THE EDITOR, Sir:
IN RECENT weeks, there appeared two articles in this newspaper, which to my mind, have misleading connotations.
The first article was published in The Gleaner of August 1, 2005, entitled 'Heart Surgery's Secret hero'. This was an edited version of an unsigned obituary of Hamilton Naki published in The Economist of June 11, 2005. It was a poignant story of a black man's horrible fate under apartheid. In that article, Mr. Naki was said to have been the key assistant surgeon in the first human heart transplant done by Christian Barnard. However, The Economist of July 16, 2005 has since printed a retraction of that article.
The last paragraph of that retraction reads "To report this misapprehension is doubly sad, apart from our own regret at being caught up in it. It is sad that the shadow of apartheid is still so long in South Africa that blacks and whites can tell the same narrative in quite different ways, each suspecting the motives of the other. And it is especially tragic that it should have involved Mr. Naki, a man considered 'wonderful' by both sides, black and white, and whose life should still be seen as an inspiration".
The second article was published in the Flair magazine of that same date (August 1) entitled "Out of many ONE people" by Kalli McDonnough. In observing the women portrayed in the article, I could not help but feel that it was an unintended misrepresentation of the Jamaican ethnic reality. Less than half of the women portrayed seemed to be of pure African descent, yet the reality in Jamaica is that this is so, for more than 80 per cent of our people, and more than 90 per cent are of distinctly part African descent.
I am, etc.,
DOREEN MORGAN
Kingston 8
