Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa (42 page)

     In short, we were supposed to dig a
ditch to carry a water-pipe to a school, and again needless to say, I was the
only white man in the line. It was Saturday morning. We were working beside the
Selukwe road, and from time to time, Europeans, on their way to fishing, would
pass in their vehicles, and they must have wondered what the government doctor
was doing, swinging a pick in a gang of blacks, with another black man standing
over him - a position that used to be filled by ‘Dutchmen’ - and what the
doctor had done to get there. As they preserved a discreet silence on the
subject, I do not know, although I told the story with great glee in the club
afterwards.

     Work started as usual at 8am, and
by nine o’ clock, the workers were feeling hungry. None of them except myself
had had breakfast, rather expecting the government to provide. The voluntary
principle is not a part of African culture: helping your neighbour build his house,
yes; but as an abstract concept, no. Mr Sango looked unhappy. As the only one
with any access to food, I volunteered to go back to the hospital for bread,
which I duly did, although Rhoda, the cook, parted with it very unhappily, not
surprisingly - she had to account for it. And to round off the morning’s
activities (which ended at twelve midday, sharp), Mr Sango, the good fellow,
gave them all
doro
(or maize beer) at a local tavern.

     All in all, the experiment was
voted not a good thing. I don’t know what was said in the councils of the local
soviet, but it was never repeated.

Alas, an idealistic effort of my own
also fell flat. There used to be a saying (no doubt, still is), WAWA - West
Africa wins again - which could be extended to the whole continent, as I have
more than once shown in these pages.

     The rural hospital at Lundi, seven
miles outside town, seemed to be outliving its purpose. It started life as the
original African hospital, but when the new black wards were built at the main
hospital, some time in the fifties, it fell into a sort of sleepy desuetude.
Twenty miles out in the country, it would have been another thing. In short,
more than half the beds were empty.

     It was an irrational tradition,
which I unthinkingly continued, for the doctor to visit the place once a week;
when apart from my usual activities, I would deposit a certain quantity of
reading matter, including the
Spectator
and the
Sunday Telegraph,
which
were sent out to me. If this sounds like caviare to the general, I should explain
that any African peasant who can read will read anything like a hungry man: I
have even seen them studying the chairman’s annual report of Barclay’s Unit
Trusts, I’d thought I’d thrown away. At Umvuma, when I got rid of some old
books (mostly dictionaries), the nurses formed a rugby maul round them: at
Shabani, I donated them to the African library. And any music too was welcome.
When I replaced my LPs (which I usually did on UK leave, few being obtainable
in Rhodesia or Zimbabwe), I would give them to Anderson to play on his old
record player. I used to wish Smithy would pass his
kaya
with a United
Nations delegation, while Anderson was listening to a Mozart piano concerto,
and be able to talk about the most cultured as well as the happiest Africans -
and make me minister of health, maybe; or, more acceptably, double my pension
from high-power to low-power microscopic size. (Though that is not fair to
Smithy: it was Mugabe who shrunk the dollars.) But all this is not the idealism
I am referring to.

     In the town of Shabani, as in all
African towns, were a number of homeless beggars, who hung around the bus
terminus, living on, and in, God knows what - certainly under the sun and the
rain and the cold of winter. From time to time, one of these ragged, half-starved
creatures would be admitted to the hospital, suffering from Tb, pellagra, and
what-not, and sometimes all together. After they were bathed, clothed, and
cured, arose the problem of what to do with them. If, or when, they drifted
back to the bus terminus, sure enough they would reappear in the hospital in
six months’ time, if only in the mortuary. I decided to give these people a
permanent sanctuary at Lundi hospital, and even bragged about my plan at the
provincial meeting, and invited other districts to send their huddled masses
there too.

     Alas, in case after case, I was to
discover, like Dr Patel at Samreboi, it had all been a disastrous failure.
After a week or two, the beneficiaries disappeared. Three square meals a day, a
clean warm bed, decent clothing, to say nothing of the
Spectator
and the
Sunday Telegraph,
were not enough to compensate these town mice for the
bright lights of the bus terminus. The country life was JUST TOO QUIET.

Then word came that the provincial
governor was coming to town, and would meet the local worthies and loyal
citizens. The venue was to be the assembly hall of the largest mine township.
For fairly obvious reasons, I did not anticipate a plumed hat and tea on the
lawn: less obvious to the reader will be the fact that the governor, as well as
representing the head of state, was a cardinal party gauleiter. And, for good
reasons, I was the only white to turn up - I was by now the only one left in
the town in government service, or, at any rate, head of department. Jock,
needless to say, felt no obligation in the matter. (In any case, his department
was still officially Belingwe.) Nor was any obligation felt by any of the
private sector. Nor should they. You can’t mix loyalty with politics and expect
it to stay in place.

     What occurred was more like the
Munich
Bierkeller
than anything on a lawn. The hall was lined by the
party
Jugend,
and the loyal citizens stood in patient rows, with myself
as prominent in the front one as the proverbial sore thumb. We faced the stage,
on which was a table, the usual supply of water, and a row of chairs, none of
which was intended for the likes of me.

     After the usual hour’s wait, beyond
the laughingly appointed time, the governor entered, followed by his entourage,
including our friends, the administrator and the mayor (who had not yet
received their marching orders): all the by now familiar local slave-figures,
who seemed to have been painted black in Moscow; the totalitarian look or smell
being as typical as the more wholesome Church of England one referred to some
time before. The governor shook his fist in the black power salute, and
shouted:
‘Pamberi ne Zanu!’
(Forward Zanu - the Party), and the loyal
(or prudent) citizens shook theirs and replied :
‘Pamberi!’
- all except
the doctor, that is, who began to look like a sorer thumb.

     The governor spoke, ‘rousing the
meeting to enthusiasm’ (or a good imitation of it), with lots more
‘Pamberis’
and as many
‘Pasi ne dissidents!’
(Down with dissidents, which referred
to Mr Nkomo and his friends, their leader not then having kissed and made up
with the leader of Zanu), to which the loyal citizens echoed:
‘Pasi ne!’
I
continued to stick out as before.

     Before long, the governor (who
would have needed to be pretty short-sighted not to) had noticed me. He came
down from the stage, especially for my benefit (which did not flatter me a
bit), and started dancing up and down in front of me, and shouting
‘Pamberi!’
at me, which moved me no more than the echoing
‘Pamberis’
around me.
I stood with my hands crossed over my flies and stared through his boiling
eyes, thinking, not so much of England, as of my late father, a man of
independent spirit, and what he would have thought and done.

     The ancestral spirit came to my aid
- with a bit of my native cheek thrown in. I calmly looked at my watch and
informed the man next to me - a reasonable chap, with whom I had had some
conversation before, and whose
‘Pamberis’
were not so enthusiastic as to
prevent him from hearing me - that I had that old excuse, a critical case at
the hospital. I then walked away, without saying ‘bye-bye’ to the governor. The
party youths at the door looked very black, in more ways than one, but let me
through, tamely enough.

     Afterwards, my boldness surprised
me and made me a little anxious. I was now a married man, with a family to
raise in this land. At the next medical workshop, I inquired of a black friend
in the PMO’s office: ‘What sort of person is the provincial governor?’

     ‘He’s a nigger. Why do you ask?’    

     I explained about the bad
impression I must (as I meant to) have given at the meeting.

     ‘Don’t worry. You are a doctor. He
used to be a garden boy. If you shouted at him, he would call you “sir”.’

     Ah well, the poor man is dead now,
anyway.

Our first child, Michael, was born in
Bulawayo. His mother was what is known as an elderly primigravida - having her
first baby over the age of thirty - and there was no specialist gynaecologist
in Shabani.

     To begin with, he was rather lean:
his mother’s family carried the greyhound genes. But soon, on his mother’s
milk, though never even plump, he grew to a cuddly little creature, we called
‘Baby Bear’, always with a merry smile, and into everything, like any other
healthy baby in the world.

     Then Michael started keeping us
awake - not through crying, but when he was able to climb out of his cot. Then
he would come scrambling on to our bed, where we were sitting up, I reading
Trollope to Terry: a habit we kept up for best part of a year, until it fell
away, as such things do. ‘Baby Bear’ with his merry grin would want to join in.
‘He
is
just like a baby bear,’ said Terry. But soon we were calling him
‘Night-life’, which sounded like an African name. ‘Sentencing Night-life
Manyonda to six months’ imprisoment, the magistrate said, “This kind of thing
has got to stop”,’ as the newspapers used to say. But stopping it was another
story.

     Michael was born in March. In
September, we took a holiday at Kariba. We were in an open boat, game-viewing.
We drew up on a bank, where there was a pride of lion at their kill, a buffalo,
no more than fifty yards away. Michael decided to start crying, a thing he
rarely did, having no idea of the lions, of course. The guide asked Terry
politely if she could keep that baby quiet: he could see the chief lion was
thrashing his tail, and looking restless. He had already explained that the
animal could be on us in two seconds. Terry felt wretched, and tried, not very
successfully, to keep Michael quiet with her finger in his mouth. All were very
relieved when we pushed off.

     Every Saturday night, we had supper
out, mostly at the hotel, even before Michael could walk, and he would crawl to
neighbouring tables, being a friendly, outgoing little chap; so his mother, who
was very much mindful of other people’s comfort, hardly got her meal for
getting up to fetch him back. Then he discovered the piano, which he was able
to play and hold on to by a simultaneous process, with the delighted waiters,
in their fezzes, holding their napkins, standing watching him, and applauding
when he finished and crawled back to us.

     Sometimes we varied it with supper
at the mine club. One night there, Michael crawled about outside and found an
old Coke bottle, which he picked up and gave a good licking. On Monday morning,
his first birthday, he developed vomiting and diarrhoea. Oral rehydration
therapy was new then, and I had had much success with it. That is what we gave
Michael: simple sugar and salt mixture.

     By the Wednesday, he was very ill
indeed. He had grown peaky and listless, all his ebullience gone. A
heart-broken Terry told me he was bringing back all the solution she gave him.
I found her sitting silent downstairs. Michael was asleep in his bedroom. I
said: ‘You don’t mind him
shupering
(
causing trouble
) when he is like this.’ I could not keep the sob out
of my voice. I knew then what it was to be a parent.

     By Friday, it was the same. We
became alarmed. I told Terry to take him to the private doctor at the mine.

     And when he got into the doctor’s
office, Michael sprang to life, and started playing with the doctor’s books. He
had been absorbing as much of the solution as he brought back, and, with his
mother’s devoted nursing, it saved his life.

Michael was fifteen months old, when
Mary was born, at Shabanie Mine Hospital. (Yes, the name was different from the
town.) Michael’s nose was not exactly out of joint, but he didn’t show much
enthusiasm for this event. He was silent as I drove him home, until he saw a
cow, and said ‘cow’. He liked cows.

     He stayed with some Dutch friends,
while Terry was lying in. I went round to be with him in the evenings.

     Mary started life looking like me:
after two years, she began to look like her mother. In her earlier stage,
although she looked so like me that Terry said you could put her down anywhere
in the district and she would be returned to the hospital, she had brown hair
and was very pretty, as she continued to be at all stages. Michael by now was a
little blond angel.

     I discovered a curious thing at the
time. I could eat off their plates: I mean those of my wife and children, but
off no one else’s. This is the curious miracle of ‘one flesh’. It persists to
this day, and will remain, as far as my wife and I are concerned; but one day
our children will outgrow it. For this cause shall a man leave his father and
mother, etc. But this runs on too far ahead.

     Michael liked to eat his evening
meal, sitting on the concrete outside the veranda: a bowl of mealie porridge.
Sometimes, before my own meal, I would join him, sitting on the step. One day,
he put down his bowl and came running towards me, his loving little arms
outstretched, and they and his face covered with porridge. Involuntarily, I
shrank back. He tripped over my foot, went flying, banged his head and cried
bitterly, his dirty little face crinkled up. I never felt so mean in my life. I
picked him up and hugged him, porridge and all.

     At bedtime, Michael liked to race
round the front garden in his bare feet and little dressing-gown, just after
dark. One night, as he was doing this, a police Land Rover pulled up in the
road outside. A policeman got out and held up a six-foot cobra, they had just
run over. ‘This snake just came out of your garden, doctor.’ That was the end
of Michael’s evening romps.

     As Michael became more active, we
had a four-foot wire fence put up, round the front garden, with a gate. One
lunchtime, I happened to open the front door. A skinny little black brat in his
rags was on the lawn, about to snatch Michael’s football. The poor kid had
never possessed such a thing in his life: a bundle of rags would be the best
football he ever got. No doubt he came in by the gate: he was about ten years
old. He didn’t leave that way. Without touching the football, he took off and
leapt the four-foot fence like an impala.

     Once, we let the nurses’ children
in to play football with Michael. Alas, they were too old for him, and Michael
never got near the ball. He ran after them in tears and was lucky not to get
trampled. We found younger friends for him after that.

Anderson was now getting old and
unsuitable for children. I pensioned him off, and we engaged a nanny, Norah, a
rather sad girl. She had reason to be, as she could not have children, despite
the best efforts of the provincial gynaecologist, when he visited the hospital.
By now, all the specialists were making district visits every month, and
greatly we appreciated them.

     But Norah had some little nieces
and nephews, who used to stay with her in the
kaya
,
and these
would play with our children, especially on the pedal-car we bought for
Michael’s birthday, and the trolley, Terry’s father made for the children.

     And there were many white and
Indian and other black children for them to play with. These came to their
birthday parties, for which Terry organised a regular treat. She hired a
donkey-cart and its owner, and the high spot of the party was a drive up and
down the hospital road for the children, accompanied by their mothers on foot.
This started with Michael’s second birthday, and the poor fellow was sick after
the drive. His third birthday was his first of unalloyed enjoyment.

     And not for nearly two years did he
see rain in his life. Two, or even three years followed each other without
rain. People starved in spite of the hand-outs of grain and the work programme
they were given to pretend to earn them. One poor fellow collapsed and died on
the work programme: ‘probably through starvation,’ as the PMO said. The usually
dry country was now arid, and the fierce sun, unsoftened by the seasonal rains,
beat down with hammer blows, as I wrote to people in England, after Hopkins,
under which earth ‘winced and sang’. One had to go to work, but Sundays found
us pent up in the house by the terrific fire outside, as we might have been by
the snows of Canada. Not till four o’ clock in the afternoon did we take a turn
up the hospital road and out the top gate, Terry pushing the shaded push-chair
with Mary in it, Michael tripping along beside us under his little bush hat -
round the back roads of the seedy little town, with their untidy gardens and
security fences, with barking dogs exploding behind every one - round to the
Selukwe road to the bottom gate and home again. And I wondered how long an
English girl would last in a place like this - like the Scottish girls at
Umvuma - and was glad, not for the first time, I had married a native, who
didn’t know any better.

Every other Sunday, when I was not on
duty, we would go to the Anglican church, where I played the harmonium. Little
white kids would run up and down the aisles, try to join me at my work, even
climb on the altar; while black children, in bow-ties and best frocks, sat in
good little rows, looking on at this behaviour with round eyes of astonishment.
At the end of the service, I would allow Michael to have a go on the harmonium,
when he would render his own composition, of the atonal school, which I called
Foggy
Night on the River.

    
Both children were now at the piano, especially Mary,
who would sit for hours extemporising what sounded like Bartók. She had a
prejudice against the black keys, so I suppose she was reproducing the
pentatonic scale, the master was so devoted to.

     Michael could certainly recognise a
tune from at least eighteen months. He heard Rubinstein on a record playing the
Polonaise Militaire,
and said, ‘Daddy!’, which was very flattering.
Once, when I was playing a record of the Dysart Pipe Band, he turned up the
sound, before I could stop him, and fairly blasted himself off his feet. He sat
down and cried, and I hoped it hadn’t put him off Scotland for ever, if only
for the sake of the Caledonian branch of the family.

Having children, of course, we had pets.
We started with cats. First a kitten called Tabby, a girl; then a few months
later, Tiger: same mother, next litter. Tabby did not seem to recognise her
brother; spat at him, cuffed him, and generally tried to persuade him he was
not welcome; until Tiger grew big enough to hit back: one day when Tabby forced
him into a corner and he stood up on his hind legs and lashed out like Mohammed
Ali. After that Tabby left him alone.

     These cats did not last long;
seemed half wild, and ran off, or else got killed by the dogs the medical
assistants kept at their quarters.

     These dogs also got the rabbits
that succeeded the cats: a present from the vicar. They came with a special
underground bunker, a sort of iron affair with a single entrance. One night
there was a dreadful canine uproar, and next day we discovered that the rabbits
had been dug up and presumably eaten.

     All these disappearances we
explained to the children as voluntary departures to cat land or rabbit land.

And as I said, I had a whole new large
family to call my own. In pride of place was the patriarch, Terry’s father, who
invited me to call him ‘Bill’, as a concession to my age, as I was the oldest
of his sons-in-law, who called him ‘Dad’. He was a tall rangy man, then about
sixty-five, who looked like what Australians used to look like, before they got
so comfortable. In fact, he looked and spoke so like Ian Smith (except for his
dark hair) that when Smithy appeared on telly one night (this being, of course,
after independence), complaining about something, Michael said, ‘Granddad!’

     Bill had had the proverbial
American career: cowpuncher, inn-keeper, veterinary hand, small farmer - never
making any money for all his toil - and now was security officer on a pig farm,
near Salisbury, where he lived in an old Rhodesian-type farmhouse: two
rondavels
 connected by a middle section - the sort of place Terry was brought up in
and ran about in her bare feet (as I discovered when she kicked me in bed, with
a kick, as I told her, like a horse). Bill had a natural refinement: a dirty
joke was abhorrent to him. He was a great reader and letter-writer in a fine
copperplate hand, a great consulter of dictionaries. He had an encyclopaedic
knowledge of the country: its history, its ‘trades, their tackle and trim’,
everything that stirred or grew in the bush. He spoke Shona fluently, and when
he came fishing with us, he would sit down with some passing African and chat
with him for hours, having the man’s life story out of him in the course of an
afternoon, with a sociability and command of the language for which I could
only envy him both. His attitude to the Africans was respectful but distant.
Like D H Lawrence (whose stories he enjoyed when he found them on my shelves),
he would have no ‘mixing and mingling’, and miscegenation was not in his book.
He stretched himself when one daughter married a ‘Dutchman’, and one
granddaughter later an ‘Italian’, but that was his limit.

     Bill was born in the country, as
was his wife, Betty. She was of Irish stock, and Bill blamed anything that went
wrong in the family on those genes. (Incidently, his own parents came from the
west of England, and he claimed descent from the Saxon kings of Essex.) Betty
was an Irish pixie, ‘all sense and spectacles’, as I first saw her, sitting up
in bed, reading Hansard (Zimbabwe), of all bedtime reading. She had worked as
hard as her husband, not only at keeping the family going, but at such things
as book-keeping, being an expert on income tax. Sadly, she died before Mary was
born, though she lived to hold Michael in her arms.