Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa (6 page)

A colleague, who was assisting me in the
PM, rigidly Anglo-Saxon in spirit (although his mother was Polish), cast a cold
eye on the scene, and remarked: 'Not a tear!'

But that was not the point: when you
express your grief or sympathy by dancing, it takes a different direction from
tears.

Back in Samreboi, on a happier occasion,
I was attending a little boy with acute asthma, when he suddenly stopped
breathing. His mother, who was standing by, ran out of the ward and began
dancing round and round the small hospital, crying:
'Adjei! Adjei!'
I
bent over and gave the little body the kiss of life. Immediately, he started
breathing again, and, as if by a miracle, his asthma had disappeared (a fact
for physiologists to ponder). Someone ran out and caught the mother, and she
returned to the ward, still dancing, but now for joy.

The Lord of the Dance is black!

In those early days at Samreboi, I would
sit on my balcony at the end of the day, with book and pipe and drink, where I
could see the hospital, half a mile away across a hollow. Sometimes I would see
the ambulance turn into the main entrance. My heart would sink, as I wondered
what new unfamiliar trial was awaiting me.

The anxiety had begun in my London
hotel, on the eve of my departure. I fell into a restless sleep, in which I was
confronted by a line of black faces, with unfamiliar diseases, whose treatment
I had little knowledge of. When I arrived at my post, I found myself confronted
by a line of black faces, with unfamiliar diseases, I had little knowledge of;
but my fear was masked to a large extent like a paratrooper, who goes into
action as soon as he hits the ground.

Fortunately, at that time, the British
Medical Association had put out a pamphlet on tropical diseases for British
family doctors, who, in this age of increasing travel, were likely to meet some
of them. This proved very useful to me.

Also, I resorted to low stratagems. I
have never been too proud to learn from subordinates, though it is sometimes
advisable to disguise the process. 'What do you make of that, Mr Sackey?' I
would ask, like a professor testing a student. 'Hookworm, sah!', promptly
replied Mr Sackey, who had seen a thousand cases before. 'And what have you got
on the shelf for that?' 'Alcopar!'

But it was a full year before I got over
the terrors of surgery. The feeling before an operation, like a soldier going
over the top. The euphoria of winning, the desolation of losing, and worst of
all, the agonies of guilt over a mistake - for a doctor's mistake can cost a
life - a mistake all too obvious after the event. This fear hung over me,
waking and sleeping, like a heavy and immovable cloud.

I had touched on this subject in a
letter to Des, who was a frequent and encouraging correspondent. He was now the
company's chief medical officer at Accra. He replied comfortingly that these
things lost their terrors in time. He took the precaution of inviting me down
to the coast for a few days, ostensibly to 'report', but really to give me a
break - the only one I had in the eighteen months I was on that station. (My
Dutch colleague at Mango and his wife, who was also a doctor, stood by for my
emergencies while I was away, as I did for them.) On the golden sands beside
the blue waters, and in the easy hospitality of the Brennan's house, I got some
much-needed relaxation. But on my return, the cloud was still there.

Then one evening, after twelve months on
the station, sitting on that same balcony, I realised that like the clear sky
before me, the cloud had lifted. I had conquered a great field of fear, and I
would dominate it for the rest of my life.

All Africans are religious. I will not say
how they are religious. After twenty-two years on the continent I can pretend
to little more than a superficial knowledge of them. Of all Europeans,
paradoxically I believe the ones who know the Africans best are the rural
Afrikaners of South Africa, who live cheek by jowl with them in an uneasy
love-hate relationship, like a quarrelsome husband and wife.

But I do not believe they are religious
in our way. We Europeans are not very happy in this world, so we have invented
an improved model elsewhere. This is especially true of the Protestants, who
seem to view the world as a kind of outward bound school run by God. If you get
through, you get the Duke of Edinburgh's award: if you don't, you get the other
thing.

Moreover this pilgrim's progress, from
this world to the next, is a model in time: a true production of the European,
especially Protestant, spirit. Africans have little idea of time (as European
managers know to their chagrin): their world-view is the model of eternity.

(Nowadays we Europeans no longer believe
in other worlds, but we still do not enjoy this one as much as we might: which
seems to leave us with the worst of all possible worlds.)

Africans may not believe in other
worlds, but they believe in the next life. Though 'next' is hardly the
operative word - rather a continuation of this life as an 'ancestor'. The
ancestors live in an invisible old people's home at the end of the village
(someone has described an African village as a 'community of the living and the
dead'), and the ancestors take as keen an interest in the goings-on of this
world as the retired
Telegraph
readers of Tunbridge Wells. So far from
enjoying any kind of paradise, they seem to be a pretty ill-conditioned lot,
visiting plague and other disasters on their descendants if they forget their
birthdays, etc.

There is little idea of sin, at any
rate, in our abstract sense: morality is humanistic or social, apart from the
ancestral obligations referred to. Africans believe in a Supreme Being, the Sky
God, but his functions seem largely confined to providing rain.

So far I have been talking about the
traditional Africans. Between them and the fully Christianised ones there is a
spectrum of mixed beliefs; but even the most regular Christians seem to view
their faith in a social light and not as the lugubrious business of northern
climes.

Jesus is a friend, and incidentally a
white man, like the father at the mission. I was discussing this with a Swiss
friend, who peremptorily summoned his cook from his kitchen duties to test the
matter.

'Joseph!' commanded Ralph 'Tell me, was
Jesus a
Bruni
or a
Bibini?'

'He was a
Bruni,
massa,' answered
Joseph, in a tone of surprise, even suspicion, at the obviousness of the
question.

The black Christs and Madonnas, which
the fathers so proudly exhibit as the handiwork of their charges at the
white-run mission stations, are there for two reasons. One, it is a fun thing
to do, and two, it is part of African good manners to do what people expect of
you, rather like indulging the whims of children. No one is fooled (except the
fathers). Everyone knows that Jesus was a
Bruni,
if not exactly an
English public schoolboy.

Graham Greene loved West Africa with a
bitter relish. He saw it as a symbol of his tragic vision. 'No one in this
place could believe in a heaven on earth.' But this again is a thoroughly
Eurocentric view. As Saki (before Greene of course) observed, to its
inhabitants the jungle was paradise enow.

I
tried to express these things in a poem of my own.

The body can be broken, maimed,

Infected inwardly.

We can fall upon misfortune.

Then Christ, the crucified, is our
god.

Christ is the god of Africa,

'The continent of misery and heat',

The heroic continent.

It is Christ in the wards,

Among the sick, the poor;

The lonely doctor at the mission

Or the seedy little town, which kills
romantic hopes.

But among the blacks,

With their undefeated grin,

Their unmindful mirth and movement,

Their stoic sufferings,

God is also Pan.

Churches in Africa
are designed with a view to function rather than beauty. It is true there are
some very beautiful ones, like the Anglican cathedral in Lagos, and the
Catholic cathedral in Lubumbashi, Zaire; but the working parish churches more
usually resemble the Anglican church at Samreboi, which looked like a garage.

When Father Adeloye, the parish priest,
saw Kendal church on a calendar in my house, he thought it was a cathedral, and
could hardly believe it was a parish church like his own. 'My word, doctor!' he
mused. 'Those people must have a lot of money.'

At my first attendance, I slipped
quietly into a chair at the back. This did not pass unnoticed. A small boy,
evidently sent by the vicar, approached me and commanded: 'Come!' I followed
him to the front row, where another small boy placed a cushion on a chair and
commanded: 'Sit!'

I looked about me. I was the sole
European. The church was packed. Two choir stalls contained rows of little
black bodies in cassocks and bare feet. They were mostly Father Adeloye's
children.

They chanted plain song. Ghana is high
church, Father Adeloye explained to me. Nigeria, where he came from, is low
church.

There were no black Christs or Madonnas,
but they certainly put plenty of African rhythm into the singing. All the
little black bodies swung together in a jazzy beat.

'Dow dat tekkest away dee
sins-of-dee-well, have messy upon us!'

Father Adeloye descended to read the
first lesson from a massive Victorian Bible mounted on a wooden lectern. He was
preceded by two little altar boys bearing candles.

As he read, one of the lads in a bored
sort of way tried to set fire to the lectern with his candle. Father Adeloye
leaned over and fetched him a bang on the ear which nearly overturned boy and
candle, spilling a fair quantity of wax: all without taking his eye off the
Bible or interrupting the flow of his reading.

Then came the sermon.

As I was to learn on future Sundays,
Father Adeloye's sermons were all on the same subject. He received no stipend
and supported himself and his numerous family on the products of his 'chop'
garden, the division allowed him from the plate and those pledges he referred
to as 'church dues'. These matters, rather than the more elevated thoughts that
fill the heads of the less indigent of God's servants, were on his mind as he
ascended the pulpit. So his texts (and they were the more rebarbative ones:
'Woe unto ye, scribes, pharisees, hypocrites!' 'There shall be weeping and
wailing and gnashing of teeth!', etc) all came round to the same end.

'So who was Our Lord (Abraham, God)
talking about when he said dose words?'

Awful pause, during which even the
sucking babies (breasts having been produced to keep them quiet during the
sermon) rolled their little eyes towards the pulpit.

'HE WAS TALKING ABOUT DOSE PEOPLE DAT
DON'T PAY DEIR CHURCH DUES!!!'

Two interpreters stood beside the
pulpit. One in Twi for the benefit of the ladies, who understood little
English; and one in Ibo, of which itinerant Nigerian tribe there were large
numbers in the town. Father Adeloye delivered long passages before giving them
their chance, and I marvelled at their memory (although the sermons were as
stereotyped as I have hinted). But I reflected, this was the gift of peoples
where literacy is low, and also that these were the lands of the 'griots', or
wandering story-tellers, whose well-stocked heads entertained the long dark
nights beside many a village fire.

When Father Adeloye came to the bit
about church dues, the interpreters performed in the business-like tone of the
tax inspector.

Naturally, there followed a collection.
I placed a dollar note on the plate. But this was not the end. I might add that
the proceedings went on in African fashion for considerably longer than the
statutory English hour. Morning prayers and hymns were performed with great
gusto and without the aid of anything in print. And then I discovered that
Father Adeloye had another little fund-raising idea to shake out the remaining
mites.

A table was placed at the head of the
aisle. Two of Father Adeloye's brawny helpers sat at it with a yet larger plate
and opened a heavy ledger.

One of them called out: 'All dose born
on Sunday!'

Few Ghanaians or other Africans know how
old they are. (One white old hand engagingly told me, they tell you how old
they feel. On sprightly days they tell you they are twenty: in less happy moods
they say fifty  - which is very old! My informant thought this a most enviable
system.) But all Ghanaians know on which day they were born: they are named
after it.

As I remember, Kobina means born on
Tuesday (Abina for a girl); Kwasi on Wednesday, etc. The late unlamented Kwame
Nkrumah was born on Saturday.

The Sundays stepped up and deposited
their coppers, which were duly noted in the ledger. It dawned on me this was a
competition designed to stimulate interest in the daily teams.

As the days wore on, people began to
look at the doctor, evidently wondering what day he was born on. The doctor
wondered too. As no one had ever told him, he decided to settle for Friday, as
the days were, so to speak, running out.

Now another problem. I had practically
exhausted my pocket money on the collection. I managed to find a few coins. Father
Adeloye made a contribution to the Saturdays. Thank God, Saturday won, so I was
able to save my face without upstaging the priest.

The Harvest Festival fell in November,
at the end of the rains, to correspond with the Yam Festival. I found the
church loaded with the products of the African earth. When we came to the first
hymn, from the throats of Father Adeloye's family choir I heard with amazement:

          'He sends dee snow in
winter,

          Dee warmth to swell dee
grain...

          Den tank dee Lor', O tank
dee Lor',

          For
a-a-all His lav.'

Presently, far out in the hot morning, I
made out the steady beat of a drum. Colonial thoughts of an Ashanti rising came
to my mind. Before long, looking out of the glassless window, I saw a drum,
which carried itself like Humpty Dumpty on two little black legs, and beat
itself with two little black arms. Behind the drum came a school crocodile,
guided by a number of schoolteachers in their Sunday-best clothes.

When the procession reached the church,
the drum was silenced with some difficulty by one of the teachers, and the
crocodile metamorphosed into a colony of ants, which poured into the church -
an hour late, but what did that matter in Africa!

At least they were in time for Father
Adeloye's sermon. When he came to the bit about church dues, he hit the pulpit
so hard with his fist that two sugar canes that had been leaning there fell
down onto a couple of cocks which lay trussed and giving the occasional squawk
between the choir stalls, killing one outright and miraculously striking the
raffia cords off the legs of the other. The second cock jumped up, rejoiced at
his new-found freedom with a loud crow, and dived into the nearest choir stall.
Much scuffling of little black feet and cassocks, and he was out among the
congregation, flapping his wings and jumping over the heads of the multitude,
until he was caught, re-trussed, and flung beneath the altar again.

There was a collection, but I think
Father Adeloye let us off the name game that Sunday as he had something else in
store.

After the usual three hours the service
came to an end. The familiar table was placed at the head of the aisle but
supplied with more than the usual number of seats. Father Adeloye's helpers
were augmented to a full committee by the 'biggest men' in town, all kitted out
in the most resplendent tribal dresses. The everyday ledger was replaced with
an even larger one. Biros were produced and tested. It became apparent that
some kind of business was about to take place.

In fact, all the harvest gifts were to
be auctioned off in aid of the church. There was no thought that Our Lord might
appear with his whip, overturn the table and drive them out. This might be
God's house, but were they not about their Father's business?

The first article to be auctioned was a
simple glass of water. The chairman (for Father Adeloye had taken a well-earned
rest in a side seat) rose and extolled the virtues of water. Was it not the
source of all life? Where would we be without water? What was more precious
than water? How much am I offered for this glass of water?