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OBITUARIES
Evil will only triumph if good men and women do nothing.
Edmund Burke, Jan 12 1729 - July 9, 1797 .
25 September 2011
Wangari Maathai, environmental activist and peace politician, Africa's first female Nobel laureate...
For a young Kikuyu girl growing up in the early 1940s, the small village of Ihithe, in the lush central highlands of Kenya, was next to perfect. There were no books or gadgets in the houses, but there were leopards and elephants in the thick forests around, clean water, rich soils, and food and work for everyone. "It was heaven. We wanted for nothing," Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel peace prize winner, who has died of cancer aged 71, told me when I saw her last in Nairobi. "Now the forests have come down, the land has been turned to commercial farming, the tea plantations keep everyone poor, and the economic system does not allow people to appreciate the beauty of where they live..."
In 2004, seemingly out of the blue, she was awarded the Nobel peace prize... It gave her an international profile and a strong platform to travel the world, pressing home the message that ecology and democracy were indivisible.
John Vidal guardian.co.uk, Monday 26 September 2011 18.42 BST
03 June 2011
Dr Jack Kevorkian, assisted suicide advocate, has died aged 83. Nicknamed Dr Death in the US for claiming to have helped more than 130 people end their lives, Kevorkian died in hospital from a pulmonary embolism after contracting liver cancer.
Kevorkian, a pathologist, ignited a polarising national debate over assisted suicide by crisscrossing Michigan in a rusty volkswagen van hauling a machine to help sick and suffering people end their lives.
Kevorkian spent more than eight years in jail for the murder of a man whose video-taped assisted suicide was aired on television.
Kevorkian built a suicide machine, the "mercitron", for 30$. It injected deadly drugs. Patients could trigger their own deaths.
Some viewed him as an ahead-of-his-time thinker who tried to shape a more humane society, while his harshest critics reviled him as a killer who preyed on those suffering from chronic pain and depression.
- SAPA-AFP, Reuters & New York Times, June 4, 2011
09 June 2009
Thembi Ngubane, courageous Aids activist, has died aged 24. Her brutally honest year-long radio diary about dealing with her HIV status has inspired millions.
..."You don't need money to do certain things, If you have your hands, you have your mouth, you have your brain, then you can just speak." ...She would not let her class and gender in a sexist society deny her a voice.
...Joe Richman the Executive producer of the radio diaries said "Thembi thought about death almost every day. Yet she was the most alive person I've ever met."
...Even after accessing life-prolonging antiretrovirals she died of a multi-drug resistant form of TB, which has become a parallel epidemic to HIV/Aids, especially among the poor and working class.
- Prudence Mabele and Sipho Mthathi, Sunday Times, June 28, 2009
22 October 2008
Dries Van Tonder, who was shot in his police van after arresting a man with an AK-47 in Bez Valley, Johannesburg, lived in a nightmare world of domestic violence, rape, burnings, hijackings, armed robberies and gun fights.
...He spoke a lot about being shot. His only hope was that when it happened he would be killed instantly rather than badly wounded. That was one prayer, at least, that was answered this week. He died quickly. He was 38.
...Policing was a vocation for him, not just a job. He was enormously proud of his uniform and took the small part he played in the fight against crime very seriously.
...His form of therapy was a fishing weekend at the Vaal River with his family, an occasional visit to his parents’ farm in Mpumalanga, taking time off to watch his son play rugby and doing jobs around the house.
- Chris Barron, Sunday Times, October 26, 2008
19 August 2008
President Levy Mwanawasa of Zambia, whose economic policies won the confidence of international donors and whose robust criticism of President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe made him an anomaly amongst African heads of state, died this week in France, seven weeks after a stroke. He was 59.
- Chris Barron, Sunday Times, August 24, 2008
27 July 2008
Former Surgeon General Julius Richmond, who has died aged 91, was the US Surgeon General who first warned the Carter administration that cigarette smoking was "slow-motion suicide."
...Richmond, a paediatrician and a passionate advocate for public health, was also the first national director of Project Head Start in the US... - a federal effort to improve the learning skills and health of poor and disadvantaged children before teh start of their schooling.
...Richmond's 1979 report on the health risks of smoking persuaded congress to require new labels on cigarette packets stating "Surgeon General's Warning" and outlining specific health risks related to smoking.
- Chris Barron, Sunday Times, August 24, 2008
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Environmentalist and human rights campaigner Wangari Maathai in Kiriti, Kenya, in 2004.
Photograph: Micheline Pelletier/Corbis, www.guardian.co.uk
Wangari Maathai,Photo: www.takingrootfilm.com
Jack Kevorkian,Photo: www.redrumautographs.com
Jack Kevorkian,Photo: topuspost.com
Dr. Jack Kevorkian's "60 Minutes" interview 1998 can be heard at www.cbsnews.com/video
Thembi Ngubane,Photo: Melikhaya/Thembi's AIDS Diary
Thembi Ngubane,Photo: www.tributes.com
Thembi's AIDS Diary can be heard at www.aidsdiary.org
Inspector Andries van Tonder on his wedding day
"We Salute You"- Citizen Alert ZA
President Levy Mwanawasa of Zambia
Former Surgeon General Julius Richmond
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