Most West African lunch parties went on all afternoon: people usually served curry or palm oil stew. There was much liquor provided, in the West African fashion: they asked you what you wanted and simply placed bottle and glass (even a full bottle of whisky) beside you and left you to help yourself. Needless to say there were no problems with drunken driving, or at any rate with the police, though cars and their owners sometimes spent the night in ditches. For when I say afternoon, it was often midnight before they wound up, the main course being usually served about four o' clock.
Walter's repast started at a more civilised hour. Incidentally, when we pulled a bottle of Beaujolais out of the car, as the common British contribution to the feast, Walter would not hear of it and made us put it back. I think he was right: hospitality should be freely offered and freely accepted.
Now, I was ten miles away from the hospital. There was no telephone at Walter's house. There was one at the office and a 'boy' had been told off to sit by it in case of any messages for the doctor. As in many African stations I was on call all the time, night and day, year in year out. My only chance of being off duty was to leave the station - a long way! Even at the Yam Festival at Mango, or any other event within thirty miles, I was still within reach of the ambulance and a written message conveyed by Samson.
When I expressed concern that the 'boy' might be bored and did he have a book to read, my remark occasioned much amusement. An afternoon spent sleeping by a telephone was no hardship to the average African worker.
I soon had the laugh on Andy and Barbara, however, at least. Spaghetti was served, which my experience in Trieste had taught me was merely an antipasto to an Italian meal. Andy and Barbara enjoyed the genuine Italian article so much they called for second helpings. Maria's look of surprise escaped them, but not me. When the main course appeared, of which I only remember it was pretty substantial, it was my turn to laugh at my friends.
One Sunday afternoon I took my umbrella and went for a stroll as far as the river. It was early days but I was already kitted out in the standard white shirt, shorts and stockings of the manager's uniform. I rarely wore a hat, although I am a pretty bald red-head, but never took much harm from the sun. When outdoors I was mostly in a vehicle or used my eternal umbrella equally against sun or rain, and was never far from the shade of the trees. The sky was rarely blue except in the dry season, when sky and air were cleared by the Harmattan, a fresh northern wind from off the desert, which was annually looked forward to as a refresher, the way the rains are eagerly panted for in the drier regions of Africa. Otherwise at most times of the year the sky was as steamy as the planet Venus. But let no one be fooled: you can get very sunburned under even a cloudy sky in Africa.
If one ever did such an eccentric thing for a white man as to take a walk, you had continually to refuse people stopping their cars to give you lifts, but eventually I got to the river on my two pins.
There a remarkable sight met my eyes. It was interesting enough even to the locals, as a large crowd had gathered at the point where the road ended and the bridge used to begin: for now the road ended indeed in a stream of muddy water which slid past at about five miles an hour; and of the bridge there was no sign, except the upper rails, where a fallen tree lay trapped like a stranded ship. There was a number of canoes, manned by small boys, and one of these presently approached me and asked me if I wanted to cross the river. No, I didn't. So would I like a trip - there and back for one cedi?
Well, I was a reckless bachelor then: nowadays, as an old married man with wife and children to consider, I would certainly refuse. Thus age and marriage doth make cowards of us all. But I thought to myself, the lad knows his business (I expect my patients thought the same about me!) so gingerly stepped into the craft, which had been half dragged out on to the muddy bank. Some bystanders, who looked as if they were enjoying themselves, gave us a hearty shove-off.
I did not know it then, but anyone falling into an African river in spate was likely to end up on the mortuary slab.
The canoe was a hollowed-out log about fifteen feet long, and the lad managed it with a paddle. The vessel drew very little water and skimmed like an arrow over the sliding surface. Even so the current bore us downstream in a great bow, which we made up in the shallower water near the opposite bank, so managing to beach where the road took up again. Then about turn and in another great bow, which the grinning little fellow controlled so skilfully with his paddle, we arrived back where we had started from.
Innocent me! The new doctor had become an instant hero. There was a great clap and cheer. One man shook my hand and assured me heartily: 'You are very brave! I would never have done that!'
I later discovered that Walter and family had been content to remain cut off for a week until the waters went down. They were all right for supplies. The only problem was Walter's hair. Our usual barber was one of the managers, who had acquired a dab hand at the business. Now Walter was forced to resort to Maria who, he later complained, when they reappeared in town, had cut it 'in steps'.
I turned about to walk home. But this was Africa. Not only was I a hero but it would have been the height (or depth) of unfriendliness to leave the new doctor to walk away alone. Some people attached themselves to me. ('And how are you liking Samreboi, docketa?') In Africa things have a tendency to grow, and presently the group grew to a crowd and the crowd to a procession of about a hundred. Now, all together, in jolly good companee, what more natural than to sing? And being Africa the song turned to a hymn, so at the head of the column swinging my umbrella I felt like Dr Livingstone in a B-movie. This was bad enough but my way lay past the club and by then the hymn had become Onward Christian Soldiers. A number of my countrymen appeared on the veranda with beers in their fists and merry grins on their faces to witness the revivalist activities of the new doc.
Well, we are British after all!
Marriage may make cowards of us all but it can also make us brave. I recall the story of my old colleague, Johnny de Graaf Johnson (a family famous on the Coast), who was my surgical registrar in Birkenhead. He married a white girl and took her and their child back to Ghana. Johnny was appointed provincial surgeon at Tamale, in the Northern Territories. Soon they had more children. One day they were crossing a river on a chain ferry. Johnny's wife and the older children sat in the car: Johnny stood beside them, holding the youngest child, a baby. When the ferry landed, something gave way, and the car and its occupants were pitched into the water. Johnny just had time to step ashore and hand the baby to a bystander before plunging without hesitation into the swollen river. He well knew what his chances were. He and his loved ones were all drowned.
Les Cady, my fishing friend, spent most of his time in the bush, as far away from offices and officialdom as possible. He was a tall rangy man, a born colonial, who would have been as morose as a caged lion in an English suburb. He had a petite blonde Polish wife, Maria, whom he had met in India during the war.
Les and I would go to spots on the river system known to him, in his Land Rover. Sometimes we fished from the bank, when we employed perforce more than the number of ghillies usual to places like Scotland. Custom required one small boy to dig the worm, another to stick it on the hook and a third to remove the fish, if necessary. And I mean this number for each fisherman. All the great White Man had to do was cast the hook into the water and wind it in again.
The only fish those rivers seemed to contain were barbel, a primitive-looking scaleless creature with long whiskers from the days when the earth was mud. Indeed, the barbel can live a long time in the mud when the rivers dry up (which they seldom did in that part of the world) and even it was said cross country to find water. Certainly, if you left one on the bank it would wriggle its way back to the river. Europeans did not like eating them, so we gave them to the ghillies, and they were much appreciated by them and their families.
Once I tried eating one myself. Someone told me, although tasteless, they went down well cooked with lemon juice. Fir
st you have to leave them in the bath overnight to get the mud out of their systems. This I did, and heard things go bump in the night several times as the fish leapt out of the water onto the bathroom floor. Finally the penny dropped. I filled the bath high enough to satisfy the creature, and it settled down. Next day James did his best with it, but lemon or no lemon, it tasted like rubber.
There must have been other kinds of fish, even if I never caught any, as a merry item in the station's folklore featured a cruel trick played on one of the white managers - the sort of thing I think Italians call a beffa. Harry was the keenest fisherman on the station, equipped with every kind of tackle, which might well have secured more difficult prey than barbel. Harry was on long leave in England. Some of his droll friends made a cut-out fish from ply-wood (which was one of the station's products) - a very large fish. They hooked it on to a rod and line and photographed it, held up by one of Harry's smiling friends. They sent the photo (which was naturally less perfect than it would be nowadays) to Harry with the message: 'Look what we are taking out of the river just now!' Harry promptly cut short his leave, and caught the next plane back to Ghana, where he was naturally disappointed on arrival. Whether his wife accompanied him or not, and what she had to say on the subject in any case, was not told me; nor as a bachelor did it occur to me to inquire.
At the end of the afternoon's sport we would pay off the ghillies, as well as distribute any fish we had caught among them. But by then the ghillies, like all things in the tropics, had multiplied considerably. This did not fool Les, who had marked out the genuine ones with his eagle eye well in advance. But we inevitably ended up with a crowd swarming at the open windows of the Land Rover before we left.
I well remember one such scene, near a bridge. Les sat silent beside me while the little hands pushed through the windows, and the little bodies tussled and crushed one another around the doors. Suddenly, even to my surprise, Les sprang up in his seat with the roar of a lion. I have mentioned before the strange telepathy of a crowd of Africans. All at once the little creatures shot off and onto the bridge, like a herd of impala, where half-way across, just as suddenly, they all stopped together and turned round. Les glowered at them through the windscreen like the Lion King for some seconds, then his features relaxed into a grin. Immediately, all the little bodies leapt up and down and screamed with delight.
We also fished from a canoe when the river had settled later in the rainy season, or in the dry season itself. This simplified the employment situation, as one little boy served as boatman and ghillie. Mostly we just drifted, usually near to the banks, and it was as lovely as a dream to while away the afternoon on the still brown water in the shade of the great trees. Les told me much about the country and its people - of the chief's daughter, who was sent down from Edinburgh University for getting herself pregnant (autres temps, autres moeurs!), and her father's mystified appeal to Les: 'But Mr Cady, I ask you! What is a woman for?' A question which nowadays, of course, would give rise to trouble of another sort. He told me of the day when the cook threatened Maria with a fate worse than death, when she was alone in the house, and she defended herself with the famous Afridi sword, not actually using it but pointing it at the man's chest and marching him backwards out of the house and down to the workshop of the outstation they then managed. And when they got there perhaps the would-be rapist wished Maria had done a proper job for the fate almost worse than death that he met at the hands of the workers.
Les asked me about my future intentions. My contract was for eighteen months, and I had a vague idea of going to Australia after that. We speculated about Australia, which neither of us had visited, and whether it might contain such beautiful scenes as then surrounded us. Les thought maybe in the Northern Territories. The conversation was idle in more ways than one. Though I did not know it then, Africa had entered my blood. I was not to leave it (and then only reluctantly) for the next twenty years.
I went fishing and canoeing with others besides Les, but he would only go with me. He was a loner, and I was flattered to be selected by him as a friend. Another companion of mine was Ralph, the large Swiss who had catechised his cook on the ethnic nature of Jesus. There was usually some competition among the canoe boys for our custom. One of them was Kwame. Then one day Ralph's shirt went missing from the line outside his house. It is hard to go undetected in the African countryside (whatever Sherlock Holmes may have said about the English ditto), and we were soon informed that the thief was Kwame. I imagine Kwame returned the shirt or Ralph would never have forgiven him. At any rate, this being the south of the country he was not nailed in the manner of Sisera to a tree; but Ralph, without any Anglo-Saxon nonsense about him, organised among his friends a three-month boycott of Kwame's canoe, which was not lifted till the day itself.
Les asked me if I would like to visit a local chief - that is, one of them, for there were two in our neighbourhood - the chief of the Brudja tribe at Bongo. Of course I did. So Les arranged an appointment for a Sunday afternoon. Off we went in his Land Rover. Les told me it was customary to take a present so we stopped at a store and picked up six bottles of beer: the large West African bottles, not the miserable things of politer climes.
We entered the chief's palace, announced ourselves and were conducted by an attendant to an awning at the top of a courtyard. Chairs were brought for us. In the centre of the awning stood the 'stool'. This was made of wood and shaped rather like an anvil. It was a sacred object as it contained the soul of the tribe and, of course, no one but the chief was allowed to sit on it, on pain of pretty dire penalties, I should think. The most famous stool in the country, the golden stool of Ashanti, was let down out of the sky to the feet of the divine first king of Ashanti, Osei Tutu. Our chief was the one whose death shortly after gave rise to the strange happenings related in an earlier chapter.
Presently he entered, attended by two or three more officials, the chief dressed in a kente, or toga, made up of squares of coloured silk sewn together, a magnificent garment. He took his seat on the stool, while the attendants stood behind him, except for one who stood at his side. This was the 'linguist', for the chief does not speak directly to anyone in public, only through the linguist, who likewise conveys messages to the chief. This is not a matter of interpretation: I doubt if this old man understood English; but whether or no, it was a matter of ceremony, which his Oxford-educated successor would certainly continue in his turn.
We presented our six bottles of beer, which were received with due expressions of appreciation; and by coincidence were presented ourselves with six identical bottles of beer, at which of course nobody showed any signs of embarrassment or amusement. Les, who appointed himself as my linguist, so to speak, introduced the new doctor; and the chief's linguist informed us that the chief was delighted to meet him, and said how much his services were appreciated in the land.
There was more polite conversation, which I tried to enliven in my fatuous way by expressing a wish to marry six Ghanaian ladies before I was another year in the country. Both linguists (that is, Les and the official one) fell silent at this remark, and Les informed me on the side that the occasion did not call for humour.
After about half an hour we got ourselves out, with every sign of mutual appreciation and gratitude, and no further breaches of protocol on my part.
It was nightfall before we got back to Samreboi. When we reached the bridge some sort of altercation was going on. Les made inquiries. Now the bridge, or rather the river, divided the territories of the two tribes: the Brudjas and the Wadjas (based on Mango). It turned out that a member of the Wadjas (a degenerate lot in the opinion of their neighbours) had been using the river for a purpose of nature and had narrowly escaped some dire fate at the hands of some Brudjas who had caught him in the act. The river was sacred to all right-thinking people, but especially to the Brudjas. At any rate, before we went on the parties had separated, if not peaceably, without bloodshed.
A sequel followed (I mean to our meeting wi
th the chief) when Sally, the new matron, and I were introduced to the new chief, not by Les, but by Adam, one of the African managers, shortly after the death of the old one. Succession is hereditary, but the office is by no means despotic, and a chief can be removed by process of the elders - all males over forty. (An old Coaster was fond of recalling a famous headline in the Times of Ghana: 'DESTOOLED CHIEF LOSES MOTION'.)
The new chief was a very polished young man who sat with his attendants in a sort of levee while people filed past him. Sally and I shook hands with him, a greeting he cordially received. Afterwards Adam informed us that no one was supposed to touch the chief in public, but not to worry: everything the white man (or woman) did was all right.
Another curious fact is that a chief apparent must have no mark on his body. There is a touching novel by a Ghanaian writer, which ends with the death of a chief's son when the young man develops appendicitis and refuses operation, not only to protect his succession (which is obviously doubtful), but through the demands of custom.
One who was certainly no uncaged lion in the jungle was Ernie. One evening I came upon a new face in the club. New faces were an event in Samreboi: at any rate, new white faces, of whom the usual number including the ladies was about fifty. 'Ee, doan't you get fed up wi' the same old faces?' complained the old Coaster referred to above, who had spent most of his career on a larger station in Nigeria. An occasional recurrent addition was Leo, the 'snake man', a herpetologist, who spent most of his time camping in the forest, and was always a welcome guest. Ernie, alas, was no herpetologist, nor was he likely to find any other comfortable diversions in his new surroundings except possibly the one he had been brought out for.
Something had gone wrong with the 'ERFs', as the locals called the logging vehicles, for an obvious reason, and Ernie had been sent out from England to fix them.
Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa Page 7