Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa (21 page)

On the third day we reached Ubundu, the
end of the stage. After that, the river became unnavigable at Stanley Falls.
One took a train from Ubundu to Kisangani. It was night and the captain
recommended me to the home of the priest, the only white man in the town, and
the usual 'Scania' led me there. Here I found a small Luxembourger in his white
cassock. He was very pleased to welcome me, explained that he had already
dismissed
'le boy',
but prepared me some food himself. The last of my
sandwiches were going green after three days and I had thrown them overboard
and gone without lunch.

The father sat beside me while I ate. He
talked as if he would never stop: how long since he had last had talk with a
fellow white? I had difficulty following his eager stream of French. He told me
about
'les événements'
of '64, and described with unChristian glee how
the mercenaries had whipped the Simba rebels -
'paff! paff!'
I could
understand his feelings, when one remembers what the Simbas did to the
missionaries.

He showed me to my bedroom, complete
with mosquito net. (Yes, they had provided one on the boat in my 'first-class'
cabin, and, of course, I was taking antimalarials.) I offered to pay for my
keep but he refused. In any case, I left the customary two dollars by my
bedside next morning, but afterwards realised that
'le boy'
no doubt
appropriated them. (Ah well, ye who now do bless the poor!) The father drove me
to the railway station in his Land Rover, where I caught the train to
Kisangani.

The train arrives at Kisangani on the
left bank of the river, and to cross one has to take a canoe: not the small
canoes I had seen in West Africa or on the river so far, but sixty-foot vessels
with seating on either side facing inwards for as many as a hundred passengers,
driven by an outboard motor. In one of these I sailed across the mile of water.

Kisangani (or Stanleyville as it was
called by the people who built it) was the loveliest city I saw in the Congo.
It was admitted on the West Coast, even by the Brits, that while we built
shanty towns, the French and Belgians built European cities (I was to discover
later the same was true of the Portuguese); and while this aspersion is not
true of our people in East and Southern Africa, it must be admitted that
Kisangani was a small piece of Paris, planted 1000 miles up in the jungle. As
well as the handsome Continental streets with their pavement cafes, there was a
lovely promenade along the riverside. I found the Hotel Stanley and booked
myself in. And when I unpacked my case, I discovered I had left Martin
Chuzzlewit on the train.

It was sundown and too late now to
re-cross the river. I did so next day. I noted the train was still in the
station: these things do not move about Africa in the restless spirit of
Europe. I went into an office where the usual bored clerk sat behind a large
desk.

'Pardonnez-moi! J'ai
laissé un roman anglais dans le train.'

He opened a drawer and pulled out the
book in question. He studied the title.

'Comment est-il appelé?'

'Martin Chuzzlewit, de Charles
Dickens.'

I signed for it, he handed it over, and
the property of the Kitwe library was saved.

I had meant to take the next river boat:
a considerably posher one, I understood (and hoped) for the next stage of 1000
miles (ten days) to Kinshasa, but through some confusion I missed the
connection and had to travel by air. Otherwise, I could wait two weeks for the
next boat to arrive: too long, I felt, to hang around Stanleyville.

So the following afternoon found me
taking a taxi (not a 'Scania') to the small airport, a mile out of town, where
the Belgian paras landed in '64, too late to save the hostages in the city.

As we flew out, I looked down on the
Grand Forest: the ocean of tree-tops, clearings which contained small villages
of thatched huts, the great rivers that glinted like reptiles. Then the swift
tide of night ran in and all was swallowed in blackness.

At Kinshasa I stayed at the famous
Memling Hotel. I strolled about for a day but found it a less lovely town than
Kisangani. The planners had taken no aesthetic advantage of its site on the
great Stanley Pool, which was lined only by docks and warehouses.

After two nights I boarded a Sabena jet,
which flew overnight to Brussels, and got a connection next day to London. I
had been abroad two years.

I now knew that Africa, or rather the
African work, was my vocation, and as the reader will have gathered, I was
aiming at permanent settlement, by which I mean wife, home and family. For
reasons already outlined, I decided this was not possible in the expatriate situations
north of the Zambezi. This left only the true settler countries of Rhodesia and
South Africa.

South Africa seemed to me too
'civilised'. In work, I was a loner: at least I wanted to take on as much
responsibility as possible. This may not sound like the altruistic motives we
attribute to Livingstone and Schweitzer (who in truth were the most monstrous
egoists), but as Schumann said: nothing of value is achieved in art without
enthusiasm; and he might have been talking about medicine too.

Now, South Africa struck me as being
suspiciously overdeveloped for my purpose. Hadn't Dag Hammerskjöld exclaimed:
'This is not Africa: this is Europe!'? I could see the place over-run with
specialists, and the bush doctor like a GP in England. This is not to say that
British GPs are not excellent people in their way; but their way was not my
way. In fact, there were some wild parts in South Africa - notably among the
'homelands'; but they were not ‘countries’, where I could settle, more black
backwaters. Besides, South Africa is rather a foreign country to an Englishman
- very tight and Teutonic. Rhodesia, I felt, was altogether more relaxed and
British. For to realise my complex ambitions, I needed people of my own kind.
If I had been by nature a monk, work alone would have satisfied me, and nothing
would have suited me better than an up-country mission hospital in the Congo.
But I wasn't and it wouldn't. So I decided Rhodesia it was.

Rhodesia was then in a tricky position:
an international pariah, after the Unilateral Declaration of Independence of
1965. I decided that as a doctor, I could stand aside from politics, and this I
mostly managed to do. I was there as a settler, a serious person - no longer a
sojourner. This, as with the other settlers of those countries, seemed to me
its own justification.

People advised me to take a car as they
were hard to come by in the country. In my ignorance, I chose a Fiat, which
turned out to be unlucky as the most popular models were French and Japanese,
and gave rise to difficulty in the matter of spares. Taking a car meant going
out by sea, so I booked a leisurely twelve-day passage with Union Castle, and
left on the Oranje from Southampton.

The voyage out was certainly more
commodious than air travel, even steerage. There were all the usual facilities
of such a voyage: swimming pool, deck games, bar, dancing in the evening,
spacious dining-room and lounge, and no more then two to a cabin. And three
good meals a day.

Each table seated about a dozen people,
and at mine we had two unofficial entertainers we came to call 'Old Bill' and
'Young Bill'. These two were English South Africans: I think Old Bill had spent
his early years in London but was otherwise as South African as Young Bill, a
curly-haired young fellow of about twenty-two, who was born there.

And both Bills were rebels.

Your English South African rebel, as I
have hinted, was not as fierce as the kind the Boers produced themselves, but
was probably more entertaining. Old Bill and Young Bill spent every mealtime
winding each other up over the shortcomings of their country and its system,
and as much time in between as they found themselves together.

I first came upon them at it in the bar
during sundowners when Old Bill was going on about their own prime minister,
John Balthasar Vorster.

'The bugger wanted to drag us in on the
side of the Nazis when the war broke out.'

'They put him in prison,' commented
Young Bill.

'Prison! They should have shot the
bastard.'

Some of the people at our table found
this sort of thing less amusing than I did: one young English girl especially,
who was emigrating, and did not want to be put off; wanted to judge for
herself, as she said.

'They won't let you,' sneered Young
Bill. 'You'll be brain-washed in six months.' He seemed to overlook his own
remarkable exception, as well as his ancient companion's. Old Bill was about
sixty.

At breakfast some sort of news-sheet was
delivered to each place, which, besides world news, was heavily loaded with
tidings of South Africa. Young Bill would peruse this as soon as he had secured
his fruit juice and corn flakes, eager for more fuel for his revolutionary
flame. So did old Bill, but he was slower off the mark, being incommoded by age
and a fumble for spectacles. So Young Bill was usually first with the latest
outrage. His style was satirical rather than angry: he laughed while Old Bill
growled from his deeper disillusion.

'Ha! Ha! Listen to this one!' from Young
Bill. 'Betsie Verwoerd says white parents should stop letting black nannies
carry white kids on their backs, as they get used to the smell and break the
Immorality Act when they grow up.'

A few mornings later he nearly choked on
his cornflakes and had to extract one from his nose before he could share the
fun.

'O Christ! What next! They are going to
introduce apartheid donkeys on Cape Town beach.'

Now all this was very jolly, but the
table next to ours seemed entirely booked up by the South African rugby team,
to judge by its heavy Teutonic-looking occupants who, although they could not
catch every word, seemed to be picking up unwelcome vibrations from our table.
Electricity built up amongst them like a thundercloud, and one morning came a
warning flash.

The most articulate of them (the rest
seemed more devoted to deeds then words) growled at Young Bill. He ignored Old
Bill as either beyond redemption or, being rather behind us in social
advancement, they were not in the habit of molesting old men.

'We know what you're up to, Bill.'

Young Bill looked superior. 'I thought I
was enjoying a private conversation,' he drawled, retracing the ship's course,
so to speak, in his accent a few thousand miles towards Oxford, the more to
annoy his interlocutor. His appeal for privacy was also a new departure for
him.

'You're trying to put them off our
country.'

Young Bill ignored them. It says
something for South African standards that he came to no physical harm and was
still on board at breakfast each morning.

I danced with a rather lovely
Greek-looking girl who had been in Rhodesia. She described Gwelo (which was my
destination) as a 'blink wunce tahn' - ie, blink once as you drive through and
you don't see the town. There were such towns in Rhodesia (and in South
Africa); but if Gwelo did not measure up to her Johannesburg, I do not think
that is a true description of the capital of the Midlands Province.

(Incidentally, a 'town' in those
countries is anything down to a garage, a hotel and a couple of houses, as long
as it is occupied by whites. A 'village' is something with mud huts.)

And one morning we were in the magnificent
harbour of Cape Town, viewing Table Mountain through a forest of masts. I
looked over the gunwale at the quay below. I could hardly believe my eyes. In
West Africa and Zambia I had seen whites, blacks and Indians. Here were men of
all colours; and even when I got ashore I saw 'white' men in whites-only bars
with crinkly hair, 'white' men with flat faces, and 'white' men with thick
mouths. (I was seeing, of course, 'Coloureds', people of mixed race, but the
mixing seemed to spill over the official boundaries.) In my first letters home
I was writing that apartheid was not only immoral and unworkable: it was
meaningless. This was a naive first impression, no doubt.

In the customs they inspected my modest
suitcase. On top of my things lay a copy of
Cancer Ward,
with a bold
hammer and sickle on it. 'I'll have to check that book, sir, with that sign on
it,' said the customs man. I explained. 'It is an anti-communist book. It has
been banned in Russia. It would be an unusual distinction to be banned in South
Africa too.' He went behind the scenes to consult his 'Index' and presently
returned with more out-going vibes. 'Yes, that's all right, sir.' By the time I
had with difficulty re-packed my suitcase, he was postively friendly. 'You'd
better buy a bigger suitcase with your first pay cheque, sir.'

I stayed at the Mount Nelson Hotel one
night, and was off north in my Fiat in the morning. Jimmy Lennon told me how he
had passed the same way many years before. After a hearty breakfast he inquired
the way to Salisbury, Rhodesia. 'Just drive down that road for a week,' he was
advised. By my time the period was shortened to four days: otherwise the advice
held good.

I picked up a young white couple who
were going to Johannesburg. Companions are usually an asset on the long and
sometimes problematic journeys of Africa, though nowadays I imagine picking
people up is more dangerous than it was. Pity!

Cape Town was ringed by fantastic
mountains towering into the sky. I thought how my hill-walking friends in
England would envy me such breath-taking sights under the glowing blue heaven.
The road climbed quickly and I was among the green slopes and vineyards of the
wine-growing country, which looks like the south of France, and where the
Huguenots brought the first grapes; but before midday I had reached a very
different country - the Great Karoo, a country of stone and coarse grassland,
semi-desert, stretching 700 miles to the north-east and 500 miles north to the
Kalahari.

I made the small country town of
Victoria West by nightfall. My companions had a tent and went to a camp-site. I
told them to meet me next day at the hotel, where I put up for the night.

After supper I took a short stroll. The
sky was clear and starry overhead. This was October, the hottest month, but the
Highveld was cool at that hour. One sensed the vast clean distances of the
country.

Next morning the sole other occupant of
the breakfast room was a middle-aged man: the clean, intelligent-looking type
of the best Afrikaner. He looked like a schoolmaster, maybe. We had a word or
two between separate tables then got together on the veranda after the meal. He
was something of a 'liberal'. He said, 'There are white men in this town who
cannot sign their own names, who have the vote, which is denied to an African
professor.' He drew the line at some things like intermarriage as the
offspring, he believed, suffered a loss of identity. I wonder how he found the
new South Africa, if he lived to see it.

I paid my bill to the manager who first
greeted me in Afrikaans:
'Gooie more, meneer!';
but switched readily
enough to English when he heard he was dealing with a
Soutie.

I picked up my friends, and on we went
to Kimberley; after which the Karoo became more barren than ever. But soon we
were on the wide grasslands of the Transvaal. The land rose to the cool of the
Rand, and as night fell I got a photo of the moon rising beside a candelabra
tree. I left my friends in Johannesburg and put up at the Celeste in Hillbrow.

Next morning I got a picture of that
hustling, towering city from the top floor of the hotel: more like America than
anything I had yet seen in Africa.

The third day found me in a country of
strange hills, some cone-shaped, some hump-backed, called
kopjes
(pron,
'copies'). Then the road descended into the hot, steamy Lowveld.

Here I gave a lift to a young black
woman, an educated woman, probably a teacher or a nurse. We did not have much
conversation. She was very shy, and I was wondering if I was breaking the
Immorality Act: just wondering, I don't mean I was afraid. Of course, I was not
breaking the act, but it would have been regarded as strange and a little
suspicious by the whites in South Africa and Rhodesia in those days, rather
like two men sharing the same house, to say nothing of bed, in England since
the homosexuals literally queered the pitch. I had the soft look of a
missionary, besides being British, both of which would have excused me, as an
object rather more pitiable than suspicious in local white eyes. However, much
of the black girl's silence would be due to her own embarrassment, as people
might have mistaken her part in the situation, not to her credit. I may say the
lift was unsolicited and I dropped her in due course with, I felt, some relief
on her part, and came after dark to Louis Trichardt, where I spent the night.

Next day I found what looked like a
small French town, with its church spire rising among small wooded hills in the
mists of morning. It was Sunday and strolling about I passed a small Afrikaner
boy and girl, dressed in a kind of folksy style, on their way to church: their
Sunday best, rather like something in Germany or Austria. I longed to take a
snap of them, but felt it a violation of their privacy.

And the same day I crossed the 'great,
grey, greasy Limpopo' into the country that was to be my home for the next
eighteen years.

On the Rhodesian side I met two young
white men, who asked for a lift to Salisbury. They were from Zambia, and were
looking for work in South Africa, but had been refused entry for some reason -
perhaps their Zambian passports. One sat beside me, the other behind.