More than a century of racist indoctrination has created in the minds and hearts of ordinary South Africans something those in the social sciences call racial essentialism - the belief that there is something in the essence of being African or Indian (etc.) that explains certain attitudes, aptitudes, beliefs, behaviours and, of course, diseases.
And as we saw in a recent study on “cognitive functioning in Coloured South African women”, racist medical mythologies are still being perpetuated.