GELL, CHRISTOPHER

Christopher Gell (November 8, 1917-May 28, 1958) a stringent and effective critic of apartheid in South Africa, campaigned against it from within the confines of an iron lung.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and educated at Wellington School and Cambridge University in England, Gell joined the Indian civil service but, while serving in the Punjab, was stricken by poliomyelitis.

In 1947, badly paralyzed, he went with his South African- born wife to live first in the Transvaal, then in Port Elizabeth. This last area was in the heartland of African nationalism and during the Defiance Campaign of 1952 had the most militant record. Gell soon realized the significance of the region.

During long hours in the iron lung to which he was confined, he contrived to read widely about apartheid and its consequences, memorize facts and figures, and plan the articles and letters to the press that flowed from his pen. He became an authority on most aspects of apartheid, especially the Group Areas Act and on apartheid in sport and nursing. His articles in South African and British journals and newspapers, and the African X-Ray Digest, which he founded and edited, were well-informed, penetrating and often witty and therefore all the more scathing in their indictment of the South African government’s policies.

Meanwhile African, Coloured and Indian friends, many of them leaders of their people, came regularly to consult him during his brief periods out of the iron lung.

Repeatedly rallying after severe bouts of illness, his indomitable will to keep working for a more just society, and the ingenuity and determination of his physiotherapist wife, combined to keep him alive. As Cyril Dunn, writing in the London Observer, said of him: “What he writes is backed by the moral judgments of a man who had been compelled to consider what he must do with the fragment of life left to him.” When he died, volunteers from the African National Congress carried his coffin.

MARY BENSON