Health Minister, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi Motsoaledi says it’s befitting that President Cyril Ramaphosa has declared the funeral of the late Prof Bongani Mayosi a special provincial funeral in recognition of the role the world-renowned cardiologist and scientist played in the lives and the development of the people of South Africa.
Prof Mayosi, who was also the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Cape Town, took his own life last week Friday after a two-year battle with depression.
Motsoaledi has known Prof Mayosi for many years. “I met Bongani exactly 35 years ago when he was still a 16-year-old. I met him at the Natal Medical School now Nelson Mandela School of Medicine. When he arrived to do first year I was already in the final year of study but I was also the president of the SRC. So I was given the job to orientate new students and I keep on remembering that event,” explains Motsoaledi.
Prof Watkins pays tribute to Mayosi
Oxford University academic, Hugh Watkins, has lauded the late Professor Bongani Mayosi as one of the greatest minds he’s ever known.
Watkins was Mayosi’s supervisor when he did his PhD at Oxford in 1998. His PhD studies centered around the goal of discovering the gene that causes heart disease, but that had to change.
“I could see that he had the intellect, he was tenacious and resourceful. He wanted to discover a gene that was causing heart disease in the family he cared for. We looked at it and I had to be honest – it wasn’t possible with what we knew those days. We had to set it aside. He came back to it later and he cracked it last year. It was a wonderful email to receive; the pride he had that he and his team here had solved the mystery we couldn’t 20 years before.”
Cape Town Mayor Patricia Patricia De Lille has also paid tribute to Professor Mayosi and expressed condolences to his family. De Lille says Mayosi’s death is a great loss to the country.
De Lille says, “When I met him just over two years ago and he looked he would like to work with the City of Cape Town especially in our poorer communities. Our discussion with Prof Mayosi and members of the health science faculty dealt with the possibility of collaboration between the health science faculties to assist the City of Cape Town in our healthy living and also our diabetes campaign. The city has now launched Our City Living Healthy campaign and I want to say thank you.”
