Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa (36 page)

I had five brain shots in the three
years of total war, three of which I saved.

     The first was a white corporal,
shot through the forehead, just above the right eye, which was shattered also.

     This case was also admitted at
night. I called the mine anaesthetist, Ben Theron, to this case too. It was a
parlous case in a white man, and I knew that the African nurse-anaesthetists,
for reasons which the reader may appreciate, were nervous of such: it was
unfair and unwise to expose them to something they were not happy with. In
other European cases, where I was confident myself, they gladly obliged.

     After resuscitation and intubation,
I opened his head and washed out most of the right frontal lobe of the brain. I
instructed the scrub nurse to stem the copious haemorrhage with a surgical
towel, while I prepared a muscle graft. This is simply a piece of meat taken
from the patient’s thigh, beaten flat, and applied like a dressing to the
bleeding area. It sticks like a postage stamp in ten minutes, and effectively
arrests the haemorrhage, before becoming eventually absorbed. I have saved many
lives by this method in cases of head injury from what used to be called
‘uncontrollable haemorrhage’.I then closed the scalp without drainage. At the
same time, I removed the shattered eye.

     I sent the man to Bulawayo next
day, where no further intervention was found necessary. I never saw him again.
He was discharged from the army, and returned to his home in Salisbury; but I
heard from his friends who told me that he was well enough but his personality
had changed. He never became depressed and he never became excited. The frontal
lobe is the part of the brain used for worrying. The bullet had inflicted a
pre-frontal leucotomy, an operation which used to be performed in cases of
intractable anxiety, but has since been abandoned. I hope he suffered no worse
after-effects.

     Another case was a carbon copy of
this one, except for the eye injury, in which I operated on an African with a
satisfactory result.

     The third was an African lad of
about sixteen, shot in the side of the head: the motor area. He survived, but
was left with some lameness of his right leg and a paralysed right arm. His
speech was affected, but mercifully, not much.

I did less well with abdominal shots, of
which I had about half a dozen. There is a lot to go wrong in a television set.
One succumbed to thrombosis, and at least two others to infection. I had only
one clear success: a man whose bowels were riddled with mortar-bomb splinters.
It was a simple matter of sewing up all the holes, followed by a wash-out. I
was barely learning the abdominal trade when the war ended.

     The most piteous case was a lad of
seventeen, ‘caught in the cross-fire’. When I appeared he looked at me
hopefully and cried, ‘Docketa!’ Alas, I was unable to save him, and that was
the last word he spoke.

     My last abdominal shot came a few
days after the cease-fire. A white soldier fell out with his companion on the
veranda of the Nilton Hotel. He drove home to get his rifle, came back with it
and chased the other man along the veranda, before shooting him in the back. It
was night, but there was no problem now about transferring him to Bulawayo,
where the surgeon was able to save him. Good job for his assailant, as, if I
had failed, he would probably have hanged for premeditated murder.

A certain Greek trader went up from
Shabani to Gwelo. He had no car (but he carried four hundred dollars), so he
hitched a lift from a white man who was going to the quarry, seven miles out of
town, opposite my rural hospital at Lundi. The man warned him he would have to
put him down at the roadside, where he would have to take his chance - in more
ways than one. They probably thought little of it - a mere seven miles out. The
man went regularly to his quarry, as I went to my hospital.

     The little trader was unarmed:
which re-opens my previous discussion about carrying weapons. For it was not
guerrillas he fell among; who might have shot him on the spot, or even taken
him prisoner and carried him to Mozambique (especially as he was not armed),
like the remarkable cases of the white road-maker and the white farmer, who
were decently treated and even spoke appreciatively of their captors, when they
were later released, even before independence. One never could tell. A party of
black road-workers was shot down on the spot, and thirty black tea estate
workers were led out of their compound one night and massacred.

     Our trader fell indeed among
thieves - a rat pack of
mujibas
- young lads, described in the courts as
‘running with terrorists’: generally scouting, sitting on
kopjes
while
about their normal avocations of minding cattle and goats in the tribal lands.
Sometimes they formed packs, armed with imitation rifles with which they
imposed on the simple people in order to rob them and gain favours from their
womenfolk; no doubt, in imitation of their masters: otherwise, they would have
no weapons but sticks and stones.

     They did not strip our certain man
of his raiment, but they robbed him; nor did they leave him for dead. God knows
how they killed him, but his rags and bones were found in an old mine shaft
three months later and brought to me in a box.

And as in any war, there were the funny
incidents. Even at Inyanga, the police told us about an African farmer who
drove over a land mine in his pick-up, fortunately hitting it with his rear
wheel, or he would never have survived. Incidently, there was an innocent idea
to begin with, even among the whites, that if you drove fast enough you would
be away before the thing went off. Of course, that only ensured you made a
higher journey through the air.

     After rising the usual twelve feet,
our farmer came down with a bang and sat half-stunned in his vehicle. When the
police arrived, they asked him how he was. He replied: ‘I think I had a very
bad blow-out.’

     A mission was attacked in
Matabeleland. All hit the floor except Father Murphy, who ran to his room and
came out firing an automatic rifle, with which he drove off the attackers. (He,
at least, had no scruples about killing people rightly struggling to be free.)
The newspaper report concluded: ‘None of the other fathers knew Father Murphy
kept a rifle in his room’ - like a packet of joints or a girlie magazine.

     But the biggest comedy of the war
was the Great Battle of Shabani. Historians are divided over the cause. The
most popular theory was that it was started by a Portuguese (still not fully
admitted to polite society) firing a revolver at a cat in his garden. The town,
by now completely surrounded by the guerrillas in the countryside, entered and
left in armed convoys by all three major outlets, was in a nervy state. Like
the famous shot in Sarajevo, this one ignited a powder-keg. It was night. The
DC’s people, the rawest and most nervous, began firing on the police camp. The
police fired back at the DC’s place, and the army, which had a camp outside the
town, fired on both. Soon all three were firing on one another without
prejudice. I stood on my balcony and watched the tracers crossing the town in
all directions. Then the
boom!, boom!
 of mortar-bombs began. The whole
thing went on for about three hours. The matron rang me and I asked her to
clear the front bays of the wards, which was our usual preparation for mass
emergencies. I did not bother calling in extra staff as I was sure they were
all under their beds in their homes and wouldn’t budge. Otherwise, I decided to
adopt an expectant policy. With one final
boom!,
all the lights in the
town went out, meaning that they had hit the power station; when all at once
the firing stopped, like little boys who realised they had gone too far.
Needless to say, there was nary a guerrilla involved. Moreover, there was nary
a casualty on any side, which was regarded with what I suppose was mixed
relief.

     Next day, an aeroplane, carrying a
high-ranking officer, was seen to fly into our small airport, and a lot of
awkward questions were no doubt asked.

The war produced other indirect medical
consequences. Public health programmes were disrupted, including rabies control
- the vaccination of dogs in the tribal areas. And we began to see cases. One
was a little boy, bitten by a dog in the leg about a month before. Rabies virus
travels up the nerves to the brain, and in an adult takes about two months from
a bite in the leg and one month from the arm; and correspondingly less in a
child. The case was obvious when the little boy’s mother offered him water, and
he literally barked like a dog - hydrophobia (the old name of the disease),
fear of water, the very sight of which provokes the painful spasms in the
throat. I set up a Valium drip, and gave him an initial injection of the same
through the tube. The little boy slept mercifully and peacefully for two days
before he died. I was glad to see that the dreadful effects of the disease
could be so easily controlled (more easily, in fact, than in tetanus, where the
activity is in the spine, less readily reached by the drugs), though the
outcome in the established case is universally fatal.

     Another case was a woman. As the
ambulance brought her in, she went into choking spasms in the vehicle as it
splashed through puddles on the road. Nor was she controlled with a Valium
drip, but continued to stagger aimlessly round her bed. Obviously, the dose was
too low. Rather than waste time adjusting it, I started large doses of
Largactil, and she settled and also died peacefully after two days.

     Then a rabid puppy attended a
European children’s party. Its condition was discovered when it died a few days
later, and the veterinary laboratory found the tell-tale Negri bodies in the
brain. It had been vaccinated, too, but was obviously already infected at the
time of vaccination.

     Europeans tend to make more fuss
about these things than Africans, even the colonial types of Rhodesia, whose
anxiety threshold is much higher than in other places I had better not mention.
So I organised a meeting of the parents concerned. This sort of thing, again, fell
under the government medical officer.

     I had already consulted with the
animal health inspector and the secretary for health, and had formulated a
policy. No one, as far as we knew, had been bitten. I did not go into the
controversial business of licks in the face, thinking it an unnecessary alarm.
I proposed vaccinating all the children under five, as unable to give an
account of themselves, and offered it to any others concerned who wished it for
their children or themselves. In the event, everyone opted for the fourteen-day
ordeal of radial injections around the navel, which was the regime then. A
telegram was even sent in pursuit of a woman who had gone to Israel, and
altogether the government was set back a tidy sum. No cases developed.

     As the war developed, nothing moved
by night in the tribal areas except the guerrillas themselves; and we began to
see other medical consequences - especially for the women in labour. In short,
I had about a dozen cases of ruptured uterus brought in, after a night of
obstructed labour. All of these I dealt with by subtotal hysterectomy, and lost
only one - a woman who had been ruptured more than twelve hours and succumbed
to infection. One might imagine there were others who never made it to
hospital. I never saw any at postmortem, but it was not usual to report natural
deaths occurring in the tribal areas.

One day, about half-a-dozen people were
brought in, suffering from strange symptoms: abdominal pains, mostly, and some
developed paralysis. Some rapidly died, while others began to recover. They
told a story of eating tins of meat they had found in the bush. I suspected
botulism, and reported to the provincial medical officer. The DC seemed to
regard the cases as more suspicious.

     After a few days, I received a telephone
call from the secretary. By then, the recovered cases had gone home: the dead
had been buried. I probably wrote food-poisoning on the death certificates. The
secretary requested exhumation of the dead for further investigation.

     After a week, he rang me with the
news that thallium had been found in the bodies. No further explanation was
available.

     After the war, I got the answer
from one of the Selous Scouts. I was wrong when I said only the guerrillas
moved in the bush by night. The Selous Scouts were a body of desperadoes, black
and white, who lived in and off the bush for months at a time: tracking,
engaging, and even infiltrating the guerrillas as spies. And they got up to
dirty tricks. Leaving booby-trapped radio sets around was one of them, and so
were the thallium-injected tins of meat. These things were aimed at the
guerrillas, as the guerrillas’ land mines were aimed at the security forces,
but in each case trapped more civilians than either.

     For years after the war, guerrillas
returned from Mozambique, reported stomach pains and stories about poisoned
meat, which must have mystified doctors ignorant of these events. I encountered
no more cases among civilians, though no doubt they occurred.

Before breakast one morning, I was
called to a gunshot case in the European hospital. A local farmer and his wife
had been taking their son and his friend to Gwelo to report for conscription.
The younger brother, a lad of about fifteen, went too. All the men were armed.
Call up was eighteen for all white males. Even so, eighty per cent of the
security forces, police and army, was black.