Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa (44 page)

     We secured another key, and got
into the room again. I switched on the light. The bulb exploded and sent the
lamp shade flying across the room like a frisby. After that, there was no way
Michael was going to sleep there. He could have been no more than seven. He
shared his sister’s bed and left the haunted room to me.

Besides these week-end breaks, we had
our main holidays: best of all, a week or two in the national parks. Here, for
about ten pound a night, one had a two-bedroomed lodge fit for a prince, with
everything supplied, including servant, except food and drink. We went often to
the mountains, where we made picnics, such as by the Inyangombe river pool,
which I told the children was a natural pool, and Mary ever after called the
‘national pool’. Here, Terry and the children splashed in the shallow water,
while the river curved dark and deep beyond. We rowed on the dam lakes, and I
tried to catch trout. At least, I could get the giant horse-whip into the air
to the extent of twenty yards out, if I never caught anything. Michael would
assist me, first waiting at the foot of the grass jetty, until I had cast the
line, then galloping up to wind it in, then back and forth again. This was game
enough, quite apart from the question of fish, and I tired before he did.
Needless to say, there was football and cricket, in which Mary joined, and such
activities as made me advise people to have their children before the age of
thirty.

     At Udu, at sunset, we heard the
baboons barking on the
kopje
, beyond the lake, among the rocks above the
flat-topped camel thorns -
wha-hoo! wha-hoo!
- and the children barked
back and made them bark again:

                                                                             -
concourse wild

Of jocund din.

Terry used to fear that children missed
out in Africa: I was not so sure.

     At McIlwaine, we had a lodge, high
among the rocks and trees, above the lake, where the dassies, the children
loved, would creep as close as their curiosity and their fear balanced out. No
such fear restrained the cheeky vervet monkeys, who would get into the house
and pinch things, if you weren’t careful. There, we went game-viewing in the
afternoon - not the best time - and saw buck, wildebeest and zebra in the long
grass; hippo in the marshes, and hippo droppings like footballs on the roads; a
giraffe or a herd of impala in the woods. Then back for a swim in the pool,
before I got the
braai 
(barbecue) going in the evening.

     And evenings were best always. I
smoked my pipe and drank a whisky, while the meat roasted, and the deep peace
of the African night grew around me. At Kariba, I saw a bat hawk, with its
strange scimitar wings, dipping and turning, snapping up as many as twenty bats
before sunset. At another place, I saw the pennant-winged nightjars, fluttering
their streamers from their wing tips, and in the night heard the cry of the
common nightjar:
Good-Lord-deliver-us!
And everywhere, the shrill scream
of the bush baby.

At home I would read to the children in
the evenings. (We had television, but it was poor - black and white, and the
programmes very limited.) They sat on either arm of my chair. First favourites
were the Noddy books - in the original ‘golliwog’ edition, which had passed
unnoticed in Zimbabwe, until the new PC edition arrived, which seemed to mean
‘parochial consumption’, as far as anyone in Zimbabwe could understand the
strange Anglo-Saxon objection to golliwogs, which was seen as the poor old
British lion losing his wits at last as well as his claws. The children spotted
right away that Sid Golly’s garage had been taken over by somebody called Bobby
Bear, I think. Useless to explain: I had to pass it off as a purely commercial
transaction.

     Other favourites were the Ladybird
books, especially
The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse,
which was read
many times, when Daddy had to finish, singing the carols to which Country Mouse
returns in the church. Then I found a Victorian edition of the story, in an old
book in the hospital library, which might have been written by Lord Macaulay
for his unfortunate children (or nephews/nieces, perhaps?): ‘The plain fare of
his Rustic Cousin soon palled on the cultivated palate of the Town Mouse -.’
The children didn’t recognise it as the same story.

When Jock retired in 1985, we moved to
the top house, which was more spacious and secluded, among the trees and three
acres of rather wild garden. This was much better for a family than the rather
pokey bottom house, which, for all its two storeys, had rather small rooms. We
felt altogether more relaxed, especially Terry, who had to spend more time in
the place than I did.

     But it was not altogether secluded;
or rather, its very seclusion seemed to attract the lunatics we treated at the
hospital, among everything else. Perhaps the troubled minds of these poor
creatures found some peace in this quiet spot. One day, as Terry was writing a
letter in the dining room, she became aware of a presence behind her. Looking
round, she saw a man dressed in hospital pyjamas, staring into space. She said,
‘Good afternoon’, walked calmly to the telephone in the bedroom, and called for
the male nurses, who came and led the man quietly away.

     Another time, after we had gone to
bed, we heard a noise in the garden. ‘Be careful, Warren,’ said Terry, as she
followed me to the back door. Outside, we saw a schoolgirl in her school
uniform, calmly removing our washing from the line. She was a schizophrenic,
poor thing; must have lately arrived, and not even changed into hospital
nightdress. She wagged a reproving finger at us and said: ‘You must not leave
your washing out after dark!’ A telephone call to the hospital saw the washing
restored and the girl sent to bed.

     We were having Sunday lunch, when a
girl of sixteen burst through the front door and ran screaming through the
dining room into the kitchen, where she hid under the sink. She was pursued by
two young men, who took no more notice of us than she did. We thought this must
be another mental case, but were rather disturbed when the young men tried to
drag her out from under the sink, where she was clinging to the drainpipe,
especially when they began beating her with the garden hose, combining insult
(to us) with injury (to her). Finally, they got her away by dragging her out by
the legs and the hair, leaving a considerable quantity of the latter on the
floor.

     Norah, who had come from her
kaya
to see what was happening, informed us that the girl was a perfectly normal
schoolgirl, who had got a bad report and managed to lose it on her way home.
The men were her brothers, who were paying her school fees and felt themselves
aggrieved in the matter. She had no connection with the hospital, and must have
run round half the town, like an antelope with the wild-dogs after her, before
she sought refuge in our house. I thought I should have stopped the business,
got rid of the two men, kept the girl in the house, and called the police.
Thinking she was a lunatic had made me slow on the uptake, and I felt ashamed
of myself. But such intervention would merely have postponed the thrashing I
have no doubt she received when they got her home.

Another Sunday morning, just before
lunch, I was taking a stroll with Michael, who was then about four. We took our
usual route - through the top gate, round the back roads, to the front gate,
and up the internal hospital road again. We were just opposite female ward, and
I was looking forward to my pipe and sherry, when a ward-maid came out and
called, ‘Doctor, they want you in the ward!’

     There was nothing to do with
Michael, so, per force, we went together. Usually I could leave him in the duty
room. There was nobody there to look after him, but I told him to wait there,
all the same. In one of the first bays I found a woman in status epilepticus.
All the staff on duty, including the ward maid, were gathered round the bed,
when I saw, in the ring of bodies, the small pale face of Michael, under his
little bush hat, just appearing over the edge of the bed, studying the scene
with intense interest.

     I gave instructions and left them
to get on with it, retracing my steps homewards.Then I discovered that Michael,
like Another before him, was not with me on the road; was, in fact, intent upon
his father’s business. A male nurse conducted him to the door, with the
gentleness only an African can show towards children, a consideration Michael
did not return, as he struggled to get back to the interesting scenes within.
Finally, they shut the door on him, and when I called him, he exhibited the
face of tearful rage of Noddy, as illustrated in his books, in that character’s
moments of frustration.

     An old man in hospital pyjamas,
sitting on a seat nearby, propitiated Michael with a piece of sugar cane. This
was the first time he had tasted it, and the new experience provided a
sufficient distraction. He followed me up the gravel path to the house, quietly
chewing.

     And when we got home, we ran into
another problem, when Mary wanted to try the new goodie. After a good deal of
protest from both parties, I cut it in half, and peace was restored.

About three years after independence, the
name changes began. It consisted mostly of the Shonas claiming back the names
which had been seized, not only by the pioneers, but by the Matabeles, who
dominated the country before them. So Gwelo (Matabele) became Gweru;
Marandellas, Marondera, etc. Shabani became Zvishavane. Names in Matabeleland
stayed the same, except for some they took back from the whites, such as
Esigodini for Essexvale. And the British Salisbury became Harare, which means
‘none shall sleep’, formerly for the roaring of the lions.

     I never got used to the new name of
our town, which sounded more like some place in Russia than Africa. After
warning people in England that the Russians had not (entirely) taken over, I
wrote, in the manner of Constance Garnett: ‘On the family estate, near
Zvishavane, Ivan Ivanovitch cast aside his fifth empty vodka bottle that day
and exclaimed: “I am bored!” A loud bang from the next room announced that his
sister, Sophia Ivanovna, had just shot herself. As Peter Simple would say: now
write on...’

In 1984, we got two new doctors. Jock
was still with us, so for one marvellous year, until he retired, we had four
doctors on the station, and proportionately lighter work and more time off. The
new doctors were Charles, a Zimbabwean, and Stephan, from Germany. Stephan did
a three months’ ‘acclimatisation course’ at Harare teaching hospital, where,
among other things, they taught him to do caesarean sections, without which a
doctor in the districts would be a burden to his colleagues. Charles had had
the usual intern training of the country, so was fully equipped for district
work.

     Both were keen and made first-class
district doctors. Charles (as I, eventually) was later forced out of the
service by economic necessity (a subject I will return to later); Stephan by
the termination of his two-year contract. Stephan is now in occupational medicine
in Germany, but must regard his African days as the high spot of his medical
life.

The only other German family in town was
the Feldwebels. Brünnhilde was now a sister at the mine hospital: not for her
the new order in the government service. I have said she was a German of the
old school. She had married a German husband from South West Africa, raised
three fine children, and had not been back to Germany for thirty years. She and
I had many a merry evening singing the jolly old
Wandervogel
songs,
which she had learnt in the Hitler Youth, and I, believe it or not, at the same
time, at my Liverpool elementary school: nobody could accuse Mr Baldwin of not
trying! Brünnhilde did not blame the British for attacking their German
cousins: she probably saw the beauty of a good scrap as clearly as Clausewitz,
but did not agree it justified any cause. To the point, she could not see why
we did it on behalf of the Poles, whom she described, in her charming way, as
the ‘Kaffirs of Europe’.

     So Brünnhilde, in the course of
duty, and the spirit of friendship, paid a visit to the Moenichs. Stephan had
his wife with him and a little daughter. Stephan was a tall man: his wife was a
tall woman, and both she and Brünnhilde, for all their Nordic blood, were as
dusky as Hindus.

     Brünnhilde got a surprise. Another
generation had grown up in Germany while her back was turned, and the Moenichs
belonged to it. She reported to us, not exactly in horror so much as
astonishment, that she had found the Moenichs taking morning coffee with the
African ‘garden boy’, as, of course, she continued to call him. ‘They are the
most extraordinary people!’ she declared. ‘Nobody in Germany is like that!’

     Brigitte Moenich had a different
version of the event. ‘This weird woman marched in, with the strangest ideas
about Africans and everything else. I couldn’t believe my ears. Nobody in
Germany is like that nowadays!’

     As the witnesses with the more
up-to-date experience, we were inclined to give the verdict to the Moenichs.

The new families became good friends.
Charles was a small man, a Tswana, as was his dainty wife, Nomsa. And all the
children became friends and attended not only the Christmas party at the mine
club, but the Sunshine Nursery School.

     At the mine there was also a
swimming pool, which afforded a study in racial habits. As at Samreboi, the
African children swam in shoals, completely without parental supervision: no
African adults appeared at all, in or out of the water. The Europeans came in
family groups, as did the Coloureds. So did the Indians, but whereas the men
and children swam in smart bathing suits, their women plunged into the water in
their saris, and were taken home dripping wet in big cars. The Moenichs found
the changing rooms dirty (I thought they were usual British standard), and got
changed in the open air, to the astonishment of all other groups.

When I came to Shabani, I was approached
by the medical school to take students. After independence, as well as local
students on attachment, we had students from overseas, doing their electives.
All were supposed to follow the doctor everywhere in his work, and observe,
without engaging in any work themselves, or being made use of.

     I remember all of them. Most of
them were excellent, some otherwise. A pair of the otherwises was a strange
American couple: two men who had served with the Selous Scouts, and were now
reading medicine at the University of Zimbabwe - which says something for
Mugabe’s policy of ‘reconciliation’.

     They were like something from a
fable: the fox and the wolf. They were older than the usual run of students.
Moreover, they took notes, especially on our travels to the rural clinics,
something other students did not do, nor were specially required to.

     I soon became disabused with this
apparent enthusiasm, when they informed me shamelessly that they were preparing
to tour the districts themselves, during their vacations, selling patent
medicines. After a week (they were down for two), they informed me they had
seen enough of district practice (or, as they put it, ‘one district hospital is
like another’: whatever they meant by that), and took themselves off, one of
them owing me ten dollars I never saw again.

     These were the only ones I had to
make a bad report on, though I had to threaten another. This was a black lad
who stayed at my house (as all did before I was married and had children, when
they stayed at the guest house - the house I had stayed in when I first
arrived). I knocked up young Barnabas one night to come and watch a caesar,
when he informed me that he was only interested in the workings of a district
hospital by day - he was going in for public health, anyway. The threat of a
bad report got him out of his pit.

     Otherwise, as I say, they were all
good. Henry and Mike. Henry became a keen district surgeon: Mike gave his name
to one of the wards. One night, we admitted a kid with kwashiorkor. After going
through my usual routine, I asked for suggestions. Mike said, what about some
heat. It was a winter’s night. We moved the kid into a side ward and installed
an electric heater, which thereafter became used specially for such cases, and
was christened, the Mike Madzima Ward. Butch (white), who was an expert on
English football and Middle East politics, as well as his own profession -
interesting possibilities! Clips, who went in the air force: David, who became
a pathologist. Two black girls from Bulawayo, one with an accent (Bulawayo
Convent) like the Queen of England. From overseas, a German girl; Sam and
Caspar (white and black together); Debbie and Pat, all from England. Hope I
haven’t forgotten any.

     Pat had a special experience. She
was sitting beside me in outpatients, when a thin anaemic-looking woman came
in. She had a baby on her back, another at her side, and another one
in
side.
When I had got through the medical business, knowing that Pat was rather into
women’s lib, I decided to lead the patient verbally through her typical day.
The entire interview went through an interpreter for Pat’s sake, as well as
mine (although I could have managed the medical part myself).

     I looked at her card. (The patients
kept their own records, usually in plastic folders, as that way less got lost
than when they used to be kept at the hospital.) I saw that she came from the
next district, Chivi, which was even poorer than Zvishavane; so poor, in fact,
that you could not see a blade of grass at times for fifty miles, and where
there was only one doctor, at a mission hospital, further for this woman than
ours.

     ‘What time do you get up in the
morning?’

     ‘At the washing of the elephants.’
(Daybreak.)

     ‘What do you do then?’

     ‘Sweep the house.’

     ‘And then?’

     ‘Light the fire.’

     ‘And then?’

     ‘Cook breakfast.’

     ‘And then?’

     ‘Go to the fields.’

     ‘What do you do in the fields?’

     ‘Hoeing, picking the mealies.’

     ‘What do you have for lunch?’

     ‘Nothing.’

     ‘When do you finish in the fields?’

     She extended her arm to indicate an
angle of the sun.

     ‘Then what?’

     ‘Fetch water.’

     ‘And then?’

     ‘Gather firewood.’

     ‘And then?’

     ‘Pound the mealies.’ She worked an
invisible pestle.

     ‘And then?’

     ‘Light the fire.’

     ‘And then?’

     ‘Cook the
sadza.
’
(Porridge.)

     ‘And then?’

     ‘Wash the pots.’

     ‘And then?’    

     ‘Go to bed.’

     ‘And what does your husband do all
day?’

     ‘Drinks beer and talks with his
friends.’

     Half-way through this catechism,
Pat had been bobbing on the edge of her chair. At the last dreadful revelation,
she exploded:

     ‘It’s about time these Zimbabwean
women got their act together!’

Finally, I got a new type of student.
The new policy was to take primary health care to the grass roots - to the
villages themselves and the commercial farms. The ministry began to train three
new cadres: village health workers, traditional birth attendants, and farm
health workers. These people continued with their usual lives, being simply
country folk with a little more education than their neighbours, who
volunteered and were chosen by village councils. The traditional birth
attendants (TBAs) were village wise women or female
n’angas
who had been
delivering babies anyway. They all received short courses at the provincial
hospital: the health workers in health education, which was the main purpose
intended for them in the villages - they would educate the people about health,
including nutrition, and teach them to make pit latrines and protected wells: the
same on the commercial farms, where necessary. They carried some drugs,
including chloroquine for treating malaria. They informed the people about the
health programmes (maternity/child health clinics), and encouraged them to use
them. The TBAs were given training in deliveries, and provided with fresh razor
blades and tapes for dealing with the baby’s cord (to eliminate the dirty
practices which caused so much baby tetanus), and to recognise and refer
complicated cases. They would keep in touch by attending the antenatal clinics
at the rural health centres. All received a small monthly stipend, which fell
short of a living wage and was not intended to be. As I said, they were simply
villagers with training, intended to be educators.

     All these people I encouraged to
attend at my clinic visits - not that they would ever deal with more serious
cases themselves, as the nurses did, but to inspire them in their work and
extend their medical knowledge; and they were enthusiastic attenders. But when
a lady had to undress, especially if she was known to them, they would all
scuttle out of the room with anxious African modesty.

One day, on the golf course, Percy said:
‘What about doing some prostates together?’ I demurred. Prostatectomy is not an
easy business, and is never an emergency. But I decided to have a look at it.

     We did the old Freyer’s operation.
Percy tried to teach me the superior and more difficult Millin’s, but I could
never match his skill: my Millin’s was no better than my Freyer’s, so I stuck
to the simpler operation.

     But once you start something in
Africa, you don’t lack customers. Old gentlemen who had suffered in silence for
years came forward in regular numbers. The reasons are complex. First, the
doctor must get a reputation, then the thing must be near home. The people did
not like being transferred (as had happened with such cases previously) to
another part of the country, where they would fall into the hands of doctors
and nurses of other tribes, who might do God knows what to them. Moreoever, if
you died in such remote places, your family had to pay a lot of money to get
your body back for decent burial in the land of your fathers.