Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa (50 page)

     I could have retorted to the
Olympians that doctors could play at that game. What general practitioners in
‘Western countries’ did caesarean sections, and a lot of other things besides;
and what would happen to the mothers and babies and most other people, to say
nothing of the system, if
we
went by ‘Western’ rules? But the Olympians
never asked for my opinion, so I never expressed it. On the ground, we were
left in our bitter quarrel.

     It reached its worst point when a
dead body was brought in one night by the police, and the sister called Charles
to ‘certify’ it. Charles refused, and the next thing, the police were banging
on Charles’s door, threatening and frightening the life out of the poor little
chap, which they did with the more gusto as he belonged to the wrong tribe.
Charles was dragged out of his bed to do his ‘duty’, and even taken to the
police station afterwards to ‘explain himself’, and knocked about into the
bargain.

     This brought a sharp protest from
the PMO, and the police chief was moved, but the hospital battle smouldered on,
and was still burning when I finally left.

     I wondered why I got so worked up
about this matter. The fact itself was annoying enough, as I have explained,
but there was something more. Some new spirit: the spirit of formalism of the
modern world, displacing the generous spirit of the old world, especially the
old Africa.

Then the PMO came up with a scheme for
training expatriate doctors at the provincial hospital (something which was the
rule when I first came to the country), and wanted me to move to Gweru to take
charge of it, in a lateral transfer to a specially created new post of medical
training officer. I may say now that the system of training them at the main
teaching hospital, which was even then in existence, was far superior: they
could learn more there in their three-month crash course, properly organised,
than they could in twelve months in the rather haphazard circumstances of the
provincial hospital. I rather think the PMO thought I had done long enough in
the districts and might appreciate a move.

     It brought, at least, benefits, for
many incidental reasons, which were rather sad reasons. In the old days, men
(and women - though the women were more usually unmarried and in missions)
spent their whole careers in the districts, with all the advantages that
experience and local knowledge give. Now things had changed.

     In the first place was the matter
of schools. District doctors could never afford private schools, but in the old
days, every small town had good primary schools for white and black; and at the
age of thirteen, the children could be sent to a state boarding school in the
provincial town. The fatal flaw was a hopeless disparity on the black side. The
black schools which existed were good enough to produce the country’s new
leaders, but there was not one tenth enough of them, to say the least.

     So, with independence, came a vast
break-neck expansion of non-racial education, and the quality of the system was
inevitably swamped. Many of the teachers did not have ‘O’ levels. It was not
quite the twelve-graduate situation of the Congo, but it was something like.

     Which meant that government
doctors, black and white, wanted to send their children to private schools.

     When we moved to Gweru, we could
send our children to a private non-boarding primary school and just afford it:
the prospect of secondary education, as it loomed ahead, was something else,
boarding or not boarding; and eventually, like everyone else, I had to review
my position in the service altogether. As an African consultant, who was
himself quitting the service, said: ‘Unless you want your kids to go to Shumba
Secondary School, Dr Durrant, you’d better get out and go into private
practice;’ as he was doing. The sad thing was, he went to Shumba Secondary
School himself in its better days.

     There was no private primary school
in Zvishavane, and all middle-class people had lost faith in the government
establishment. A desperate attempt was made to re-classify the schools into ‘A’
and ‘B’; ‘A’ being the old European schools, ‘B’ the old black ones. As the ‘A’
schools were in the posher areas, now multiracial, it was hoped, though never
confessed, that class distinction might save the situation left by the
abandoned racial distinction of the past; but few (white or black) acquired
much faith in this expedient.

     Moreover, the government salary was
not keeping pace with inflation and the rising cost of living. Sadly, when we
left Zvishavane, we had to pay off our servants, knowing they had little chance
of finding other employment.

The day came to say good-bye to
Zvishavane. A tea party was given to us by the staff one morning, at which we
attended as a family. We received the customary big clock - in the shape of
Zimbabwe, which still hangs on the wall of our guest room. I solved the now
doubly wretched business of making a speech by reviewing the progress we had
made together in the ten years I had been with them: the immunisation programme,
the sanitary programme, the Tb programme, etc, etc; how all our clinics had
telephones, how 85 per cent of all deliveries took place in medical facilities,
how our perinatal mortality rate was already below the government’s target
figure for the year 2000; and so on and so on. The atmosphere became strangely
charged around me; tears began to gather in dark eyes; Terry too was looking
dewy. My voice faltered, and I rapidly made an end.

O, my brave brown (and white) companions! as Sassoon says. These too
were my fellow soldiers, and their names form a roll of honour. The matrons:
Brewster, Johnson, Ashwin (later Durrant!), Jones, Mhlanga; the sisters:
Masina, Mushaya, Sibanda, Banda, Mandebvu, Moyo, Mataka, Mutema, Munyoro,
Kimpton, Grobelaar, Ziemkendorf, Wild, Drayton, Fourie; the medical assistants:
Muguti, Chaumba, Mutamba, Marashe, Mutema, Dzauma, Mutonhodza; the ladies: Mrs
Rioga, Muguti, Chikara; Chigumbo (health inspector); the clerks: Reynolds,
Mantiziva, Jackie, the Sitholes, John and Peter, Rioga; Sam and Chikara
(ambulance); the general hands: Molly, Rebecca, Eveline, Phineas (mortuary);
Roda (cook); all those out in the clinics, and those on other stations, too
numerous to mention: I shall always remember them, even those whose names I
have forgot - may they forgive an old man’s memory!

At Gweru, I bought a house, nothing being
obtainable to rent from the government: at 58, the first house I had owned in
my life. And a very beautiful house it was, in a half-acre plot. I just about
managed to keep the lawn under control myself with an electric mower, while
Terry managed the rest, including a kitchen garden. We had trouble with bees in
the house, which Terry managed to keep out by sealing one of the ventilators
and smoking them out of the chimney - they fell into the sitting room in a huge
dead ball. I was grateful for marrying a practical country girl - Harold
Skimpole Durrant being a mere child in such matters.

     I walked daily to the hospital,
which was just down the road, but took the car for more rapid progress to
emergencies which arose in the night. For I was a kind of all-round registrar,
especially on the surgical side, and gave such training as was needed to expatriates
and young local interns. My teaching methods in surgery were simple. First, I
did the operation (say a hernia) with the pupil assisting. Then the pupil did
the same operation on another case, with me assisting. After that, for that
particular operation, he was on his own, unless he specially requested my help.
A course which will no doubt make European surgeons shudder, but, as I do not
need to say again, this was Africa.

     They kept me at it to the day I
retired, and my last night saw me piloting a young African doctor through a
burst appendix with peritonitis - a successful and happy termination to the
operation and my government career. But this is leaping ahead.

Came news that we were to receive two
doctors from Poland: husband and wife, a surgeon and a gynaecologist, to boot.
Poland was still (1986) a communist colony of the Russian Empire, and I feared
the arrival of some sort of communist missionaries, and said so in my letters
to England.

     Within days of the arrival of the
Stiritupskis, I was writing in a very different strain. ‘If Jaruzelski thought
he was sending us communist missionaries, all I can say is he boobed
resoundingly.’

     So far from preaching communism, so
far from preserving a discreet or cautious silence on the subject, the Stiritupskis
practically denounced it from the roof-tops. I lived in daily fear of their
arrest.

     Zimbabwean comrades, who
incautiously approached them in a comradely spirit, got a big shock.

     ‘Vot you are tinking is Rassia?’
snarled Adam, a small, dark, fiery man, who looked like a scale model of Lech
Walesa, even to the big moustache, which I learned was an anti-communist badge
in Poland. ‘Vorkers’ paradise? Vot a joke! I tell you vot is Rassia, my friend.
Rassia is Tird Vorld cantry viz atom bombs!’

     ‘As for Rassians!’ spat Elizabeth,
a small fiery blonde. ‘I tell you, Polish people vud razer hev zee Nazis!’

     ‘Communism!’ sneered Adam.
‘Communism is dead in Polan’. Dead? It voz never born. I tell you, Polish
people are 99 per cent Catolic. On’y communists are traitor shits!’

     All this was very upsetting to the
faithful of Zimbabwe, who looked for bread to what they thought was the source
of the true bread, and got stones thrown at them.

     Adam soon cottoned on to the local
‘comrade’ fashion, then still in full bloom. He sat in outpatients.

     ‘Come in, comrade. Good morning,
comrade. Sit down, comrade. Vot can I do for you, comrade? Get zis medicine,
comrade. Call zee next comrade, pleess, Comrade Moyo!’

     All this was rather lost on his
unsophisticated victims, and even the nurses; but it was clear Adam was
enjoying himself.

     When their pay cheques failed to
arrive after two months, Adam was on the line to Head Office in no uncertain
tone. Finally, he shouted : ‘From now on, I am on strike!’, banged down the
receiver, and walked straight home. By next day, his sense of duty to his
colleagues (to say nothing of his patients) brought him back to work: the
half-day strike was over. It caused a lot of fluttering in the dove-cotes of
Head Office, who had never had this kind of thing before. (They were to get it
later from their own people, as the service deteriorated.)

     Then he asked me if he could use my
private telephone for a certain purpose, which he more or less let us in on.
While Terry was in the house, he would slip out of the hospital to our place to
ring the Canadian High Commission in a neighbouring country. It became plain
that they had come to Zimbabwe as the first step in a plan of escape from their
own country. Usually after these calls, he would leave with a sad face. Then
one morning, he put down the receiver, ran into the kitchen and gave a startled
but sympathetic Terry a big hug and a kiss. They had been accepted for Canada.
Before long, they invited us alone to a small party, left their jobs without a
word, and boarded the next flight to London.

Even before we left Zvishavane, Gareth
decided to go back to Wales. He came out for an annual holiday for some years
afterwards, when we would meet him and go away with him for a holiday
ourselves, usually to the Eastern Highlands.

     One day, in the British High
Commission, the children saw Uncle Gareth’s picture on the wall: not exactly a
police notice, but looking remarkably like a wanted South American bandit, with
his strong, swarthy features and heavy moustache. It was, of course, his new
passport photo, awaiting attention, and our first intimation that the eagle had
landed.

     Once I took him to see the Mutarazi
Falls: at 2500 feet, the highest in Africa. Even Terry had not seen them. On
our previous visit, she had stayed with the children, as the thought of them
scampering up and down that terrible drop was too much for our parental nerves.
The scene is reached, walking down a valley in the Highlands, where one sees
the strange tree ferns, like giant hairy phalluses. Then one comes to the
V-shaped cliff. The narrow stream falls over the right arm of the V, in two
thousand odd-foot steps, and can be viewed clearly from the left arm. Before
one and far below is spread the vast panorama of the Honde Valley, fair as the
Elysian fields.

     On the viewing side there is a
promontory, not at all unnerving, even to me who have no head for heights; but
there is no doubt that only a little push is required to send someone over it,
and they wouldn’t touch anything for a long time. Gareth said he would like to
shove his second wife off it, and we named the spot, ‘Mrs Baker’s Leap’.

Alas, in the government service, we got
poorer and poorer. I had already cut Anderson’s pension from fifty dollars a
month to twenty. Now I decided I would have to stop it altogether. I did not
want to give the old chap the shock of finding this out from the bank, when he
went to collect it, so I went round to his house in one of the Gweru townships.
I need not have worried about Anderson’s welfare.

     Malawians are no slackers. They
were brought up by Dr Livingstone and his friends, under their policy of
‘Christianity and Commerce’, which is why so many of them have Scottish names,
and although their mountain country is as poor as the Scottish Highlands, they
have an equal reputation for industry and frugality. I discovered that Anderson
(Thatcher style) had long since bought his house in the township; he and his
wife were feeding themselves amply from the garden (like me, he had taken the
wise course of marrying a strong and much younger woman); and, moreover, the
couple were living in one room of the house and letting out the others to some
lady lodgers, whose source of income had better not be further elucidated,
except to say that it was secure.

     In fact, I suspect that my pension
simply covered Anderson’s supply of liquor and tobacco: a double vice to which
that admirable nation is over-addicted, and which has given them one of the
highest rates of cancer of the gullet in the world; so perhaps I was doing him
a service by cutting it off, though I rather doubt it.

     All in all, Anderson was by no
means discomposed by my news; even, if anything, extended sympathy to me and my
family in our poverty.

And at Gweru, Michael showed organising
abilities in creating the Gweru East Sports Club, comprising, like most such
bodies in the country at that time, European and Indian members, for historical
reasons, too complex to go into here. They shared their venue with Chaplin
Secondary School (where Terry had boarded), until the governors of that
institution, in rather cavalier fashion, enclosed it with a wall, and Michael’s
club came to an end.

     They played cricket and soccer in
season: on Saturday or Sunday afternoons; and I was dragged out of my armchair
to supervise and instruct. Talk about the leadership activities of the blind!
One bowler had an incurable problem: young Kalpesh, whom I rather unkindly
described as bowling ‘like an Indian student throwing a brick at a policeman’.
And when it came to soccer, Africa burst in with the children of the school
caretakers, who had never had more than a bundle of rags to play with before,
and (temporarily) took the ball off the more privileged children, like a pack
of wild dogs, sending them home in tears.

     At least, Michael gained some local
fame by his activities, and I was hailed by black children, on my way home, as
‘Macklesfather’.

Finally, at the age of sixty, I decided
to take early retirement from government service, and took a three-quarter
share in a small private practice with an Indian, who went to live in South
Africa as a sleeping partner.

     The surgery was a simple lock-up,
open eight to five, no night or week-end duty, and no house visits, except to a
handful of my partner’s friends. So, under the sign of Balti and Durrant, I set
up in my own business for the first time in my life, in a street of other
Indian stores, below Main Street.

     What frightened me most was keeping
the accounts. The other staff consisted of a clerk, Robert, and a nurse, Annie,
with a stand-in nurse, Nyasha. But Indians are not in the habit of delegating
finances, so I faithfully took on the books in my partner’s tradition.

     It was something I learnt faster
then surgery, and its terrors were equally less. Soon, I was writing to an old
banking friend in England (who was also musical): ‘Our accounts would seem like
a five-finger exercise to the symphonies of accountancy you must have conducted
in your time.’

     Dr Balti’s wife had been used to
sitting in the surgery, ostensibly knitting, while keeping an eye on the clerk
and the nurse, who might otherwise have been subject to obscure temptations
while her husband was in the examination cubicles, or otherwise off his guard.
She suggested that Terry might like to do the same: Terry didn’t.

     Dr Balti instructed me not to let
other Indian doctors into the surgery (they seemed to trust one another about
as much as - I’d better not say). He gave me his address in South Africa with
similar reservations; both including ‘specially Dr Vindaloo’.

     Indeed, I seemed to be fending off
half the Indian secret service. Mrs Tandoori, up the street, was not only a
patient but a frequent inquirer. Dr Balti had advertised his house for sale at
what seemed to Mrs Tandoori a suspiciously low price. Even Dr Vindaloo broke in
one day, but got nothing out of me.

     And no love was lost between them
and the Africans. The drains frequently got blocked, which Annie blamed on the
‘horrible food’ the Indian tenants above us were cooking. An African colleague
in the next street cheered me with the assurance: ‘Balti’s a crook, and
Vindaloo’s another.’ And, of course, Mrs Balti had warned me from her side -
‘You can’t trust them!’

The practice specialised in sexually
transmitted diseases (STD), and again I was getting experience far beyond
anything Europe could provide. I was seeing 300 fresh cases a month, which is
more than most general hospitals in England; and nearly ten times the number of
diseases, for in Africa, there are about twenty varieties to choose from.
Species multiply in the tropics: eg, Roberts’
Birds of South Africa
lists
fifteen species of eagle, on a rather different subject.

     And more and more, I was seeing
Aids. The first Aids case I saw was in Zvishavane, and went unrecognised by me
until it was pointed out by the provincial physician, on his monthly visit: a
young girl with extended shingles. Then, as I said, I recognised it in the
terrible cases of pelvic sepsis we saw and operated on in females. In my new
clinic, I saw it besides in cases of florid penile ulceration, which were
stubborn to treat. Then the black spots of Kaposi’s sarcoma, and the ‘wasting
disease’.

     At first, I would test them, but
the results took three weeks - a long trial even for the stoical African. The
news was invariably bad: the signs were obvious enough before the test. The
patients took the news silently: one schoolboy only shrugged his shoulders and
said: ‘Then I needn’t bother about my ‘A’ levels.’ I would always try to
comfort them, telling them they had many years to live, and medical science was
advancing so rapidly, a cure might be discovered in time for them. But I had
little faith in my own words. Finally, I gave up testing them, or even voicing
my clinical suspicions. They would do nothing about it, anyway.
Carpe diem
-
the motto of Africa!