Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa (11 page)

Which some of the whites much resented:
the lack of supervision of the black children, I mean. Their own children were
closely supervised by their parents, who felt uncomfortably responsible for the
black children too. They felt morally bound to hang around until all the little
black tadpoles were safely off the premises, when they wanted to be off to the
bar, to say nothing of their suppers. And any white parent will understand
their feelings.

For a boring month or two I had to take
my turn as chairman of the club committee, and one morning a white manager rang
me up at the hospital to complain about the dereliction of the black parents.
In turn, in what I thought was my official capacity, I got in touch with
Solomon, whose default had been especially castigated by the complainant. In
short, Solomon's children had formed a conspicuously large proportion of the
little black free-floating bodies (in more ways than one) in the pool the
previous Sunday. Solomon sounded very penitent and promised to do something
about it. Somehow the matter reached the ears of the GM - maybe that was what
Solomon had 'done about it'. At any rate, the GM got on to me and explained the
constitution of the Samreboi Club, which included no connection with the
swimming pool. That was the exclusive province of the GM. (Maybe Solomon had an
idea of this. I may say he was a good friend and was not trying to get me into
trouble.) The GM explained this to me with all courtesy, but I could see I had
got myself into a culture clash of long standing from which I was rescued by
the GM as Amos had rescued me from the politics of labour problems. And I could
also see that the GM had a trickier problem to deal with than Amos's.

British mothers-to-be were sent home to
UK to have their children, and the children sent home for schooling even at
primary school age, and came out in the school holidays. This subject first
entered my life on my first day in the country at the beach club of the hotel,
when I was accosted by a very persistent Dutchman on the matter. 'Vot is the
thing vith this International School?' he pressed me, who had not the least
idea what he was talking about. 'All the teachers are English, but the English
don't send their kids to it. All the kids there are Dutch and Germans and French
and things like that. I send my kids there, but the English don't send their
kids there, only all the teachers are English.' (I may say he had had a few.)
'So tell me, vot's the matter vith this International School? Vy don't the
English send their kids to it?'

I forget how I wriggled out of that one
- I suppose I told him it was my first day in the country. He seemed to think I
was Her Majesty's High Commissioner. I need not have bothered. The questions
were all rhetorical. He was thinking aloud, and thinking darkly.

'I tell you vot it is,' he said. 'The
companies pay for the English kids to go to school in England. Now vot I vont
to know is, vy don't they pay for the Dutch and German kids to go home to
school?'

Well, not being in fact 'HE', I was not
in a position to answer that question. But in time it made me think  - or
rather it became a factor in my growing thoughts about my whole position in
Africa.

For as I said, as I lazed on the river
with Les, the continent was laying its hold on me. I did not know it - I had
some ideas of Australia as the next, and permanent, step (for I am not by
nature a wanderer, as I shall shortly explain). But it was at work on me - and
'work' is the operative word: for not only was the deep charm of the continent
seducing me, so much more was the work itself. On my first excited letters home
(which were all about medical adventures and must have been a bit much even to
him) my old partner and friend in England had commented, 'You're in your
element, that's for sure.'

So somewhere in my heart I wanted to
stay in Africa - and stay for good. But I was a normal man with a normal man's
desires for wife and family and home. And I could see that was what even the
married white folk in Samreboi did not have.

They had one foot in Africa and one foot
in Europe, and God knows where their lives were. Most of their money was paid
in Europe, and their children received expensive education there (at least the
British did). But that was not what I called a life.

For what I am working up to is my great
thesis: in Africa (and places like it) there are two types of European -
sojourners and settlers.

I do not wish to run ahead of myself.
The thesis referred to matured through much living and thinking (and some pain)
over many years. But, as I have hinted, I felt dissatisfied with the situation
of the expatriate in West Africa, which I have described. Though many of them
spent their whole working lives there, they were still what I call
'sojourners'. They spent their long leave at home, they sent their children
home to school, and eventually retired to what they called 'home'.

This is no denigration. Such people have
done, and continue to do, good work. Moreover, it is now almost impossible to
work in Africa on any other terms, and in a reduced form at that: the form of
the short-term contract. The days are past when people went to Africa on the
terms they go to Canada or Australia: the terms of the immigrant.

And those, vaguely, were the terms I had
in mind, which in Africa were always called the terms of the settler.

The first-water settlers in Africa are
the Afrikaners of South Africa. Indeed, they would not even recognise the term
'settler'. The last settlers, as far as they are concerned, were the 1820
Settlers, who were all
rooineks
(Englishmen) anyway. The Afrikaners
called themselves (in their own secret language, at any rate) 'Africans',
though as far they were concerned, in its English form, the word meant
'Kaffirs'.

I am jumping ahead, but before we move
south, I will affirm that nobody ever accused the Afrikaners of what I
sometimes called 'flirting' with Africa: as I have already hinted, they were
married to the place.

Now I was far from that stage, but I can
remember a significant conversation with the GM over Sunday lunchtime drinks at
the club. I asked him whether they had ever thought of opening an
English-speaking primary school.

There would be nothing 'racialistic'
about this. The African managers would welcome it for their kids: most primary
education in Ghana was in the vernacular. They would have readily recognised
the advantage for their children of primary education in English.

The GM said they had thought about it,
but there was not the demand, and I had to leave it at that. The reader will
perceive the direction of my thoughts: I was against all this to-ing and
fro-ing anti-family business.

There I will leave the subject for now:
as far as it had developed in my mind.

Les Cady (who was technically a
sojourner but spiritually a settler - indeed, I believe, like me, he will spend
the first thousand years of eternity between the forests and plains of Africa,
when the call comes), Les had a theory which I have learned to appreciate more
profoundly since: for indeed, it is a profound theory, and has added its weight
to my sojourner-settler thesis. As he had naturally given more thought to it
than I to mine, he had defined it more closely, which I had yet to do. He
called it the 'three tour theory'.

'On your first tour,' said Les, 'you
drink one finger of whisky in your glass and think the Africans are angels. On
your second tour you take three fingers of whisky and think they are devils. On
your third tour you take two fingers and settle down to a comfortable view
which hopefully is permanent.'

Further than that he did not elaborate.
He was a philosopher of the slow pipe-smoking school. I may say he was not a
member of the Monopoly Society, which he probably considered, perhaps rightly,
as an affair for first tourers (or even tourists).

He did not believe in miscegenation,
which he thought brought out the worst in both breeds; and even wondered if he
had not overstretched things in marrying a Pole. He expressed these genetical
opinions, including the last, in the presence of his wife, who heard them
without comment; which in a Polish lady must have signified agreement as to the
main proposition and wifely acquiescence in the codicil - as Jeeves might have
put it; meaning, in Bertie Wooster's words: otherwise there would have been
jolly old fireworks!

There were actually two clubs in the town:
the Samreboi Club, which was for managers, and was fifty per cent black; and
the Forest Club, for the workers, which was wholly black. Members of the first
club were encouraged to patronise the Forest Club occasionally, in an officerly
sort of way, to encourage the lads - who needless to say, would not have
received much encouragement if they had tried it the other way about.

When we (meaning almost exclusively the
bachelors) dropped into the Forest Club on a boring Sunday afternoon, or
seduced by the jolly sounds of a Saturday night dance, which were rarely echoed
in the Samreboi Club, we were treated like royalty. At the dances large if
battered armchairs were manoeuvred for us, and beers pressed upon us by hands
which could afford them abysmally less than our own. Other times we would join
the crowd at the bar. On one occasion Ralph found himself beside two gentlemen
from the Ivory Coast who, of course, spoke French, and a jolly conversation
ensued.

Standing by was a beefy foreman - Henry,
who did not wish his underlings to think him, though a Ghanaian, ignorant of
the great world beyond. After listening in to the exchange for a minute or two
with a very wise look indeed, he explained to the bumpkins: 'Dat's dee French
language dey are spikkin'. But dem boys for Ivory Coas' is on'y spikkin' pidgin
French. Mistah Philipp is spikkin' dee proper English French.'

Ralph and I attended at least one
Saturday night hop at the Forest Club. As soon as we entered, the usual
armchairs and beers were produced, under the direction of the same Henry, a
bearded black Falstaff, who smoked a large Meerschaum pipe. Henry was a
sidesman at the Anglican church, a member of the PCC as vicar's warden, and
therefore well known to me. When he had made sure we were comfortable and had
everything we wanted, I gazed into the throng of dancers, amongst whom I
thought I recognised one of my nurses. (As a matter of fact, she was not.)

'Who is that girl, Henry?'

When the girl had been sufficiently
identified, Henry laid aside his pipe, breasted the sea of dancers until he
reached the girl, whom he briskly separated from her astonished partner by
grabbing her by the hair, dragging her after him like a sheep in the market,
and flinging her into an empty armchair beside me.

Reappropriating his pipe as a pointer,
he instructed the girl: 'Dee docketa want you. You go wid him. You get a bath.
You pleasure him, and when dee docketa say fack off, you go for house one
time!'

So far from resenting this treatment,
the girl (who had probably never heard of Germaine Greer) sat back with an
expression of the utmost complacency, and look-at-me-I'm-the-doctor's-girl
written all over her.

I thought I owed her a turn of the
floor, at any rate. Then I resumed my seat. She calmly resumed
her
seat
beside me.

Presently Henry returned. He had
evidently expected more progress. He removed his pipe from his mouth. 'Doan'
you want dat one, docketa?'

'Actually, Henry, I only wanted to dance
with her.'

Without a word, Henry once more
discarded his pipe, grabbed the girl again by her woolly head, and flung her
back into the pool of dancers like an unwanted fish, her eyes nearly popping
out of her head in dismay and astonishment.

Teresa was a pretty girl of seventeen.
She had sickle-cell disease, for which there was then, and is now, little
effective treatment. It was heart-breaking to see the young face creased and
crying with the bone-breaking pains of the disease in its acute bouts, as she
lay and writhed on the hospital bed.

She followed up in outpatients and was as
merry then as any other African young girl. As I passed her in the waiting
queue, she smiled and chanted without shame: 'I lav you!'; which was some
compliment to a bald-headed old man of forty. Nor was she at all shy of the
sympathetic grins which accompanied her on all sides.

With all the gallantry I could muster, I
felt the least I could do was to reply: 'I love you too, Teresa!'

Bigger happy grins and approving
'eh-eh's' all round!

The sequel came the following Sunday as
I left for church. There was Teresa at the front door. 'I have come!' she
announced with a happy smile. As I closed the door behind me, her eye fell on
the hymn book in my hand, and the smile vanished. 'O! You are going to church?'

Once again, I felt the least I could do
was give her a lift back to her village.

At the London office they had touched on
the European patients. Not much trouble with the men, they said cheerfully:
they have their work to keep them occupied. The women are the trouble. They
have nothing to do and are bored. I do not know what the ladies would have
thought of that opinion, and I never asked them. At least I found that neither
they nor their men folk gave me much unnecessary trouble: they were glad to
have a doctor in such a place at all, and seemed to consider his time.