How to be a social activist for health: an interview with David Sanders

David Sanders, an internationally renowned paediatrician and public health researcher, has spent fifty years involved in struggles for health in Zimbabwe, the UK and South Africa. David has always been passionate about participatory socialist democracy as a way to improve health and reduce inequality. In this wide-ranging one hour interview he offers analysis of the causes of the causes of inequality and poor health, and guidance to young social and health activists about how to tackle contemporary challenges for health, the environment, gender and inequality.

In the UK, as a political emigre from Rhodesia, he trained in paediatrics and became a Founder member of the Medical Association against Private Practice. At St Thomas’s hospital in London he learnt much “about the British Class system”. At the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine he became an advocate for the Alma Ata Declaration on primary health care and was influenced by the writings of the Marxist doctor Vicente Navarro.

Returning to Zimbabwe for twelve years, 1980-1992, he was active for Zapu and Zanu PF, took a post as health adviser for Oxfam, and then as lecturer in the medical school. Over time he became disillusioned with the Mugabe regime, especially after the Matabeleland massacres.

Since 1992, through his pioneering work at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, and in the People’s Health Movement, he has been a leading critic of structural adjustment, neoliberal economics and the causes of social and economic inequality which underpin poor health. His research and books have highlighted the links between social and political injustice as the root cause of maternal and child ill-health.

One lesser known fact about David is that he is a passionate and expert fly fisherman. For many years he went fly-fishing in the UK with the jazz singer, author and raconteur, George Melly.