It has been accepted as fact that UCT’s Medical School graduated its first three black doctors in 1945 - Maramoothoo Samy-Padiachy, Cassim H. Saib, and Ralph A. A. Lawrence. Research by a UCT Religious Studies Master’s student from Turkey, Halim Gencoglu, challenges this previous belief regarding the first non-white doctors in Cape Town.

In an article published in the Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa, June 2015, "Forgotten Medical Doctors, Dr Muhammed Shukri Effendi and Dr Havva Khayrunnisa”, Gencoglu illustrates that Dr Effendi graduated in 1942 and practised Medicine in Cape Town before 1945, and would thus be the first black UCT medical graduate. An additional suggestion is that the first black doctor in South Africa would have been Dr Effendi’s Turkish aunt, Dr Khayrunnisa, who graduated in London in 1920, and eventually practised as a gynaecologist in Cape Town after the death of her husband in Holland in 1929.

From Left: Dr Mohammed Skuri Effendi, Medical School at UCT 1942. Dr Mohammed Shukri Effendi's registration form at UCT, 1935

Using archival sources, among these UCT registration documents and material from the Effendi family, Gencoglu argues that although fair-skinned, doctors Effendi and Khayrunisa would at the time in South African history have been classified as non-white due to their being Muslim. He is of the view that earlier historians researching the origins of the first black doctors in South Africa might have overlooked this because they were confused by their ethnic and national identities - Dr Effendi’s fair skin and Turkish surname might have been a factor in him being accepted at UCT at the time; and Dr Khayrunisa’s Turkish nationality. 

Dr Mohammed Shukri Effendi studied in District Six at Trafalgar High School, the first non-white High School in South Africa, established by politician Dr Abdullah Abdurrahman in 1912. Effendi studied medicine at UCT from 1935 to 1941. After he graduated he worked at Groote Schuur hospital for a while until he opened his own surgery in Bokaap, where he practiced until his death. He died at the age of 30 after contracting Tuberculosis. 

His father’s sister, Dr Khayrunisa, who was also Dr Abdurrahman’s niece, was Turkish and trained as a gynaecologist in Britain. She settled in Cape Town after establishing a practice in Cape Town in 1929. Gencoglu submits that she, and not her younger cousin, Dr Varadea (a daughter of Dr Abdurrahman), was the first black female doctor in South Africa.