How a boy born on World TB Day helped turn the tide on SA’s deadliest TB

Norbert Ndjeka was born on March 24 1965, in what is today Sankuru Province in the central part of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“It was only many years later that I realised that this was the World TB Day date. It cannot be a coincidence, can it?” asks the man who, perhaps more than anyone else in South Africa, is associated with the management of tuberculosis (TB), particularly the deadlier forms of this ancient disease.

When Ndjeka was born, his paternal grandfather said he would become a healer.