Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa (14 page)

Mr Hunt also covered traumatic surgery -
accident and emergency - which is also a specialty in Europe.

And, of course, he was a general surgeon
who did such things as hernias and bowel resections. In other words, as even
specialists are in Africa, he was an all-rounder, but worked within the limits
of his own competence and the resources available to him.

And so it was throughout the other
departments: obstetrics and gynae, internal medicine - all of which stretched
to include sub-specialties such as ear, nose and throat, eyes and so on, at a basic
level.

There were a specialist anaesthetist and
pathologist. We did not run to psychiatry; and children came under the
specialist physician and surgeon.

This is the usual thing in Africa -
breadth and simplicity, rather than specialisation - at hospitals up to this
size.

There was little formal training for the
GDMOs (or general doctors), and the hospital was not very busy. The general
public went to the large government hospital, which was a very different
affair.

There was nothing wrong with this. The
mine hospital was designed to serve the mine people, and this it did well, with
ample resources, both professional and material. And it was a place where a
general doctor could learn much if he was prepared to push the specialists. In
a formal training establishment the teachers push the pupils - and chase them.
But formal training was not within the remit of the mine hospital, nor did it
need to be.

At night the GDMOs were on call for all
departments together, and could summon the appropriate specialist, and so maintained
their broader experience. All in all, although it was not geared for training,
a person who wanted to learn could learn much through observation and some
extended practice.

My contract here was for two years, and
they were not years wasted.

At week-ends we helped out with the
flying doctor service: the government doctors were too busy for that. I think
it was some kind of private charity, and was run for the benefit of outlying
mission hospitals, where there was no doctor. We made weekly trips in a Cessna
with a volunteer pilot. Emergencies at these places were sent to the government
hospital by ambulance, and sometimes by air. Of course, our services were also
voluntary, and it was great fun and instructive too.

Flying in a Cessna is like flying in a
Mini car - a pretty nervous experience for the first time, which one quickly
got used to. And the broad expanse of Africa was an exhilarating sight from the
air. We looked down onto the large houses, with the blue squares of their
swimming pools: we crossed the bleaker areas of the townships, and were soon
over the open country - like a map painted grey-green and yellow (for my first
trip was in winter and the dry season), with a few straight-ruled lines of
roads running across it.

That first trip, we came after an hour
to a hill, rising like some beast from the ocean of the Bushveld, the hard
earth shining through its crop of shrubby trees like the scalp of a Bushman.
Then, over the hill, was the landing strip, which looked like a six-inch ruler
placed on the ground. How on earth were we going to land on that?

The plane smashed down with a hard bang,
and then hammered across the earth as if it had lost its wheels. A reception
committee of brothers or nuns would be waiting, together with the usual crowd
of children.

The different missions - Anglican,
Catholic, etc, - rather merge together in my memory. At one Italian mission we
would be met by Sister Ilaria, in a large American car: a delightful lady who
would never make her living as a taxi driver in her own country, or anywhere
else where there was other traffic, or anything except fresh air. Even Africa
was not big enough for her. She had several square miles of it to move around
in, not another vehicle in sight (except the plane, which give her her due, she
never hit in my experience), but as soon as we were in ('we' being myself and
the pilot), she backed into a tree - bang! - then lurched forward, in and out
of a ditch, and finally, after using the dirt road as a rough guide to the
mission, deposited us there, probably having been instructed to apply the
brakes within twenty yards of a building; talking and waving her hands and her
white habit about all the time, in the happiest spirit in the world: a spirit
not always caught by her passengers.

At these places, first we would do a
ward round - the bare wards, the rough beds, the ragged people. We would do the
usual things, sometimes advise referral to the government hospital. Except for
emergencies, patients would have to make their own way. Afterwards, we would
see outpatients: men, women and children, the latter with their mothers. Not
many, as we saw only the more difficult cases selected for the doctor. At one
place I saw the rubbery faces of leprosy: at another, a woman with the scaly,
burnt-looking skin of pellagra - vitamin B deficiency, seen in districts where
maize was eaten, unsupplemented by other foods. To finish, there would be minor
operations; nothing requiring more than local anaesthetic or a whiff of ether.

An Italian sister informed me: 'We 'ave
some extractions.' I found a number of people, sitting hopefully, with badly
rotten teeth. The sister handed me a syringe, a bottle of local - and a screwdriver!

This same sister had a problem, which
appeared to exercise her Catholic conscience. If a woman died in labour, should
she do a postmortem caesarean section? (The original caesarean, of course, by
which Julius Caesar was reputedly delivered.) I advised her against it,
remembering the legalities of Europe, and also uncertain of the feelings of the
local people. Years later, I heard of a Catholic doctor in Rhodesia
successfully performing such an operation.

The people showed their feelings in no
uncertain fashion at this mission on one occasion. A party of white men were
fishing in a nearby river, when they were attacked by a hippo, and one of them
grievously wounded. He was brought into the hospital, but died before the plane
arrived. The body was removed. But what about the ghost?

The locals were well used to dealing
with their own - by means of ceremonies lasting up to a year - but a white
man's ghost! That was a problem beyond them. The whole black population of the
mission who could use their legs or had relatives to carry them, including the
nurses, took off more or less into the bush, leaving only the terrified
remainder and the white staff. The father superior (the white witch doctor) had
to exorcise the place before they could get them to return.

Flying home on one occasion, we saw a
large herd of elephant, surging across the plain. The pilot flew low to get a
closer look. There we were, alone in the vast solitude, with this noble sight.

'People come and go in Africa,' said
Graham Greene, 'as though the space and emptiness encourage drift.' This is no
more true of most parts of Africa than it is of Europe, but it certainly
applied to the Copperbelt - and, for that matter, Samreboi. In both places
there were long stayers (Mr Hunt was one), but less of them in Zambia. On the
other hand, in the latter country there were the English-speaking primary
schools I had suggested in Samreboi, and therefore more family life. Otherwise
it was true, people came and went.

The first new doctor to follow me was
Sean, a tall handsome Rhodesian, who might have been his namesake in
When
the lion feeds.
He was a first class doctor, and fate eventually recognised
the fact, for he did well: but fate, or what was known locally as the 'Party',
did not treat him kindly at first.

One day, as he entered the hospital, the
matron (who, as fate would have it, was also Rhodesian) asked Sean to have a
look at her dog, which had something wrong with its ear. Being a thorough-going
sort of chap, Sean asked her to bring it out of her car and into the plaster
room (not the operating theatre, as the
Times of Zambia
said, which got
its information, or its approval anyway, from one sole source, which the reader
may guess). The plaster room was used by the medical assistants for removing or
changing plasters, and was not, or intended to be, squeaky clean. Sean took a
look at the dog's ear, and saw immediately that it had ticks.

But the eyes of the Party where
everywhere, even in the plaster room, and next day, a deputation from the Party
bore down on the medical superintendent, or rather the luckless man who was
standing in for him while he was on leave. Bob Speirs was a canny Scot, and
anyway, had been too long in Zambia to ask daft questions like what was the
Party's constitutional connection with the matter, as he already knew the
answer was nil; and that was also as much as the answer counted for in the
great 'humanistic'
(
‘Humanism’ was the doctrine of Kenneth
Kaunda, a philospher some have compared to the microscopic Mao).
democracy of Zambia. When Louis Quatorze said,
'L'État
c'est moi',
his imitators would include even 'KK' (Little Ken Kaunda), the
humble schoolmaster of Zambia.

In case the reader does not understand,
the actual charge was treating a dog in an 'African' hospital (a thing which
did not officially exist, as all hospitals and everything else were supposed to
be non-racial; but law was not the Party's strongest point, which it generally
regarded as a damn nuisance, inherited from colonialism; except for the new
'humanist' laws, with which it dealt with difficult humans), and therefore
equating Africans in some way with dogs. It is interesting to speculate what
would have been the reaction if the dog had been treated in the (white?)
management hospital.

In short, the local gauleiter (or
district governor, as I think he was called) ordered Sean out of the country,
and the matron too for good measure. And the great Anglo-American Company was
shown to be a lesser thing than the great UAC of West Africa was always
believed to be, for it bowed the knee. In fact, they found Sean a job at
another of its hospitals in South Africa.

But Sean had the last laugh. In Kitwe he
met and fell in love with a very nice Finnish nurse, and one day these lovers
fled away
out
of the storm, and Zambia lost two able young servants it
could ill afford to lose.

Soon after they left Zambia, Sean and Rita
invited me for a holiday in Rhodesia. They took me to Victoria Falls and the
Eastern Highlands - the Trossachs in the tropics. In Umtali I met up with an
old friend from Liverpool, Jimmy Lennon.

He was a schoolmaster, then in his late
fifties, and lived alone at Brown's Hotel. I knocked on his door while he was
enjoying his afternoon nap. He called 'come in' and leapt out of bed at the
same time, stark naked, as he always slept in the tropics, searching for his
shorts. 'Good afternoon, father!' he said, not recognising me at first after
many years and unaware that I was in Africa. We soon made up for that.

Jimmy was a short bald man with a
clipped military moustache and all the charm of the Liverpool Irish. In twenty
years in Africa he had not lost his Scouse accent. (I had met him on his long
leaves.) He would have taken the Queen by the elbow and got away with it.
Someone once saw him in the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall following Sir Malcolm
Sargent off the platform, clapping all the way - Jimmy below the platform, of
course.

He came out (with some more clothes on)
to meet my friends. Sean's sister was with us, a girl of about eighteen, as
handsome as her brother. Jimmy took her by the elbow as we crossed the street
to his favourite cafe. 'And what is your name, my dear? Tamara! That is a very
lovely name, but then it is only like you, my dear!' sounding as if he meant
it, which he did.

Unfortunately, he was not on holiday,
and we were unable to see more of him then. The reader will see much more of
him later in these pages.

Next came Andy and Liz, a Northern Irish
couple. Andy was half-way to being a gynaecologist: Liz was a nurse but was not
working. Andy was a balding Irish gnome (bigger than a leprechaun): Liz was a
laughing little Irish pixie. They sang Irish folk songs together to
professional standard and appeared on Zambian television. They organised many a
'come-all-ye' at their house and attended many others, for there were many
Irish in the town. And it was wonderful to see how Catholic and Protestant sank
their differences so far from home (the Crookes were Protestant but were never
partisan) and even sang each other's songs. Newcomers were often astonished and
even disapproving of this, especially the song swapping, even English people.
'You should see what's going on at home!' Of course, they were getting it every
night on telly. Alf Garnett, it will be remembered wanted to solve the 'Irish
problem' by towing the country into the middle of the 'Hattalantic Hocean and
torpedoing the bladdy plice!' It would be wonderful to transplant the North at
least to the healing air of Central Africa for a time and see if it produced
the same results on a general scale - even if Alf Garnett said 'and leave it
there!'

Andy did everything with the skill of an
artist. He accompanied the couple's singing on the guitar. Once he painted a
mural of a Roman feast on one wall of his sitting room (wall paper is unknown
in Africa) for a party. Even his handwriting was the hand of an artist and not
the scrawl of a doctor. And he was a deft operator.