mortality rate in South Africa as a 'whole in 1974 was 100 to
I 10 per
1,000, which was worse than every country in Africa except Upper Volta
(now Burkina Faso) and Sierra Leone. In South Africa as a whole, the
Coloured infant mortality rate was 80.6 per 1,000 and the Indian rate was
25.3 per 1,000 in 1978. Mortality rates for both African and Coloured
children aged one to four years old were thirteen times as high as for
Whites. The principal cause of these exceptional infant and child mortality
rates was inadequate nutrition. An Institute of Race Relations survey re-
vealed in 1978 that 50 percent of all the two- to three-year-old children in
the Ciskei were undernourished and that one in ten Ciskeian urban chil-
dren and one in six Ciskeian rural children had kwashiorkor (a severe
protein deficiency disease) and/or marasmus (a wasting disease ultimately
induced by contaminated food and water). Official life expectancy figures
for Africans were not available in the apartheid period, but official esti-
mates (almost certainly overestimates) put them at 51.2 for males and 58.9
for females in 1965-70.37
The principal African diseases were those common in third world coun-
tries: pneumonia,
gastroenteritis,
and tuberculosis (TB). Apart from