One of Cape Town’s first Muslim women doctors passed away at the Rondebosch Medical Centre on Sunday night. Dr Khairunisa Parker, 81 took ill last week and was hospitalized on Friday. She graduated from UCT in 1959. She lived and schooled in Salt River and enrolled for the medical degree in 1953, an unusual step for a young woman at the time.

Dr Nasheba Jardine who enrolled in 1958 said by the time she arrived at UCT, Dr Parker was about to graduate.

“I am not sure if she was the first Muslim women to graduate as a doctor but she was the first one we knew of,” she said.

Dr Jardine is the mother of the well-known South African poet and academic, Gabeba Baderoen.

“All the years, she worked at the Langa Day hospital,” said Dr Jardine.

During the years in Langa, she was eyewitness to many historic moments quietly tending to those who were affected and ill.  Dr Parker’s funeral leaves her home in Athlone today at 12.30 and will move to the Mowbray mosque and then Mowbray graveyard.

Dr Parker leaves behind her husband Abou Desai, well-known retired Hewitt Teacher’s Training College lecturer, her daughter, Fatima and son, Rasheed, her grandson Shadley and two adopted grandsons, Banele and Odwa. THE JOURNALIST