Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa (7 page)

This was of course a purely ceremonial
sale, a matter of honour. I did not feel called upon to upstage any of the big
men, so preserved a modest silence in my usual seat. The bids went up and up to
ten dollars, and a big man had his big day drinking the water there and then,
to the uninhibited cheers of the congregation.

And so on down to the unfortunate cocks.
I did buy something myself: a fish-trap, made of woven cane. A work of art in
itself which I knew would make a beautiful ornament. I got it home to England
eventually and presented it to an uncle. It returned to me after his death, and
thirty years from the day it was made it still stands sturdy and elegant in my
sitting room, where guests think it is a space ship.

One day we were honoured by a visit from
the archdeacon. The uniformity of the English Church is as remarkable as its
catholicity. There is a certain brand mark about its officers which makes me
wonder if they are not mass-produced at Canterbury and some painted black for
Africa. For our archdeacon was Trollope's Archdeacon Grantly, painted very
black indeed. (Father Adeloye, I might say, could have been Mr Harding.) There
had been some slump in the fortunes of the Church (and when I say fortunes I mean
what St Matthew the tax-gatherer would have meant by them). We had already had
a meeting of the parochial church council, of which I was a member, at which
some very strong-arm methods for raising the necessary had been proposed,
including knocking on doors more in the spirit of the Gestapo than the Little
Sisters of the Poor, until I reminded them that our initials were PCC, and not
CPP (which had belonged to the party of the lately overthrown dictator, Kwame
Nkrumah).

The archdeacon spoke in the church one
week night to a large turn-out, more due to his star quality than any religious
enthusiasm, and spoke in tones of an Oxfordian fruitiness, that would have
surprised even his Victorian prototype, of the 'perishes that were not doing
vary waal' which included, alas, the back-sliding Samreboi. Various members of
the congregation made suggestions, which the archdeacon heard with apparent
interest before cutting short the inevitable African prolixity with an
un-Christian clap of the hand and an authoritative finger pointing to the next
aspirant. I forget what resolutions were arrived at (if any), before the
archdeacon closed the proceedings with a short prayer; nor do I know where he
spent the night, but I am pretty sure it was in more commodious circumstances
than Father Adeloye's house could provide.

Constable Yobo of the CID was pointing
out the local places of worship to me during a Sunday morning walk along the
main street. He was most proud of his own establishment, the Methodist church,
which he told me was 'best for singing'. His words were amply corroborated
there and then by the lusty strains of ‘Bread of Heaven’, which threatened to
lift off the tin roof of the building. This impressive performance was one of
the many fruits of that diligent labourer in God's vineyard, the Reverend Alec
Jones, an unassuming Welshman. Alec bore a curious nickname among the Africans.
They called him
'Bruni
-go-die', (
'Bruni'
of course meaning 'white
man'). Alec collected old clothes through many contacts in his homeland, and
distributed them among the poor of his parish. As none of his parishioners
could believe that anyone could part with his clothes in life (especially in
one piece), they concluded these must be the post mortem effects of Alec's
friends in Britain. Hence the name.

Further down the street we passed the
Catholic church, where, Constable Yobo dismissively informed me: 'Dey jest
hollered in Italian.' (This was of course still in the days before they mucked
about with the Tridentine Mass.)

As I have hinted, there was a spectrum
of mixed worship between orthodox Christian and pure pagan. Somewhere near the
latter end of the rainbow lay a place I looked into one evening with an African
guide. In the middle of the room on a stand lay a large Victorian Bible, as good
as Father Adeloye's, around which the people were enthusiastically dancing amid
lot of drumming and singing. My guide informed me in a superior tone that 'dey
tink it catch plenty power' - a scene to make a missionary cry.

The Reverend Alec organised a sort of
Three Choirs Festival at his own establishment, in which the Anglicans and
Catholics were invited to participate. Not with any idea of competition.
Competitiveness is considered rather vulgar in Africa, and Lady Thatcher, I am
afraid, would not be thought ladylike - at any rate, on account of her famous
doctrine; though she might have been respected, even worshipped as a figure of
power - a Great She-elephant. Needless to say, competition or not, Alec's team
outshone all the rest. Even Alec, for all his innate modesty, could not
suppress a grin of sinful pride which threatened to cut his head off. The
Catholic priest sat expressionless. But poor Father Adeloye (who had of course
a family interest in the matter) exhibited what I can only describe as a
'boiled' look of equally sinful envy.

One Sunday afternoon I was lying on my
bed when I heard once again a distant drum. In those early days I was as eager
as a puppy to learn everything about my new surroundings. I quickly got up and
went in search of the sound in my car. Presently I came upon a body of scouts
filing into the Methodist hall, and for the first time made the acquaintance of
Alec. As the forms filled up with the scouts and cubs, evidently assembled for
some improving purpose, Alec invited me to take a seat beside him at the desk.
When all had settled down Alec stood up and began in his Welsh voice:

'This is our new doctor, Dr Durrant.' A
big clap. 'Dr Durrant would like to say a few words to you.' Then he sat down
and looked expectantly at me.

Now I don't know what gave Alec that
idea, because he was dead wrong. If there is anything I loathe it is having to
make a speech in public when I have nothing to say. It is not shyness: just the
mere fatuity of trying to make bricks without straw.

I need not have worried. I was about to
witness the genius of African interpreters, which I had merely glimpsed in the
Anglican church. I rose awkwardly to my feet, and before I could even cough,
one of Alec's officers sprang to my side.

'Good afternoon,' I began. The
interpreter went into action as if I had pulled a lever in his back, and
delivered a sentence which might have flowed from the rambling pen of Marcel
Proust. He paused and looked to me for more.

'It gives me great pleasure to be here
this afternoon,' I went on, beginning to feel almost eloquent myself. This
generated a whole paragraph.

After that it was dead easy, and was on
every miserable occasion I had to make a speech in Africa thereafter. I had
only to give the interpreter a verbal shove now and again and in half an hour
we had produced a speech which would have done for the House of Lords.

At the pagan end of the religious
spectrum lay the fertility clinic. I am not referring to anything at the
hospital, which in Western terms is a pretty sophisticated undertaking, not
much less than the open heart surgery I had hoped to find at Accra hospital. I
am referring to the establishment run by the witch doctor.

Twice a week I visited the outstations.
On my Friday trip to Wadjo I passed a stockade in which interesting things
seemed to be going on to judge by the drumming and ululating which came from
within. Samson, the chauffeur (for I was not yet trusted in the forest by
myself), told me this was the place of the fetish priest for women 'catch belly',
but I never pressed the inquiry any further.

Until the new matron came out. Jenny
left after another of those Greek tragedy affairs had broken out between her
and the GM. No reflection on either of them, who were both able managers; but
in the hot-house conditions of a small station in Africa, if personalities were
going to clash, they clashed resoundingly.

The new matron was a pretty English girl
called Sally, aged about thirty; and it was some time before anyone in those
sexist days believed in her existence as a matron at all, rather than the
heroine of a steamy tropical film, played by Julie Christie, whom she certainly
looked like. Even when, through diligent effort and a particular interest in
midwifery, she increased the weekly attendance at the antenatal clinic from
thirty to eighty, that wag, Danny Wilson, commented that most of them were
women.

So while I was showing Sally the ropes,
I thought it might be fun to drop in on the witch doctor's clinic, on our way
to Wadjo.

As we entered some of his helpers ran
forward and politely provided us with log seats. We looked around. At the back
was an awning with a ladies' band, all the ladies shaking rattles, beating
drums and singing. In the main area stood rows of other women, about fifty in
all, stripped to the waist with tin bowls of water on their heads. They swayed
gently to the music while little children, some barely able to walk, jived
around them.

I might say that rhythm seems inherent
in the African, almost from birth. Even the babies, after their jabs at the
hospital, don't cry like white babies: an immediate rhythmic 'wa! wa! wa!' gets
switched on in their bottoms, while they kick their mothers in protest and wee
ditto down their backs; nappies, like the wheel, not being indigenous to the
continent.

Actually, most of these ladies seemed
pretty pregnant already, so we concluded it was an antenatal as well as a
fertility clinic.

The witch doctor
went into action. He sprinkled water from the basins with an antelope switch on
to the ladies' tummies, running up and down the rows. When he saw Sally and me
sitting side by side on our logs, he naturally inferred an interesting
connection (if not an interesting condition in Sally), and sprinkled water over
us in our turn.

All very interesting, and I expect Sally
wrote home about it in her first newsy letter from the Coast. But at the end of
the month, as the locals so charmingly put it, 'her flower' did not appear.

Well, this is a thing well known even to
white gynaecologists: a change of circumstances, the attendant stresses, etc.
But it did not charm Sally. 'That bloody witch doctor!' she cursed. 'What has
he done to me?'

No account of African religion would be
complete without a discussion of witchcraft, in which again some 'educated'
Africans profess not to believe, just as 'educated' Europeans have no fear of
the number thirteen or walking under ladders. But in their hearts they are not
so sure.

In fact, in his heart, Amos, who had
attended the London School of Economics, was pretty sure the other way. He told
me of a man who had insulted another man, and two nights later a cobra entered
the first man's house and tried to bite him. 'What about that, doc? You
wouldn't say that was a coincidence, surely?'

Des had spoken about 'juju' on the day
of my arrival: how a man had been 'crossed' on the golf course. Two enemies
approached him and crossed (changed places from left to right) in front of him.
Then they passed him on either side. The terrified man looked behind him and
saw them repeat the process. Within the week he was dead.

Many of our medical cases were of juju.
In the African philosophy nothing happens by accident, especially evil, which
is the spiritual work of an enemy or an offended ancestor. In these cases Des
had his 'juju cure', or rather, Dr Conron's juju cure, which he attributed to a
compatriot and previous MO Samreboi. After satisfying himself that the man
merely thought he was going to die because someone had put a spell on him, Des
went to work with his 'alternative medicine'. He placed a beaker on the locker
on each side of the bed. The first contained water, the second hydrogen
peroxide, which of course look exactly alike to an African peasant and Albert
Einstein. Then Des would remove ten millilitres of blood from one of the man's
arms, and this he injected into the beaker of water, which lay on the same side
of the bed. He held the glass up to the light, swirled the bloody streaks round
a bit and said wisely: 'Ah yes, I see the spirits!' And sure enough the patient
saw them too, with his eyes popping out of his head. Then Des would give the
man a painful injection (theophylline was his favourite) in his buttock, which
everyone knew was the best medicine possible. He would allow that ten minutes
or so to chase the spirits round the man's body, while he got on with his ward
round. Then he returned and removed a similar quantity of blood from the other
arm and injected it into the hydrogen peroxide. The resulting explosion of red
champagne carried powerful conviction. 'Dat chase him proper!' exclaimed Des,
and the man would jump out of bed, full of the joys of spring.

At a party in an African manager's house
we sat on the veranda, gazing at the moon. I asked Yao if the sun and the moon
held the important place in African mythology which they do in ours. 'No,' he
thought. 'What means more to us is the forest and the river.'

And indeed the forest and the river were
full of stranger creatures than the ones nature had placed there. To begin with
there were the Aboatia people, whom even the Europeans soon told you about.
They were small creatures, about the size of chimps, very hairy, and lived in
the trees: perforce, as when they sat on the branches their legs hung a hundred
feet to the ground, with which they seized the unwary, who were never seen
again. And what is more their feet pointed backwards. Their children (whose
legs had evidently not fully developed) liked to play on the bridges over the
rivers, and you could be sure the African drivers of the logging and any other
vehicles never forgot to sound their horns and drive slowly at these places,
for if you killed or even hurt an Aboatia child, the parents would come for you
in the night.