Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa (16 page)

(Joe Cooper was something of a
paternalist into the bargain. Every Friday we had lunch at the management
hospital, where Joe held a mortality meeting on all the deaths of the week. I
supposed this served a purpose. Among other things, he would lay down the
treatment regimes nearly every week, and more or less treat us like a bunch of
soldiers, if not school-kids. On one occasion he said: 'As you know, I believe
in treating doctors like responsible adults.' Andy Crookes doubled up in silent
laughter, only saved from Joe's eyes by the fruit bowl on the table.)

Julie had a dry Australian sense of
humour. She took a photograph of the local Party office, with its Orwellian
slogan prominent outside: UNIP IS IN POWER FOR EVER: (OBOTE STREET BRANCH). The
point being that Obote, the tyrant of Uganda, had been recently deposed (and
now UNIP is no longer in the driving seat). She did not realise, nor did I till
later, that this was a risky action. She might have been arrested as a South
African spy, which would have been a bitter fate for Julie. What's more, some
forms of humour don't travel as far as Julie: the idea of trying to make an
African court see the joke boggles the mind.

I took Julie out to the Catholic
mission. We went in my car and made a picnic of it. There were two lovely black
nuns there. I said it was a waste for them to be nuns. Julie frowned: 'I don't
believe in what they stand for, but I don't know -' I could see the warning
lights of feminism ahead (though too crass a word for Julie, as I said) and dropped
it.

We sat and had lunch by the dam. A
butterfly settled on Julie's knee. 'He thinks you are a flower.' 'Gee! Thanks,
Warren.' Of course, I was half in love with her. She used to say, 'You're the
only person I can talk to here, Warren.'  Which was surprising, as I was pretty
conservative. 'Have you always been as right wing as this, Warren?' 'More so in
the past.' 'Christ!'

When I told her I was a Christian -
though not in an orthodox sense - she protested: 'O, you can't be a Christian,
Warren! There's so much going on in the world.' I suppose she viewed
Christianity as an otherworldly religion. I could have pointed out that many
Christians thought there was enough to do in the world. And most important,
that Christianity was the basis of everything
she
'stood for', which was
Western liberal democracy. But I did not think of these things till long after,
so did not say so.

At the mission we saw a dog lying on its
side, under the wooden steps of a ward. It was salivating profusely and
panting, its staring eyes unblinking. They thought it had been bitten by a
snake, and Brother Joseph was going to shoot it.

Later I heard of an outbreak of rabies
in the district - mainly among pigs. One woman died. We had seen our first case
of this disease. I have seen many more since, animal and human.

I took Julie up to Lubumbashi (the old
Elizabethville) in the Congo, which was famous for its restaurants. It was an
older city than Kitwe and looked Continental - I remember the old Belgian sets
in some of the streets. Julie liked the Continental atmosphere. I told her how
the British nearly got Katanga, and she said thank God they didn't! So then we
had a furious argument. We had several, though most of the fury was on my side.
I told her about the two systems: the indirect rule of the British, which
worked through the native institutions; and the Franco-Belgian system of direct
rule, which treated the Africans more or less like apes, and ran everything
down to ground level through the notorious
agents de postes,
who practically
cut out the African headmen, ie, abolished even their NCOs. And look at
education! British Africa wound up with five universities. The French didn't
have secondary schools till after the Second World War; and what about the
famous 'twelve graduates' of the Belgian Congo at the time of independence? As
for the famous 'multiracialism' - that was best summed up by one British
district commissioner as 'sleep with them, but don't shake hands with them!'

In all this I had the advantage of a
greater knowledge of Africa, where Julie confessed, the British beat the
Aussies. I would not have that advantage now.

Then came a famous scene in a
restaurant. Teasing her of course, I said Hitler was a socialist. 'That's what
he called himself - a "National Socialist", didn't he?'

Julie turned white. I thought she was
going to bring up the frogs' legs I hadn't enjoyed much seeing on their way
down. She got up, trembling, and walked to the door. There she paused. It would
be unworthy to suggest she wondered how she was going to get back to Kitwe -
150 miles away. I prefer to think she chose to 'master herself' (if that is the
word); and she returned to the table.

Julie did not get on well with most of
the whites on the Copperbelt. There were many Rhodesians and South Africans,
who had (with some exceptions like the Millers) fixed racialist attitudes. But
they were not half as virulent as the shoals of little Andy Capps and Alf
Garnetts from UK, who greatly outnumbered them, and to whom racialism was then
a new religion, which they embraced with all the fervour of the convert. At
least one of these annoyed Julie with his attentions.

At a party - one of those boozy
all-white affairs Julie hated - Len sat next to her and 'fancied' her right
away. Len could have been Alf Garnett's son and (unlike his disappointing lefty
Liverpool son-in-law) the apple of his father's eye. Len knew about
Australians, or at any rate, knew of them, for he would not have met many at
that time, even in his East End. If he had, he might not have taken the risk he
did with Julie. But he did know they were 'colonials', like Rhodesians and
South Africans, with whom he had discovered much in common.

Learning that Julie was a doctor, he
decided on the philosophical approach.

'Don't you fink, Julie, it'd be better
to leave these Kaffirs jist to die orf of all their 'orrible diseases? I mean,
the world'd be a better plice wivout 'em, wouldn't it? We could even run the
mines wiv machinery.'

After about ten minutes of this, in
which Julie's frozen silence failed to register, Len reckoned he had earned a
kiss. He slipped a hairy paw round Julie's neck.

His suit did not prosper.

'Git off me, you colonialist fascist
pig!'

Now given Len's understanding of
Australians, this was like collecting a belt from Father Christmas.

(Well, that is the usual way I tell the
tale. But, of course, Julie would never call anyone a pig in earnest - unless
he was hurting a child, or something. I think she gave a shrug and a kind of
snarl, but the reaction was certainly surprising to Len.

As the Irishman said, 'What do you want:
a story, or the truth?')

Before dismissing Len from these pages,
it is worth recording that even Andy puzzled him. Andy was giving a plangent
rendering of Carrickfergus -

     I wish I kne-ew a handsome
boatman

     To
carry me o-over the sea to die.

When he had finished, Len asked: 'What
was that? "A 'andsome boatman?" Is that meant to be a bloke singing
that song, Andy?'

Julie was brilliant. Later she got the
Himalayan MRCP (specialist degree) in one go, and a public health diploma.
Thereafter, she returned to Africa, where she has remained ever since, working
mostly among the blacks. She can speak at least two African languages fluently,
and must know the customs through and through. I urge her to write her memoirs.
They would contribute far more of solid knowledge at any rate than these
ramblings of mine. Compared with her I am Bertie Wooster in the bundu.

Sister Steadie lived up to her name (at
any rate, her husband's name: whether he did I do not know), and she would have
no nonsense on her ward - and this is no old battle-axe I am talking about, but
a small pretty woman of thirty.

We were at the head of men's surgical on
the morning ward round, she and I, she pushing the little trolley which carried
the case notes. Three policemen entered the ward, comprising a big-booted
sergeant and two plain clothes CID characters in pork-pie hats and dark glasses
like Tonton Macoutes. They bore down on one of the beds, and the Tonton
Macoutes grabbed a prostrate patient and pulled him up by the shoulders.

'Sergeant!' rang the clear bell-like
voice of Sister Steadie, as she stared not at them but at the wall in front of
her.

'Yes, madam?'

'Come here.'

The Tonton Macoutes dropped the body and
the trio trudged up the ward. All the patients capable of doing so sat up in
their beds and began to take notice.

When they reached teacher's desk, Sister
Steadie, now looking the sergeant steadily in the eye, demanded quietly:

'Would you like me to come into your
office like that, unannounced?'

'Yes, madam.'

'What?'

'No, madam.'

By now the patients were beginning to
wriggle, as if they had all discovered ants in their beds.

'What can I do for you?'

The sergeant fumbled for a scrap of
paper in his breast pocket.

'We got dis name, "Boniface".'

'Well, you've got the wrong man, haven't
you?'

'No, madam.'

'What?'

'Yes, madam.'

‘For your information Boniface is too
sick to be interviewed.'

'Yes, madam.'

'And you won't get much information out
of him when he is better, because he is a boy of eight.'

'Yes, madam.'

'So I think you had better return to the
station, don't you?'

'Yes, madam.'

'Good morning, sergeant.'

'Morning, madam.'

They turned about and trudged back again
down the ward. By this time, the patients, who did not feel free to laugh in
the humanistic democracy of Zambia, were all in epileptic convulsions, and
every bed the trio passed beat like a tribalistic drum. The sergeant stared
ahead of him like a frustrated rhinoceros, while the Tonton Macoutes eyed each
patient in passing, as if they were trying to remember every one of them.

It was about this time that Billy came
to share house with me. He was an instrument technician at the hospitals. His
wife had left him, taking the children, and going off with another man, who had
even taunted Billy in the club with his achievement. 'Ay, lad, and ye're
welcome tae her!' retorted Billy, telling me he was glad to have the answer on
the tip of his tongue then and there instead of in the back of his head a day
later.

He was a small Scot. To describe him, I
have only to say that he was the physical image of Beethoven, whom he resembled
also in dauntless character, if not quite in genius (which is no sarky way of
saying he was a fool - he was a member of MENSA); and I have only to see the
defiant features of the great composer on an LP sleeve, and mentally give him a
Glasgow accent, to have Billy before me again.

Incidentally, he loved classical music,
though I do not think he had gone into it much, and I was able to enrich his
experience with my large collection of LPs. With unaffected good taste, he soon
put Mozart at the top of his pops, closely followed by Beethoven himself and
Brahms. For the emotionalism of Tchaikovsky he had no time. 'What's he trying
tae prove?'

If Billy was dauntless in spirit, physically
I have never known a more courageous man. One night, coming out of the club, we
were too late for the mine restaurant - it was Wednesday and we had given our
cook the evening off - so we decided to go for take-aways at a place bearing
the interesting name for Central Africa of the ‘Eskimo Hut’. We hung about,
waiting for the queue to shrink, when Billy noticed a small black boy, who had
seemed to make more than one appearance at the end of the queue. It became
plain that every time he reached the hatch where the food was served, someone
bounced him aside. Billy approached the lad.

'What's going on, son?'

'Please, sir. I want some food.'

'Come with me.'

Meekly the bare-foot child followed the
sturdy Billy, like the page of Good King Wenceslas. At the head of the queue
was a black giant who must have stood seven foot in his socks, with lateral
dimensions to match. The boy pointed him out as the latest of his tormentors.

By some movement like a practised chess
player, which I hardly saw, Billy replaced the large black piece with the black
pawn on the same square.

'Give this lad what he wants,
Papadopoulos!' he commanded.

Meanwhile, the black giant looked around
for the cause of this sudden change of gambit, which seemed as irregular to him
as it must have done to Capablanca, and saw only a small chunky white man as
the possible agent. He looked discontented.

Now Billy had not been brought up on the
streets of Glasgow not to recognise the first signs of discontentment and know
how to allay them. He faced the black giant, or rather, he directed an evil
stare upward to meet the discontented downward one: and when Billy wanted to,
he could look very evil indeed. I was reminded of the honey badger/elephant
situation described earlier in these pages; and besides being the fiercest
animal in Africa, the first thing the honey badger goes for is the pudenda.