Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa (46 page)

     In 1985, when he was seventy, Jock
retired from government service and went (if not to sweep the streets) to live
with Joyce in Bulawayo. He continued to do locums, including three months at St
Paul’s mission in Matabeleland, which was now haunted by disaffected bandits,
who no more frightened Jock than they had in their previous metamorphosis as
‘freedom fighters’. Then came news that he had died suddenly in his own home.
He was seventy-three.

     For years after he left, children
on the borders of his old district would hurl the cry, ‘Scott!’ after me in my
Land Rover. People change slowly in Africa. I expect the cry of ‘Durrant!’ was
long being hurled after my successors.

Terry carried a small pistol in her
handbag, during the war years. In 1980, she handed this weapon over to the
police, not bothering to sell it, being more averse to such toys than even I
was; and got an official receipt for it. (I gave my cowboy set away to a man
who, with his wife, had shown me more hospitality in my selfish bachelor years
than I had ever returned. What did I give his wife? Good question!)

     Then, in 1985, Terry got a chilling
notice through the post: ‘Our records show that you have a pistol, licence
number 123, expired 1981.’ Obviously, the official record of the receipt had
been lost. But that was not their fault! The mandatory penalty for possessing
an unlicensed weapon was five years in jail. And this was a country where, even
if a good lawyer got you off, you could be re-arrested on the stroke of a
minister’s pen as you left the law court.

     Terry never threw anything away. (I
don’t think even I would have thrown that away.) We got our files out on the
bed and had an anxious fifteen minutes before we found the receipt. In that
time, we felt what English people have not felt for centuries, the deadliest
fear I know - the fear of the State.

Yet another of our duties was covering
the prison. We would be called there to examine the new intakes. I had a system
of getting through them very quickly, without missing anything important. We
also dealt with sick prisoners, either in outpatients or admitting them to the
hospital. They were always accompanied by a guard, handcuffed to him in
outpatients, handcuffed to the bed in hospital, while the guard sat beside it.
There were also one or two women prisoners in a separate part of the prison.

     Under the new order it was
considered incorrect to allow the prisoners out to work on the roads, etc. This
piece of socialist philosophy was not appreciated by the prisoners, and the
prohibition was soon abandoned.

     Capital and corporal punishment
existed: the latter was abolished after independence, but while it was the
government’s intention to abandon the former, it was retained owing to the
disturbed conditions which developed through the differences between the two
main parties, which, as ever in Africa, were essentially tribal.

     Another curiosity of the country
was the abolition, some twenty years before independence, of trial by jury. I
am ignorant of the reasons for this, but I can imagine that if you assembled
twelve good Africans and true, they would be arguing from now until Christmas
over a simple parking offence, especially when they were getting paid for it,
and there was no planting or harvesting to be done. For a time, both systems
ran concurrently, and you had a choice. It used to be said, if you were guilty,
opt for trial by jury: if you were not guilty, for God’s sake, opt for the
alternative - trial by judge, sitting with two assessors.

     After I had examined the new
intake, the superintendent would give me a cup of tea. One of them told me a
tale of Africa.

     During the Congo troubles of 1964,
many Rhodesian and South African youngsters took off to grab a piece of the
action and the money. One such was the super, who left home at the age of
sixteen, telling his mother that he was ‘going south’ to look for work.
Instead, he went north, where he lied also to Mike Hoare about his age.

     At length, he found himself in the
dreaded Manyema of the Eastern Congo. ‘One day, we ran into an ambush. When we
got out of it, one of our chaps had a gunshot wound of his leg. His leg was
completely shattered. We knew he was going to die of gangrene, unless we did
something. There was no way he was going to see a doctor: they had all cleared
off, if they hadn’t been murdered by the
Simbas.
We didn’t even have a
medic with us.

     ‘Anyway, we stopped in a clearing
in the forest, and put him on the ground. One guy made a kind of knife out of a
bully beef tin. We got a tourniquet on his leg, and we all held the guy down,
while the other guy tried to saw his leg off with the knife. Fortunately, the
poor bugger was semi-conscious by then. Anyway, we couldn’t manage it, so we
just
bopered
his leg with our field dressings and put him back on the
lorry. He died soon after that.

     ‘But what I most remembered about
it was, while we were trying to cut the guy’s leg off, a jet airliner went
overhead. It must have taken about ten minutes to cross the sky. I remember
thinking to myself: there’s those people up there, reading their
Newsweeks
and
eating their plastic lunches - they’re in the twentieth century, while us, down
here, are in the bloody Dark Ages!’

And the mortuary was always with us. The
work here had certain spin-offs. I was able to study surgical anatomy, as I
dissected - that is, anatomy in regard to operations. This I had always done:
my first ectopic and my first ruptured spleen I had seen at post mortem in West
Africa, and the anatomical knowledge I had gained enabled me to save lives
later.

     And one day, I detected a murder.

     It was common enough to perform a
post mortem on an alleged murder victim, determine cause of death, etc, but
this was an unsuspected murder.

     The police brought in the body of a
man, found hanging from a tree in the communal lands (as the tribal trust lands
were now called). The request form for post mortem said: ‘Foul play not
suspected.’

     ‘Yes, doc,’ said the policeman. ‘We
think he hanged himself.’

     A wise doctor never accepts an
assumption of that sort without question, and I had grown that wise long ago. I
did a meticulous examination. There was a rope mark on the neck, proving that
the subject was hanged alive: there was no question of a previous murder being
made to look like suicide. Then, after the mortuary assistant had opened the
body, I began my work. I found the expected congestion of the lungs and heart.
I suppose I found Tardieu’s spots (tiny haemorrhages) on the lungs, with the
eye of faith: in an African, one obviously does not find them on the face.

     Then, when we drew the scalp
forward, there, over the left forehead, on the skull and under the scalp, was a
small bruise. There was no fracture of the skull or evidence of damage to the
brain.

     On the way out of the mortuary, I
met Jock, who was still with us, and asked him, pointedly, ‘How do you get a
knock on the head, when you hang yourself?’ He made some joking remark about
hitting it on a bough. His joke was more serious than he knew. I later saw a
case where an old woman hanged herself in her hut and banged her head in the
process, producing a similar bleed. Good job a clever lawyer could not then
have got that story out of me!

     It did not come to that. I voiced
my doubts to the magistrate. He informed the police and they re-opened the investigation.
The murderers were so surprised, they confessed. They must have thought the
chiremba
(myself) had been throwing the bones. They had knocked their victim
unconscious with a knobkerrie, before hanging him alive to make it look like
suicide. Final verdict - murder by hanging.

     The significant detail, Watson!

Africans do commit suicide, though
rather less commonly than Europeans. I wish I had made a study of their
motives. Only two I remember from that point of view: a man who cut his throat
after a business failure; and saddest of all, a lad of sixteen who hanged
himself because his parents could no longer meet his school fees.

The most horrible occasion was the
massacre of six party workers by bandits. These people were unpopular. Apart
from selling party cards, as in Zambia, they would round people up to attend
party rallies or political lectures. Complaints from schoolchildren, dragged
away from their homework, appeared in the letters column of the newspapers. The
bandits (who were the fringe of the opposition party) would take advantage of
such discontents.

     But the corpses were pathetic, each
killed with an axe blow in the back of the head: the youngest being a boy of
fourteen. (A party of white missionaries was axed later in Matabeleland: the
disaffection in that case being a land dispute with the locals.)

     The policeman told me the details.
Under the guns of the bandits, the oldest man was made to axe each of his
companions in turn, before being axed himself by the bandits.

Such actions seem incredible to the
white man. The fellow had the axe in his hands; why didn’t he have a go at his
tormentors? He must have known he was going to die: he had nothing to lose.
Quite simply, in a state of terror, people (especially simple people) act like
zombies.

     The Africans were full of
contradictions. No people more biddable; none more obstinate when they decided
to be. None was more devoted than the African woman. We had one on the ward,
blinded in one eye by her husband. I wanted to send her to the eye specialist,
afraid of sympathetic disease, when the good eye can go blind as well. She
signed herself out: there was no one to cook for her husband. And none more
vindictive when she felt herself betrayed, as we learned another day in the
mortuary.

     A village Lothario returned to his
marital hut one night, stinking from his lover’s bed, and fell into a drunken
sleep in his own. His wife (a sleeping African, normally barely rousable)
awoke; or maybe was even waiting up for him. She had had enough, as we saw from
the thousand cuts he died from - or rather, dozen axe-chops; the last, the
unkindest of all, which destroyed the offending organs. ‘She meant to do it,
doc!’ commented the black policeman.

Young children were admitted to
children’s ward, where we had cots only. When they were too big for cots (say
four or five), they went to female ward, and older children went on male or
female wards. The younger children were admitted with their mothers, who slept
on mats on the floor beside the cots, and in the beds with their children on
female ward - another practice Europe has learnt from Africa, which has long
since displaced the cruel practice of admitting young children without their
mothers, which existed when I was a houseman. Mothers in hospital contributed
in the matters of feeding, etc. As for the other children at home, they were
looked after by grandmother, as are all African children between the ages of
weaning (two) and schooling (six); when
Ambuya
 teaches them their
manners and the traditions of the tribe.

     European visitors would appear in
the African wards sometimes - police, mostly; sometimes a farmer bringing in a
worker, or taking one home; someone visiting a favourite nanny, cook, or
gardener.

     One day, a friend came in and saw a
little boy with a fractured femur, in gallows traction, which means swinging
both legs from a beam. The children tolerate this literal suspended animation
with great cheerfulness; after the first few days, when the fracture has become
painless, twisting around and twining the cords and getting into all sorts of
positions, like acrobats.

     ‘What’s the matter with that kid,
Warren?’ asked Fanie.

     I could not resist the temptation.

     ‘He’s been a very naughty boy.’

I have mentioned mental cases. It used
to be said, even by African psychiatrists, who should have known better, that
lunacy, idiocy and genius were all rare in the African race. This seems to be a
sort of wishful thinking, induced by their considerable bias towards
conventionality: it is true that eccentricity, or even distinction, is viewed
by them with suspicion. A man who has become very rich might be suspected of
using witchcraft.

     As to mental disease and mental
deficiency (and, no doubt, genius), I should say they were as common among
Africans as they are with us. We rarely saw depression, and never used
antidepressant drugs (which are among the commonest prescribed in Europe.
A
personal statement, and evidently inaccurate. I see from later statistics that
the newly appointed community psychiatric nurse was treating 188 new cases of
depression in 1987, in a population of 100,000 (and would be in my time) -
still vastly lower than in Europe
): but I
suspect such cases may have gone to the witch-doctor, their condition
attributed to witchcraft.

     One lad of sixteen, admitted for
something else, was found to be depressed. As with the suicide reported
earlier, his parents were unable to continue his school fees. Education can be
a slow process in Africa (as mentioned in Part I). Interruptions occur, owing
to shortage of funds, mostly, and to requirements arising in the homes of the
poor. So sixteen is a more tender age than it might be in Britain: two years or
more short of ‘O’ levels in many cases.