Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa

by Warren Durrant

  Zorba the Greek, it will be remembered, danced for grief when his little son died. Africans also dance for grief, strange as this form of expression may seem to Anglo-Saxons.

  Years later, I was performing a post-mortem in Central Africa, when, through the window, I saw the family of the deceased beginning to dance, twisting round and round and crying: ‘Mai-wei! Mai-wei!’

  Beyond the fence was a crowd of about a hundred people at a bus terminus. Africans are nothing if not social beings. Privacy, except in intimate physical matters, is anathema. They also have a mass telepathy, like birds. In no time, the crowd beyond the fence took up the dance in sympathy, until they were all twisting and leaping and crying, ‘Mai-wei! Mai-wei!’

  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.

  8 - All God's Children

  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 miss
ion

  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?
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  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?

  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).