Inside Labour | Celebrate women and nurses, not just the pale-skinned colonial myth

VOICES

For workers in South Africa and around the world, the month of May started with a whimper rather than what is traditionally a celebratory bang for May Day. And, in South Africa, it ended with something of a slap in the face to one of the most essential and probably most under-appreciated, under-resourced and underpaid of workers: the nurse.

Faced with several new births on a weekend in the maternity ward at Mahikeng Provincial Hospital and a chronic shortage of cribs, let alone incubators, nurses improvised: they wrapped newborns in blankets and housed them in cut-down cardboard boxes.