by Jon Soske
At the time of his murder in 1989, Dr Abu Baker ‘Hurley’ Asvat was
widely revered as ‘the people’s doctor’ based on almost two decades of
medical work in Soweto and health projects initiated across the
Transvaal as Azapo’s secretary of health. Despite his close relationship
with leading African National Congress (ANC) figures and his major role
in anti-apartheid medical activism, Asvat’s name rarely appears in
histories of the liberation struggle and his life’s work has been almost
completely overshadowed by the controversial circumstances of his
death. This article reconstructs Asvat’s biography from his childhood in
the multiracial Johannesburg neighbourhood of Vrededorp to his medical
study and political activism as part of a Pan Africanist Congress
(PAC)-aligned student group in Pakistan; from his significant role in
non-racial cricket to his emergence as a central figure in Soweto’s life
and politics. This article also reflects on the relationship between
Lenasia and Soweto as social spaces during the years of apartheid and
interrogates the ways in which apartheid racial categories –
particularly ‘African’ and ‘Indian’ – continue to structure how
historians represent the recent past.
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