Cape Town - The widow of slain Stellenbosch University paediatrician Dr Louis Heyns appealed on Friday at his funeral for people not to “repay evil with evil”, and to never “stop praying for this beautiful country of ours”.
Dalene Heyns’s message, conveyed to a packed Tygerberg Evangelical Reformed Church in Bellville by a friend, came after she sat listening attentively as, one after another, her husband’s colleagues paid him moving tributes.
Heyns was murdered after going missing on May 22. His body was discovered a week later in a shallow grave at a beach in Strand, after the site was pointed out by one of the men being held in connection with his murder.
As hundreds of people, from the Western Cape and Gauteng, arrived for the funeral, Heyns’s wife, along with the couple’s sons Charl and Daneale, and their daughter Eldalè, sat in the third row.
When the Tygerberg Hospital Choir sang, Dalene dropped her face into her hands. Their daughter burst into tears several times during the service. People crowded the steps of staircases leading to a second-floor gallery of the church, while others crammed into the doorways in an attempt to hear the tributes.
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, who together with his wife Leah is a patron of Tygerberg Hospital, was there to offer his condolences.
He said in a brief interview that Heyns was “such a wonderful symbol of our country”.
“His previous patients came to the hospital when they heard what had happened because he touched the hearts of so many people. He represents the South Africa we know we can be. Skin colour is nothing. It’s a person’s heart that’s everything.”
Tutu told Daneale, the Heyns’s youngest son: “God bless you.”
Daneale told Weekend Argus after the service: “I couldn’t have wished for a better dad.”
Professor Sharon Kling, a colleague of 22 years, said during her speech that Heyns was “a gentle giant of a man, with a reputation for eating the nurses’ sandwiches and the patients’ leftover food”.
“If we could not find Louis in the intensive care unit, we knew he would be in the sisters’ tearoom or in the kitchen,” she said, to smiles and laughter from the mourners.
Ward A9, the neonatal intensive care unit at the hospital, would “never be the same again”.
Tygerberg paediatrics professor Robert Gie said: “Today we are all very sad. Dr Heyns taught basic and advanced life support courses to all medical students at the University of Stellenbosch. Tens of thousands of people. All of them would have been infected by his attitude. He joined in 1984. And over the last 20 years he was a wonderful colleague. An exceptional and caring physician and best of all, a people’s person. Louis knows everybody, and everybody loved and knew Louis.”
Gie’s voice broke with emotion when he said: “I have received e-mails from all over the world as people express their sorrow that Louis is dead.”
One of the e-mails read: “He was such a humble, lekker person. That his life was taken was senseless. It robs not only his family, colleagues and students, but also the many children for whom he had so much to give.”
Professor Mariana Kruger, executive head of Stellenbosch University’s Department of Paediatrics and Child Health, said people had arrived at Tygerberg Hospital spontaneously after the news broke.
“They wanted to be where his soul had last been,” she said, adding that Heyns had sacrificed his weekends to do community service.
“The man was a miracle. We all want to honour him.”
Emilia Maloi, a
nurse who worked with Heyns in the paediatric ICU for 12 years, told Weekend Argus afterwards: “I could chat to him for hours. We would chat about the management of the hospital and the safety and health of the staff and patients.
“The shock that he has been taken away from us is immense. It will be difficult to continue without him because so many things revolved around him.”
Weekend Argus