale Mission Hospital after qualifying. Unfortunately, she fell ill and had to be granted a leave of absence to recuperate. She went to stay with her sister, but never recovered from her illness and died in 1919.
Named in her honour, Cecilia Makiwane Hospital was built in Mdantsane, Eastern Cape, South Africa, and a statue of Makiwane was erected by the nurses of South Africa at Lovedale Hospital.
The stamp we see here was issued in 1982 to honour local heroine Cecilia Makiwane by the short-lived republic ‘Ciskei’. It was one of four partly independent ‘homelands’ in South Africa under apartheid, mainly home to the Xhosa peoples relocated there in the 1970s.
Apartheid ended in the 1990s taking Ciskei with it and in April 1994 it became the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Some of the other stamps issued by Ciskei on nursing and medical themes can be seen here.
References
‘Cecilia Makiwane – Pioneer African Nurse’ by David P. Steensma, Marc A. Shampo & Robert A. Kyle (Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 2005).
Link: http://sahistory.org.za/pages/people/bios/makiwane-c.htm