Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [7]
Meanwhile, other discoveries in Africa had taken the limelight.
CHAPTER 2
DART’S CHILD
ARRIVING IN JOHANNESBURG in January 1923 to take up a post at the new University of the Witwatersrand, Raymond Dart, a twenty-nine-year-old Australian, felt a profound sense of foreboding. Only with great reluctance had he been persuaded to forsake his London-based career for the backwaters of South Africa. In London, as a senior demonstrator in the anatomy department at University College, he had been able to work alongside some of the giants of British medicine; but Johannesburg was little more than an overgrown mining camp, remote from the forefront of medical research. Although given the rank of professor, Dart feared he had taken a wrong turn. Johannesburg, he later recalled, seemed more like a place of exile than one of opportunity.
It was worse than he had expected. He took an instant dislike to Johannesburg, with its endless rows of red-painted, corrugated-ironroofed buildings. ‘It seemed to have progressed little since the days of the gold rush towards the end of the [nineteenth] century and one felt that if a financial slump hit the place, it would become a deserted ghost-town in a matter of days’.
Moreover, he found the facilities offered by the new university to be entirely inadequate. The medical school—a double-storeyed building hidden behind ten-foot-high garrison walls—stood amidst high grass and weeds and exuded ‘a general air of dereliction’. The anatomy department consisted of a dissecting hall with three side-rooms, a lecture theatre and an underground basement mortuary, bereft of almost all equipment. He recalled: ‘The architect had overlooked the necessity for planning water taps, electric plugs, gas or compressed air for student laboratories’. The walls of the dissecting hall were spattered with dirt and other marks indicating their use for football and tennis practice. On trestle-type dissecting tables lay dried-up portions of corpses covered only by scant hessian sheets. During a preliminary tour of inspection, Dart’s American wife, Dora, a former medical student from Cincinnati, was so distressed by the conditions that she burst into tears. To add to his consternation, Dart next discovered that the medical school did not even possess a library.
Nor did he receive much of a welcome from either university colleagues or students. His predecessor had been a popular figure who had been forced to resign, amidst a storm of protest and controversy, as a result of his affair with the chief college typist and his subsequent divorce.
Dart also encountered lingering resentment over his Australian nationality. Australians were disliked by many Afrikaners because of their involvement in the Anglo-Boer war on the side of the British. Shortly before he left London, Dart was shown a letter from Professor Jan Hofmeyr, the university’s principal, expressing ‘regret that the appointee was Australian’.
Close to despair, Dart resolved to press for improvements to the anatomy department. He began to establish a medical library and a specimen collection. He also tried to keep up research he had started in London on the nervous system and the evolution of the brain. But, frustrated by the lack of equipment and scientific literature, he soon found it necessary to divert his attention to other areas, notably anthropology, in which he had previously taken only a passing interest.
As a medical student in Sydney, he had striven in particular to avoid the subject of bones. Now he was obliged to study bones instead of brains. Recalling his early experience at the University of the Witwatersrand, Dart remarked: ‘It would be useless to deny that I was unhappy in the first eighteen months’.
The sequence of events that propelled Dart to international fame began in May 1924. On a visit to a limestone quarry at Buxton near the African village of Taung in the northern Cape, a mining company official, E. G. Izod, was shown what looked like a fossilised