Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa (20 page)

I returned to the store. Before
sundowners Spiros took me for a drive around town in his Land Rover. The swift
twilight was falling.
'La prostitution s'allume dans les rues.'
Spiro called
to a young white man on foot:
'Tu cherches la femme, mon ami?'

Spiros told me of a mine disaster, where
I had come from, he had heard about on the radio. It was not exactly where I
came from: it was the Wankie Colliery disaster in which 400 died.

Before supper we sat with his French
wife on the balcony overlooking the river, sipping our sundowners. They had no
children. They spent as much time as they could in Europe.

'La vie est triste ici,'
sighed Spiros.

I asked if they had television (which
was available then in Zambia, though Billy and I never bothered with it).
'Ah, si seulement il y'en avait!'

Next day he took me to meet another
Englishman in the town, a large man from Newcastle who was working on the
railways. He was living alone. He in turn took me to the house of a doctor. So
there was a doctor in the town! The railway doctor, a little African from the
Ivory Coast, whom we found sitting in his clinic.

Alas, the clinic was bare! He had a
small patient with him, a little boy with a greenstick fracture of the forearm.
The doctor had not even a sling to offer him. Now I knew what few European
doctors get the chance to know, as fortunately what is known as the 'natural
history of disease' is rarely observable in Europe (except in incurable cases):
I knew that such a fracture would reduce itself by natural forces and the boy's
arm be as straight as ever in a month. Small consolation to our doctor in his
empty clinic!

I thought it would not have been beyond
the wit of man to unite the empty-handed doctor with the doctorless hospital,
which were both government property, but did not broach the subject. Besides,
that would have meant re-equipping the hospital. The African hopeless feeling
was beginning to get to me.

  The doctor took me home with him for
lunch, where I met his wife and baby girl. I told them about the Copperbelt,
where I felt sure they could get a job. This seemed to bring a ray of hope into
their lives.

After three days, Spiros's friend, the
stationmaster, told me the train for Kindu was expected that afternoon. This
was news to him as much as to me. He had not consulted the time-table, which
was merely an academic document: they had told him over the telephone - at
least they had that. So at three o' clock in the afternoon I found myself alone
in my first-class compartment with Barnaby Rudge, waiting for the train to make
up its mind to start. Through the window I could see a plaque, announcing to
all who ran and read that the station was opened in 19-- by
Son Excellence,
le Président des Colonies.

Incidentally, as we got more and more up
country, the trains became rougher and rougher, and this one was exceedingly
rough indeed.

We got moving, and after dark, before I
fell asleep, I was joined by one silent fellow traveller on our bunks, when the
train stopped in the crowded station of Kongolo.

It was no more than my fancy, no doubt,
but there seemed an aggressive air about the lamp-lit crowd. This was the town
where the sixteen Italian airmen were murdered at lunch during the troubles.
There was nothing unique about Kongolo. Kolwezi was to gain the prize for the
biggest massacre of whites in Africa ten years later. Old, unhappy things, etc!
And it is only the murder of whites we remember.

Next morning, when the sun rose, I found
myself in
La Grande Forêt:
the high forest I had not seen since West
African days. The same giant trees, the same fin roots, the same tangle of
greenery, the same hot, wet air. When I moved to the dining saloon for
breakfast and lunch, the windows lay open in the heart of the green grotto.
There was good food and lager to be had on a clean table-cloth.

Then towards 6pm the train took a long
high curve and below us was the town of Kindu, burning red in the evening sun.

I caught a 'Scania' which led me up the
high street to the hotel, Le Relais. Here was a pleasant Belgian host and
another English traveller, a young man, a teacher I think. After supper we
wandered down to the river and found a couple of rather disconsolate-looking
Indian traders sitting gazing at the water on what was evidently their evening
constitutional. They brightened up at the chance to speak the tongue that
Shakespeare spake.

Kindu was the railhead. My next journey
would be by river. And sure enough, the boat was there next morning. I packed
my bag, paid my bill, and without benefit of Scania, made my way to the quay
where lay the boat.

And what a boat! A dirty little tramp,
its lower deck stacked high with the logs which were its fuel; some palm oil
drums and a single white man on the upper deck directing the loading. A smaller
vessel interposed between boat and quay, and a perilous bridge of duck boards
ran over all. The boat had side paddle-wheels and two barges in tow, and on her
funnel proudly bore the letters: CFL
(Chemins de Fer des Lacs).

Presently I boarded with the usual
crowd. We all paid two dollars, but as soon as the black captain saw me, the
Great White Man, he installed me in a cabin on the top deck behind his own,
which I could share with the engineer at no extra charge. He ordered a deck
chair for me so I could sit outside under the awning. He and his family
occupied the front cabin, and there was a bathroom between us. This was the
extent of the first class accommodation, and I was the only white to travel on
the ship: the other was a checker and would not come with us. After making sure
I was comfortable, the captain joined the checker in busily stacking the black
passengers into the bowels of the ship like sardines.

I asked about food and discovered none
was provided. I flew back to the hotel and mine host seemed to find this
amusing: the blighter! - he might have told me; or perhaps he was an
absent-minded type like me. He hastily prepared a stack of sandwiches - enough
to last three days, which was the duration of the journey to Ubundu. I ran back
to the boat, but need not have panicked. I was to sit on my deck chair
observing the scene for another hour before we moved.

Finally, after a lot of hooting the boat
moved off, making a great curve across the mile-wide river to change direction
to the right side. Now this surprised me considerably.

Up to then I had been convinced that
Kindu lay on the east side of the river and the boat was pointing north. The
opposite was true. Not for the first time, I had experienced the strange
impression to those born and bred in the opposite hemisphere of inversion. I
had noticed it in Kitwe. Ask me to point to South Africa, or for that matter,
merely Ndola, and I would point north to the Congo: ask me the opposite and I
would do the opposite. For me the north was south, and vice versa.

(The same thing happens to our
opposites. When years later I brought a Zimbabwean wife to England, and she
went shopping with our small son in Liverpool, when she wished to return home
to our flat in the south of the city, my wife insisted on boarding a bus for
the Pier Head. My son tried in vain to get his mother to cross the street until
she was at last convinced by the words on the bus. She may have been convinced
but she was not reassured: in fact, she thought she was going crazy.)

I think this is because, as far as we
northerners are concerned, the sun passes through the southern sky, and that is
where we are aware of the light: in the south it is the opposite way about.

By afternoon we were sailing up the
broad brown river, past the monotonous green wall on either bank. There were
many islands in the river and, although the boat kept to the right bank,
sometimes coming so close that we looked into the heart of the forest, like a
green wonderland, the channel presented difficulties and a man crouched on a
pontoon, dropping a plumb-line and calling the depth to the captain on the
bridge; and like railway trucks, veering from side to side, the barges trailed
behind. We saw canoes with men fishing. Otherwise, mostly the empty river and the
blank forest. At one point, another river joined ours from the west, in the
great drainage system of the Congo basin. The sunlight slept on its southern
bank as it wound out of sight, incredibly remote, making the heart faint with
loneliness.

People grew bold and came up onto the
upper deck. Ladies sat in chairs while other ladies modelled their hair into
balls, spikes, linking plaits, according to fashion or fancy. I sat in my deck
chair with Martin Chuzzlewit (Barnaby Rudge parting company on the last train),
and had already joined Martin and Mark on their similar voyage on the
Mississippi. And as often I left off reading and gazed on the scenes around.

Before night we came to our first
landfall - a palm oil station. The clearing hove in sight on the left bank and
we swung across to reach it. It was a simple square half-mile or so cut out of
the forest, with some works and simple company housing. On the bank stood
masses and masses of drums of palm oil, like an army of black beetles or
armoured Samurai; and beyond them a more intriguing sight. This was a mass of
boxes piled up with a man leaning on each side like book-ends. These were the
crates of beer and Coke bottles - the empties of the previous week, waiting
with the palm oil drums to be loaded and replaced (except in reverse - the
drums full and the bottles empty).

We drew alongside with the usual
hooting, and I looked into the large crowd which had gathered for this weekly
event. The thought crossed my mind that this would be a good place to escape one's
creditors. In the crowd I saw a small blonde girl, about eight years old. She
stood out among the black faces like a light or a lemon on a tree. Her skin
alone was brown. She was not an albino (who are fairly common in Central
Africa, more so than in West Africa), or she would have been as red and
sunburnt as me: more so, in fact. She was a half-caste. But how so in this
region where whites were almost never seen? I reflected, she could have been
fathered by one of the mercenaries
(les affreux)
who fought through
these parts (the dreaded Manyema) in '64.

I became thisty. Was there water? There
was a large tank with a tap. This was full of river water. Fortunately, I had a
cup with me, or rather, a copper tankard presented
To Dr Durrant from his
Colleagues at Kitwe, 1972.
I filled my gift, hoping that the water had been
taken on away from human habitations, as I did not wish to die of typhoid in
these remote parts and have my tankard (my familiar article) left on my grave
instead of flowers, in African tradition.

Then the unloading and loading began.
Men like ants bearing the large palm oil drums along the duck boards, up and
down, to and from the boat and the barges behind. This went on after dark by
the light of kerosene lamps. They were still at it when I fell asleep in my
cabin. Some time in the night I woke to see the engineer creep into the bunk on
the opposite side.

Next day the sun came up on the right
bank, blazing white among the trees. I ate some of my sandwiches and visited
the water tank. The captain asked me if I wished to take a bath.

I entered the bathroom and shut the
door. Immediately, I was in complete darkness except for streaks of sunlight
which entered round the door and through the cracks in the walls. I got used
enough to the obscurity to run the water into the huge bath from its mighty
tap: the water was cold so there was no need for two. The bath was plugged with
a most curious device, a large hollow cylinder which fitted into a simple
drainage hole. Strangely enough, I was to see another such bath plug later on
my leave in a hotel in Aviemore, which has long since, no doubt, been tarted up
out of recognition. And soon I was in my deck chair with Martin Chuzzlewit, the
river and the forest.

And so it went on monotonously. Suns
rose and set like fires among the trees. There were one or two more palm oil
stations, with the same crowds and activity as before. At other spots, we
stopped where people could buy food. I stepped ashore to stretch my legs but
found nothing I could eat. At a larger place, Lowa, there was a tavern where
one could get beer. A large lady sat beside me and tried to engage me in
friendly conversation, but as she spoke no French and I had no Swahili, we made
no progress. In fact, the only conversation I had was on the third and last
day, when a plump girl who could speak French told me about Kisangani (the old
Stanleyville, next stop but one) and recommended the Hôtel Stanley.

At one point on the second day, a gang
of about thirty soldiers with FN rifles scrambled onto the boat, bound for some
place downriver. They came onto the upper deck. As well as myself, there were
the usual strays from the lower deck whom the captain seemed prepared to
overlook, but he drew the line at these soldiers. He boldly ordered them below,
rifles and all, telling them that the upper deck was reserved for first-class
passengers, and they meekly obeyed. He was a tough little character, a sort of
black Billy Doughty, equally fearless, if stouter. When one considers that a
few years before, the soldiers would probably have shot him, thrown him to the
crocodiles, taken over the boat themselves and run it into the bank, one could
see that things had improved (for the nonce, at any rate) in the Congo.