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CARDIOVASCULAR JOURNAL OF AFRICA • Volume 29, No 4, July/August 2018
206
AFRICA
Bongani Mayosi, a hero remembered
Mpiko Ntsekhe, Patrick Commerford, Paul Brink, Salim Yusuf
Shortly after joining the internal medicine rotation at Groote
Schuur Hospital, Bongani Mayosi admitted a patient with
suspected tuberculous pericarditis to one of the medical wards.
Little did he anticipate the reaction of the attending consultant
the next day on the post-intake ward round when he let her know
that he had added high-dose corticosteroids to the patient’s anti-
tuberculosis therapy. Stumped by the simple request to provide
evidence for his decision and shocked by the absence of definitive
answers when he looked it up, he made a mental note to one day
be the person who would provide the answers. Twenty years later,
Professor Mayosi had not only published the largest clinical trial
of interventions for tuberculous pericarditis in the
New England
Journal of Medicine
, but he was widely acknowledged as the
world’s foremost authority on the subject.
Mayosi was born and brought up in the Eastern Cape
Province of South Africa (Transkei) where his father, the
regional district surgeon and his mother, a nurse, inspired his
lifetime commitment to patient care, and nurtured his belief that
he could be whatever he wanted to be and achieve anything.
He often reflected on his early years in rural Transkei where
everyone he looked up to, admired and wanted to grow up to be
like, looked like him and believed in him. He was grateful to that
environment, which he believed had spared him the crippling
consequences of self-doubt that is one of the main legacies of
apartheid South Africa.
He graduated from St John’s College in Mthatha at the age
of 15 years, with six distinctions, and then went on to graduate
cum laude
and at the top of his medical school class from the
then University of Natal. When asked to explain the source of
his subsequent passion for research, he pointed to, as crucial, the
extra year he had taken from his medical degree programme (MB
ChB) to study the intricacies of the navicular bone. His MB ChB
was followed in quick succession by fellowship of the College of
Physicians and formal cardiology training, both at the University
of Cape Town (UCT).
In 2001 he returned to Cape Town from Oxford University
with a DPhil and the dream of creating a cadre of people and
building a programme of clinical research that would be capable
of eradicating the unacceptably high burden of neglected
diseases of poverty afflicting sub-Saharan Africa. Shortly after
that he was appointed and served as professor and head of the
Department of Medicine at Groote Schuur Hospital and UCT
until 2015.
Whether it was his warm smile, infectious enthusiasm,
engaging intellect or irresistible charm, few people who met him
were not immediately smitten. Mayosi was endowed with unique
combinations of academic brilliance and vision, ambition and
humility, and the ability to persuade people around him to
believe that they could achieve the near impossible. Among his
many mentees and colleagues, he became famous for a number
of inspiring ‘Bongani-isms.’ One such -ism, which came to
encapsulate so much of who he was and what was important
to him, was the idea that we should all strive to ‘lift others as
we rise.’ Whether it was individuals or institutions, he believed
Department of Cardiology, Faculty of Health Sciences,
University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape
Town, South Africa
Mpiko Ntsekhe, MD, PhD
Department of Cardiology, Faculty of Health Sciences,
University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa
Patrick Commerford, MB ChB, FCP (SA)
Department of Internal Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and
Health Sciences, University of Stellenbosch and Tygerberg
Hospital, Tygerberg, South Africa
Paul Brink, MB ChB, PhD
Department of Medicine, and Population Health Research
Institute, McMaster University, and Hamilton Health
Sciences, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Salim Yusuf, MD, DPhil, MRCP
Obituary
Professor Bongani Mayosi
This article may be reproduced in other medical and scientific journals
provided the original source is acknowledged:
Cardiovascular J Afr
2018;
20
(4): 205–206.