Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa (13 page)

As I said, the new President Busia came
to Samreboi where he made a speech. And Ralph Philipp, with his usual cheek,
pinched my seat on the HOD row to which he had no right. Now I am a pretty
lamb-like fellow, as my secret nick-name among the people (finally confided to
me by Amos) testifies. Modesty forbids my revealing it to the reader; though it
could be a back-handed compliment in a continent where the lion is more usually
admired as an object for imitation. But I had half a mind to turn Ralph out,
except I anticipated some insulting reference to 'British stuffiness' or
something.

I was consoled and refreshed, after the
usual protracted experience in the hot open air, not greatly improved by the
awning provided, by Yao in a local bar. 'Have a beer, doc!' he invited. I said,
'I would like to try an
akpoteshie
for once, if I may.' This is palm
gin, the local fire-water, also known as 'VC10' for the airborne experience it
commonly gives you. Yao looked doubtful. I remembered the saying: 'everything
the white man says is OK', or perhaps he thought 'on your head be it!' (in more
ways than one). At any rate, I had my
akpoteshie
.

I was about half way through it when a
policewoman entered the bar, who looked like Bessie Braddock painted black for
Africa: a large pistol on her hip for use, I suppose, against subjects beyond
the reach of her hambone fist, which otherwise might have served her purpose
better by the look of it. Yao brightly said, 'I want you to meet this lady,
doc, who is a friend of mine.' (Lucky Yao!) 'She is the chief policewoman of
Ghana.'

In preparation for taking the lady's
formidable hand, I passed my glass from my right hand to my left. I deduced
this from subsequent events, for at the time I discovered I could feel nothing
from the neck down. Thereafter I might have been watching a film. Yao and I
moved forward together (it being improbable that our surroundings moved
backwards) until some invisible railway-type buffers brought me to a halt a
foot before the lady. The music of three voices (as Jeeves would say) speaking
in English and Ghanaian was heard from the sound track which accompanied the
film. The lady's hand advanced, and I observed my own do the same and take it.
After a little more on the sound track, I found us returning to our former
places.

Akpoteshie
! I started having thoughts about what the profession
calls 'recent advances in anaesthesia'.

As great an institution among the
populace as the wandering griots or story tellers were the village
letter-writers. No application for job or loan went except through their
skilful hands. They performed on paper torn from school exercise books, and
used long envelopes whose  source had better be overlooked, and charged half a
dollar a time. They used a Victorian copperplate hand, and expressed themselves
in formulae as hallowed by tradition as those of the law itself, if rather more
colourful. The finest example retailed to me was received by a manager of the
Standard Bank, which began: 'Dear Master, I lie at your feet and wait for you
to open your bowels of compassion.'

Amos (who lacked the true spirit of the
connoisseur) treated these creations with contempt, casting them unopened into
the waste paper basket and commanding the applicant to state his business: a
degree of confidence (or something) I never achieved.

For one day I found such a one outside
my house: a young man waiting for me to come home, with a long brown envelope
in his hand.

The contents expressed a modest request
to be adopted as my son and sent to Oxford University.

While I was wondering how to deal with
this with kindness and firmness, we were joined by Braimah. Braimah was the
little old man who had requested the lease of the Wendy house and become my
gardener. And he was an 'NT'. He was wearing a solar topee as sole garment
besides his usual ragged shorts, which proclaimed that he was on his way out to
the tavern. This topee had been given him by the Reverend Alec, and his title
to it once questioned, to Braimah's annoyance, by my jocular neighbour, Andy
Astle.

This was not the sole insult Braimah had
received from the same quarter. One evening I heard a great palaver at the back
door, involving James and Braimah. Braimah had been taking his usual way home
from the tavern past the sawmill of which Andy was manager. This was strictly
illegal, as 'access to the industrial area was restricted to employees of the
Company, etc'. Standing at the door of his office, in a moment and spirit of
idleness, Andy had challenged Braimah.

'Mistah Assell say, "Who be
you?" I say, "O, massa! You savvy me proper." Mistah Assell say,
"You lie! I nebba savvy you. What you doin' here for workside?" Den
what you tink Mistah Assell say? He say, "You be tiefman. You
baggaroff!"' At which point I found Braimah fairly hopping up and down on
his bare feet.

Now seeing me with the young man he came
up, either through curiosity or to render assistance. He peered over my arm at
the letter, which of course meant nothing to him.  I questioned the young man.

'You want to go to college?'

'Yessah,' answered the youth.

Braimah seemed to think some
interpretation was called for, or perhaps the services of a 'linguist'.

He echoed my question. 'You wanna go for
college?'

The youth looked doubtfully at Braimah
for a few seconds, trying to 'place' him - an exercise as important to the
African as it was to Dr F R Leavis. Some connection with myself seemed
probable, but Braimah's appearance did not inspire the same confidence.

At last he gave Braimah the benefit of
the doubt and replied: 'Yessah.'

Now this was the first time Braimah had been
called anything but 'old man' - and not in the chummy British sense either. His
chest expanded: he decided to make the most of the opportunity.

At the head of the letter was the
address of the electrical department. I took up the conversation from there.

'I see you work for the electrical
department.'

'Yessah,' answered the youth.

Braimah intervened. 'You dey for
'lectical depar'ment?'

The youth looked at him again. 'Yessah.'
Braimah's chest expanded further.

I saw my chance. 'I think you had better
consult your own manager.'

'Yessah.'

'You berra go for you same manaja,' from
Braimah.

'Yessah.'

At this point the conference broke up.
Braimah proceeded on his way, by far the most satisfied of the participants.

I was resting on my couch one Sunday
afternoon when there came a tap on the french window. Outside was a small boy
in a body cloth. When I opened the window, he announced:

'Ee dey concert tonight for Mpeasam
village.'

This meant that a folk play was to be
put on at the village named. The boy knew of my interest in these events. I got
in touch with Ralph, who was a fellow connoisseur, and at sun-down we drove out
to the forest village.

When we arrived it was night, and the
village looked charming in the moonlight, which blazed on the polished earth and
streamed down the thatched roofs. The play was to be enacted at the headman's
house, which lay within a stockade.

At the entrance we paid our fees at a
desk. A group of little boys collected round us, chanting softly in small
reptilian voices: 'Docketa! Docketa! Docketa! Mistah Fee-leep!' and, 'Mastah,
please give me a penny.'

If we had been so foolish as to accede
to this request, the small boys would have vanished and been replaced by a mass
of furious protoplasm.

As we entered we were seen by the headman
and invited to join him in his awning.

'You know me?' he asked. 'You dun my
hennia.'

The play was to take place in a central
space. A hut provided the dressing room and wing. The mass of the audience sat
on benches, or the ground in front of us, and all around the rest of the
enclosure.

As I have said, all Africans are born
actors. Even a village of a hundred souls can put on a little play, based on a
well-known story, and acted out ad lib with great fluency and perfect timing.
There is a certain sameness about the stories, in which the villain is always a
woman, as evidenced by their titles: The Bad Woman. The Wicked Aunt. (Perhaps
there is a Freudian explanation.) Tonight it was The Wicked Aunt.

A small boy called Kwasi attached
himself to us to interpret (as the play was in the vernacular) and explain the
action.

The entertainment began with the beat of
a drum, and an almost naked man with a skeleton painted on his body performed a
dance.

Then the story started. There are a
number of stock characters. First we saw the Wicked Aunt with the Daughter and
the Orphan. The Daughter was dressed up like a Takoradi tart to indicate her
special status. (All the characters are men, as in Elizabethan times.) The Aunt
was built up with aggressive cassava breasts and a pumpkin rump. The Orphan was
dressed in rags.

The Aunt and the Daughter are jealous of
the Orphan, who stands to inherit the farm from the Uncle, a benevolent if
somewhat ineffectual figure. The Orphan is watched over by the Boy, a 'Buttons'
character who does good, nor looks for any reward, and gets none. He wears a
schoolboy's cap with the peak turned up and THE BOY written on it.

In the first scene the Aunt and the
Daughter were expressing their feelings about the Orphan. The Aunt struck her
across the shoulders with a stick. The Daughter kicked her food bowl out of her
hands.

'Dey doan' like her,' explained little
Kwasi.

When it gets too much, the Boy
intervenes and gives the Aunt a drubbing. While she lies crippled on the
ground, the Doctor enters with an enormous syringe, with which he proceeds to
bayonet her in the rump, to the huge delight of the audience.

On his way out he adds: 'And chop
nkuntumbre!'

This is coco yam leaf, a rich source of
vegetable protein, which I recommended daily to my patients, especially for the
children. The reference is not lost on the audience, and I rise to take a bow.

The plot thickens when the Aunt takes
the Orphan's blanket to the witch doctor to put a spell on it, observed by the
Boy from behind an imaginary bush.

At bedtime all lie down to sleep, in
African fashion, with their blankets over their heads against mosquitoes. All
except the watchful Boy, who changes the blankets of the Daughter and the
Orphan. Next morning the Orphan gets up and goes to work, while the Daughter
lies motionless.

The Aunt does a dance of triumph over
the body. Tension builds up in the audience. Little Kwasi explains,
breathlessly: 'She tinks it's dee Offen, but it's not. It's dee Dotta.'

The Aunt pulls back the blanket, and
makes Rigoletto's discovery. She shouts,
'Adjei! Adjei!'
and beats her
cassava bosoms.

This brings the house down. Women
literally roll in the aisles, to the peril of the babies on their backs. Some
of these fall out of their cloths and roll in the aisles themselves, crying
their protests at this rude awakening.

Next enter the undertakers, sporting
bowler hats and drinking beer out of bottles. 'Dey are drunk,' explains Kwasi.

There is a good deal of fun with the
body, which is tossed and dropped between them and into the audience, which
rises enthusiastically to toss it back; the body remaining rigid the whole
time.

The Wicked Aunt is ordered into a corner
by the Uncle, and the Orphan reappears, now herself dressed like a Takoradi
tart, on the arm of the Doctor. Virtue rewarded!

All this has been spun out, with a great
deal of extemporisation and song and dance, to about two hours. The play
concludes with a moral delivered by the Boy.

'If you do good, you do it to yourself.
If you do bad, you do it to yourself.'

The audience crowds out, and we seek our
car. Soft voices plead for a lift back to town. This time I am not so cautious
and say, 'Jump in!' Immediately, the car is full of writhing bodies, mostly
female, with legs and arms protruding from the windows.

Some men unceremoniously
remove a sufficient number of bodies, and we drive away.

PART TWO -
CENTRAL AFRICA

I stayed in Ghana for eighteen months and
returned to England before Christmas, 1969 - the dead of winter. And of course,
I felt as if I had come up from the boiler room. I found a comfortable
residential hotel near my native Liverpool, and seeing no reason to follow the
example of Captain Oates, I remained within its doors until the slightly kinder
weather of March arrived, except for rapid dashes to the motorcars of friends
who were kind enough to collect me.

At that time I still had ideas of going
to Australia, and even took a book out of the local library on the country:
until after a few months I discovered I had read exactly twenty-four pages,
though faithfully renewing it several times. In the same period I had read John
Gunther's thousand page
Inside Africa
for the second time, and several
other books on Africa besides. I began to realise this could only mean one
thing.

But a return to Ghana would not do.
Samreboi was a lonely place for a bachelor. I was only human (to say nothing of
being a male human) and I looked for wider horizons and feminine opportunity. I
also looked for a more satisfactory training than a doctor can give himself
working alone - which is a most unsatisfactory training.

So I applied for a post in the large
company hospitals of the Copper Belt of Zambia, namely, the Anglo-American
Company hospitals at Kitwe, of which there were two: a 300-bed hospital for the
workers, and a smaller one for the management. These were covered by a full
team of specialists: full, that is, for that type of complex in Africa, which
means one consultant in each of the major specialties.

Zambia has been described as 'a vast,
hot, ugly country which wears its human inhabitants, white and black, as an
elephant wears its fleas' (
Peter Wildeblood:
Against the law
)
. Now it is a principle of mine that nothing in nature
can be ugly, and since most of Zambia belongs to nature, I cannot join in that
epithet; though I concede its monotonous landscape would not be one's first
choice in decorating a chocolate box.

But philosophy apart, I have to admit
the writer had a point, which is why I used the quotation to open this section.

Here was forest again, and as monotonous
as the forest of West Africa, but without its enchanting loveliness: or so it
seemed to me at first. Nor were the trees tall. The highest trees in Zambia
stop at thirty feet: thirty feet of scrubby bush, like the woolly heads of its
black natives, except for the exotic gum trees, which were introduced from
Australia via South Africa. These were tall - fifty feet or more - with their
tall trunks and long branches, sometimes in their blue skins, sometimes in
white nakedness, sometimes with skins half shed, like moulting snakes. These
trees were brought by the white man and marked his places: the city spaces, the
parks, or giving shade to a white farmstead.

Otherwise the Bushveld, as it is called,
was so monotonous it was said when people skidded in their cars on its endless
roads in the wet season, did a turn or two and then resumed their journey, they
sometimes travelled a hundred miles or more before a previous petrol station
informed them they were retracing their steps: unless they ran out of petrol first.

Zambia must be the last part of the old
Empire to be significantly occupied and developed by the white man. I have met
men younger than myself who came up in the Forties in ox waggons, whose first
homes were rondavels (thatched roundhouses). These were Afrikaners, of course;
and this must represent the last trek of that indefatigable people, who
penetrated as far as Angola and Kenya.

Kitwe itself seems to have been mostly
built since the Second World War. It is the largest of the group of mining
towns on what is known as the Copper Belt, which runs indeed like a belt across
the waist of the large body of Zambia. It runs up into the southern Congo
(Zaire), into the famous province then known as Katanga, where there is another
group of copper mines, which belonged to the old Union Minière of Belgium. Two
companies divided the Zambian mines between them: Anglo-American (which was
neither Anglo nor American, but South African), and Roan Antelope.

Kitwe was a pretty town, which certainly
looked like no mining town in Britain. It was a typical Central African town
(in fact, a city), consisting of a central grid of wide streets. The streets of
all these towns seemed to follow the example of Bulawayo, where the streets
were made wide enough to turn a span of oxen, which consists of eight pair of
beasts. The buildings were all modern, no more than three storeys high, giving
the city an intimate feel. There were at least two good hotels, large shops,
banks, and other commercial buildings, cinemas, clubs, restaurants, and
handsome public buildings. The traffic was light, and the pavements wide: a
pleasant place to walk about; though more walking was done by Africans than
Europeans. The main grid was based on a wide central square, known as Kaunda
Square, after the first president, who was still in the early days of his long
reign. There were many trees: blue gums, already mentioned; the flamboyants,
which were a blaze of fire in season; frangipanis, with their fleshy,
ivory-coloured blossoms; and the delicate jacarandas, which flowered in clouds
of mauve. The flowery season for all was September and October, before the
rains began in November. For we are now south of the equator: the rain in the
tropics follows the sun, and the rainy season in the south fills the other half
of the year from the north. Winter is July, and December is high summer. In
fact, winter in Zambia was little more than a few cold nights in June and July:
the rest of the year was summer. The hottest month is actually October, panting
for the rains, which was called the 'suicide month'.

The best suburbs were built nearest to
the city centre, in the usual Central African fashion. Large houses, almost
always single storey, lay in large gardens. These houses were not called
'bungalows', a term unused in Central Africa. A double-storeyed house was
exceptional and referred to as such: so in future, in this narrative, a 'house'
means a single-storey house, unless otherwise designated.

British people will see a reversal of
conditions in their own country, where the best suburbs are the farthest out
and the city centre consequently dies at night (or did in the sixties). In
Victorian times it seems to have been otherwise, to judge by the decayed
magnificence of the old central suburbs of Liverpool and Manchester: and
Central Africa was simply following an older tradition. The city centre
consequently lived at night in its clubs, cafes, hotels, etc.

The better suburbs were very spacious:
Kitwe must have been at least five miles across, though the total population was
100,000. You needed a motorcar, unless you lived within a mile of the city
centre (as I did). The great arc of Second Avenue was the main artery of the
suburbs, and that was about two miles long.

These good suburbs, which were
originally built for the Europeans, lay all to the north-west of the city
centre. To the south-east lay the mine and all its works, and beyond them the
vast workers' townships, where the prevailing winds and uncontrolled effluvia
of the mine blew over them, in the correct direction: a universal principle in
Central African industrial towns.

These weather conditions were reversed
for a month or two when the south-easter blew in the winter, but you can't have
everything in life, and at least it brought coolness.

By the sixties many Africans were rising
in the world and entering the posher suburbs. But some were less posh than
others. These were the older suburbs, which were actually more central than the
others. Junior white managers lived among the Africans here, and in my new (and
reduced) status of general duties medical officer (GDMO), I was one of them.

I lived on Eleventh Avenue, within
walking distance of the city centre, across the railway line (the famous 'line
of rail' which linked the country with the south and ended, not at Cairo, as
Rhodes originally hoped, but at the heads of the great river system of the
Congo). On my right lived a white Rhodesian family, and on my left a black
Zambian one, and I could not say who made the most noise, as our kith and kin
in those parts are not the shrinking violets of the old country, any more than
the blacker Africans. Mercifully, there is plenty of space between such houses
in Africa, so I was not much disturbed. On the black side of the fence, the
quaint obligations of old Africa were observed, and a large extended family
accommodated by the official occupant; the cooking fires of whose relatives
dotted the large garden at supper time. As if inspired by this, the white
family would throw a
braaivleis
(barbecue) for their friends about once
a month, at which much beef and beer were consumed and noise produced around
the smoking fire, while the house became a rowdy sound box with music (or
something).

My white neighbours were the Millers. Jem
was a bearded jovial giant, of Celtic appearance: Sylvia was a petite, spirited
blonde, with something of the Dutch in her - in fact, she came from the Eastern
Cape. They had splendid family rows, which they no more disdained to share with
the rest of the avenue than the Africans did on my other side. I may say that
the rest of the avenue was British, and silent. Otherwise, the Millers were
charming and cultured people, who soon became my warm friends (which is more
than can be said for the rest of the avenue, for reasons I had better not go
into).

And they were liberals.

Yes, reader, such creatures existed in
that part of the world. They were not the dangerous revolutionaries which South
Africa can produce: Rhodesia was more British, and kinder (or politer, anyway),
than that. But they gave me much sound information on the region.

Jem produced the best aperçu I have
heard on his own country. 'Imagine UK ruled by the Jews. They would probably
make a better job of it than the Anglo-Saxons; but the Anglo-Saxons wouldn't
like it.'

Sylvia could be very spirited. One
afternoon I heard her shrill tones, not in her own house, but in the street
outside. A large black man in council overalls was half-way up a ladder, doing
something with a chain saw to a tree, which had nothing to do with the Millers,
except in the aesthetic way. Sylvia was half way up the rest of the ladder,
punching the astonished man in the kidneys with her tiny fists, without
appearing to disturb him much, and screaming about 'beauty' and 'conservation'
and such-like. The man kept repeating the formula, 'Mistah Cummings, madam',
who, I guessed was the city engineer, rather in the spirit of 'acting under
orders', which I understand has lost force since Nuremberg. Failure of
communication, as they say, was mutual and complete. Sylvia only left off to
take another line of attack - via the telephone on Mr Cummings. I seem to
remember the tree, or most of it, was spared.

 One night I got a telephone call from Sylvia
at 3 am. She had had a burglar. Jem was away, and she was in the house alone
with the children. I slipped on a dressing gown. She had rung the police, and
as I went round, they arrived. Prompt! Several of them jumped out of the Land
Rover and ran about the garden with revolvers. If the cook had emerged for any
reason, he wouldn't have stood a chance.

Sylvia was soon with us in her house
coat. And she had some evidence for the police. She had woken up in the night
and seen the man in her room. From whatever complicated motives - fear, rage,
maternal - she went for him like a leopardess and tore the shirt off his back.
I even think there was blood on it.

Well, they never caught the burglar, of
course; but when I returned to my house I discovered my late father's watch was
missing from my bedside. The man must have got into my house before Sylvia's
and never disturbed me. I think the front door lock was broken.

Jem told me he was an admirer of
Liverpool humour, at least ever since one famous experience. After one of their
parties, he and Ted were the only ones left, slumped in armchairs at six o'
clock in the morning; apart from Sylvia who had got a few hours in her bed, who
then appeared in her nightdress and surveyed the usual wreckage of such feasts
with bleary eyes. It was Sunday and they had given their servants the day off.
There was going to be a lot of cleaning up to do, and the ladies take these
things more seriously than we men do. My fellow citizen tried to cheer her up
(or something).

'Give us a song!'

As I said, the mine ran hospitals for
management and workers. To begin with, I was assigned to the workers' hospital.

It had a number of specialised
departments, each under a consultant specialist, and the GDMOs like myself were
rotated between them every six months. I was placed first in the surgical
department, under a benign and highly competent surgeon, Mr Hunt, a man then in
his fifties.

Mr Hunt did rather more than a general
surgeon would do in England: or rather, he covered a wider field, for he also
did orthopaedic surgery. I do not mean he did hip replacements, which had not
then been invented; nor would he have attempted anything so ambitious if they
had. But he nailed femurs and screwed ankles, etc, which a general surgeon
certainly does not do in England; nor does he need to.