It had come like a summons from the Angel Gabriel, or some darker spirit. One Monday morning he had been sitting in his Manchester office, minding his own business, when he was plucked out of his cosy nest, not by any angel, but by his boss, who announced: 'Ernie, lad, ye’re going ter West Africa!' and no argument about it. I doubt if Ernie had been any farther than Blackpool in his life, and certainly he kept bleating: 'Me and the wife have never been separated before!' He made no mention of children. He was no older than twenty-five, a sad little shrimp in navy blue shorts, an unmemorable shirt, and navy blue socks (not stockings), round his ankles. And he was very nervous. Even the beer, which his kindly hosts had placed in his hand, failed to reassure him.
'Will ah catch malaria?' he whined. 'Will we get attacked by natives?'
Neither of these questions actually deserved the hearty laughter they provoked. He had been sent out without antimalarial tablets ('On t' next plane, lad! So be quick about it!') - a deficiency at least I was able to repair next morning. But the others would have laughed the other side of their faces if they had forseen the answer to the second question. For two years later (after I had left), the place actually was attacked by natives. There was a strike, which in the common way of Africa, turned quickly to rioting, in which as many people were shot as at Sharpeville, but naturally received less attention in the world press. Black bites black! That's not news!
Meantime the crowd at the bar did their best to cheer him up. 'Don't be downhearted, Ernie. We have a great time here at Christmas.'
'Christmas!' squeaked Ernie. This was September. 'I expected to be 'ome at the end of the month. The wife and me -'
However, he was a resilient little fellow, and so far lost his fear of the natives that I actually spotted him receiving the revivalist procession treatment one evening on his way home from work, which he seemed to appreciate in his simple way more happily than I did.
In the event he did get home by the end of the month, and what a tale he would have to tell the wife! Or perhaps he preferred to forget that the whole thing had ever happened, like some dreadful dream.
When not fishing, or at the pool or tennis, we would spend week-end afternoons taking walks in the forest. We would select one of the footpaths referred to in the first chapter, calculate the time to sunset by our watches (which fell regularly at 6 pm), and walk for half that time before turning back, having left the car at a convenient spot on the road. Usually we would take Sally with us, who was the darling of the station. The rest of us were bachelors, I being the oldest. All the other white women on the station were married, long settled in the place and, with their husbands, had long lost interest in such expeditions.
Sally was very nervous of the forest, which brought out the protective male in all of us - all except Ralph, who seemed to think it was funny. One afternoon, near the end of our walk, we heard a loud garrumph! nearby in the bush, which was probably a colobus monkey clearing its throat. Sally gave a scream and never stopped running till she reached the car, a full five hundred yards away, while the mean-spirited Ralph nearly laughed his un-gallant head off.
And when we would reach the car, the evening chorus had begun. The whole forest came alive like a great orchestra: a vast throbbing and whistling and screaming, like the opening of The Rite of Spring. Weird hornbills flapped woodenly up to their nests like creatures of the Lost World. Flocks of parrots flew in like clockwork toys, shooting their long whistles.
Otherwise, in the forest, at all times, one heard sounds, but saw little. One of the loveliest afternoon sounds was the call of the emerald-spotted wood dove, which goes: 'Coo! Coo! Coo! Coo-coo-coo-coo-coooooo!' in a dying fall. The Zulus (for the bird is heard all over Africa) say it is saying: 'My father is dead! My mother is dead! My brothers are dead! My sisters are dead! O! O! O-oooooo!' But only in the West African forest have I heard two of the birds singing together in falling harmonic thirds like a pair of flutes.
But as I say, we saw little. Once a troop of colobus monkeys swinging through the trees in their dinner jackets. Sometimes the green ripple of the forest mamba crossing a laterite road. Returning from a friend's house in an outstation one night, I saw a buck with stripes and spots pause in my headlights before passing on into the opposite wall of the bush. An old hand at the club identified it as a bush buck. There were stories of the bush cow, a smaller type of buffalo, but I never saw one. There were stories of leopards but I never saw one either: they are nocturnal creatures and rarely seen anyway.
Every night we heard the scream of the tree bear (hyrax). It was said to scream to frighten other creatures, then drop to the forest floor before climbing another tree. One day my neighbour, Andy Astle, showed me a rhinoceros viper, his gardener had killed. It was the size of a man's arm and had two tusks on its snout, but side by side, more like a wart hog than a rhinoceros. Africans were afraid of snakes and killed them on sight. But most of all, and all over the continent, they fear the harmless chameleon.
One night, returning from the club, I found the forecourt of my house looking like a sand table model of the Battle of Waterloo. It was covered with columns of ants moving all over the place like the armies of Wellington and Napoleon and Blücher's besides. It soon became clear what they were after. All over the battlefield were nodes of concentrated combat. These were fallen grasshoppers which were being devoured by the ants. The globe lamp over my door illustrated the whole scene.
I leapt over the columns, fumbled for my key and quickly opened the door. I switched on the hall light inside. A big mistake, for now both grasshoppers and pursuing ants began to enter the house. I ran for the spray gun from the kitchen - an old-fashioned thing you had to pump - and turned it on the invading columns. It was quite futile: I might as well have hoped to turn back the Chinese army with a Tommy gun. Then the penny dropped. The cause of everything was the lights. I switched off both inside and outside lights and waited. When after about ten minutes I gingerly switched on the outside light again, the whole spectacle had vanished, leaving not a wrack behind.
10 - At Work and Play
Jenny, who had no more race-consciousness than she had self-consciousness or class-consciousness (or any other so-called 'consciousness' except a strong dose of good old Scots moral consciousness), had long since founded a small multiracial social group - the only one which existed in Samreboi, I might say - which began around the nucleus of her famous scrabble parties - a term which excited the derisive laughter of the GM, who was not her friend.
The group consisted mostly of unmarried whites and the more modernistic Africans. After Jenny left they evolved into the more exuberant Monopoly parties, certain features of which would not have been entirely to Jenny's taste - the main such feature being the chatty hour which preceded the actual Monopoly, when we discussed the scandal of the week.
Ghanaians are famous throughout West Africa for their sense of humour, and the object of this humour which delights them most is - themselves: which strikes me as a mark of high civilisation in any people. And of all the Ghanaians I knew, the master exponent of this brand of humour was the personnel manager, Amos Black.
Amos was a tall rangy man with a woolly head, full of restless energy. He had piercing eyes: the eyes of a strong will. 'He's a bright boy,' Des Brennan had said. 'I wonder he doesn't go in for politics.' 'No fear!' was Amos's comment. 'I thought Des was my friend. Does he want to get rid of me?'
Like many Ghanaians of the south, he had acquired his surname from one of those Caledonian vertebrae of the Empire already referred to, either through ancestry or appropriation.
In many African countries is found a curious pair of opposites: one tribe which has all the brains, and another tribe which has the more martial qualities - at any rate, by reputation; on the justice of which I will not comment. So in Rhodesia, there were the Shona and the Matabele; in South Africa, the Xhosas and the Zulus. In Ghana, the corresponding pair was the Fantis and the Ashantis.
Amos put it without prevarication. 'Al
l Fantis are cowards. I am a Fanti and I am a coward, so I know what I am talking about.'
He questioned me more than once (perhaps in a professional sense) about a matter which seemed to obsess him, as to whether one could successfully feign death on the battlefield. ‘I mean, doc, how could they tell?'
He never tired of recounting the story of the famous coup, which toppled Nkrumah in 1966, while he was out of the country staying with his friends in Hanoi; and how the daring deed was done by the Ashantis. 'If it had been left to the Fantis, That Man would be here yet.' The event was precipitated when the rumour got about that Nkrumah wanted to send his army (or at any rate, the disaffected section of it) to Rhodesia to fight Ian Smith - 'so he could look good at the United Nations, and get his army wiped out at the same time,' as Amos lucidly put it.
Then he would tell how Afrifa's battalion swept down from the north and fought a ding-dong match all day in the capital with Nkrumah's Russian-trained guards, while the Fanti armoured battalion stood on the touch line, waiting to see who looked like winning, before intervening at close of play to clinch the match in favour of the rebels.
And the day itself. 'Do I remember the day of the coup! You must know what the country was like at that time. Talk about a police state! If a policeman came to your house, even if you knew it was a simple traffic offence, you sent your wife to the door while you got out the back.
'When the news broke, at first no one could believe it. Some people thought it was a trick of That Man to get his enemies out dancing in the streets so he could arrest them.
'I was sitting at home when the telephone went. When I picked it up all I could hear was funny little noises. Then I thought it sounded like Anokye.' (Anokye was Amos's assistant.) 'Now, as you know, Anokye is an Ashanti, but while he may not have the brains of the Fantis, he doesn't have the courage of the Ashantis either. Finally I said, "Look, Anokye, if you've got something to tell me, you'd better come round to my house."
'Next I hear the scrape of Anokye's car on the gravel outside. I opened the door and Anokye came in with his finger to his mouth, looking over his shoulder as if the spirits were after him. He was making funny little noises in his throat which sounded like "coo! coo! coo!" Finally it dawned on me. I said: "YOU SAY THERE'S BEEN A COUP?!!! - I mean, coo! coo! coo!"'
Nkrumah was succeeded by the sober figure of General Ankrah. The general (now president) paid a visit to Samreboi, and the managers, black and white, were lined up to receive him - a ceremony which Amos did not find entirely comfortable. He told us without shame how when the general got to him, Amos decided his shoe lace was undone (Amos's, that is, not the general's) and bent down to mess about with it, at the same time, with a deft movement of his hip, propelling Anokye, who stood beside him, practically onto the general's bemedalled chest. The simple-hearted Anokye found himself, to his pride and delight, shaking hands with his president, as sole representative of his department, in place of the suddenly indisposed Amos, who needless to say, showed no promise of speedy recovery; leaving the general with no choice but to pass on down the line escorted by a pretty red-faced GM - fiery Welshman at the best of times, as I have said. But at the critical moment, as Amos had anticipated, the press cameras (which took a particular interest in the black managers - too particular for Amos's liking), the cameras flashed, and within a few days, very likely, a photograph on the front page of the Times of Ghana of Anokye shaking hands with President Ankrah landed on Kwame Nkrumah's breakfast table in neighbouring Guinea. Well, while That Man was still alive, you couldn't be too careful!
Then came an outbreak of a perennial trouble: that of illegal timber-taking. Through some obscure arrangement - a relic of the wise but delicate principle of indirect rule, which formed the basis of British colonial policy - the tenure of the forest lands was divided between government and chiefs. The effective power was the government, and negotiations, brisk at any rate by African standards, were pursued smoothly enough with them. But there remained the indispensable discussions with the chiefs, mainly ceremonial though these had become. And a pretty tedious time the company's representatives had of it, according to my informant who had served his time at the business, and whose account, which I imagine is more colourful than strictly accurate, will do.
No such barbarism as 'hustle' is known to any part of the African business world (except maybe in South Africa, but I am referring to the civilised parts), and certainly not in such venerable precincts as the chief's palace, where a working lunch, still more, breakfast, would provoke indigestion by its very idea. In short, a great part of the proceedings was taken up by old gentlemen walking up and down, hitching up their togas, making very long speeches. And sometimes they would invoke the name (in passing, but the 'passing' was to prove a very long excursion indeed), the sacred name of the divine first king of Ashanti - Osei Tutu.
This would bring the proceedings to a sudden stop. Documents would be taken up, a general exit made, and preparations begun, including the slaughter of a statutory number of goats, for the mandatory three days' celebrations due to the holy utterance.
Admittedly a good time would be had by all, including the company's representatives (at any rate, while the thing was still a novelty to them), and in due course all would return to the forum. As a matter of unquestioned courtesy, the old gentleman would be allowed to take up where he left off. And as often as not, the old fool would clear his throat and recommence - 'As I was saying about Osei Tutu!' - and the whole three days' business would start again.
Not surprisingly, the legal niceties referred to rather went over the heads of the populace, who could not understand why they were no longer allowed to cut their ancestral woods, and by what right anyone could call them 'illegal timber-takers'. Anokye was sent to deal with one specially rebellious village. He soon found himself in the middle of a riot and had only time to execute a three-point turn with his Land Rover in three feet of mud, with a speed and skill he had not known he possessed, and extricate himself and companions from what the Times of Ghana might have reported as 'an unfortunate fate'. Not that the mob would have been content with such small fry as Anokye. Their main wrath was reserved not even for the company itself, which to them was an impersonal abstraction, but for that traitor to his own kind, Amos Black.
So Anokye's vehicle was chased out of the village to a chant of 'WE WANT BLACK! WE WANT BLACK!'
As Amos concluded the tale, we commented as one: 'Of course, you're going, Amos! - by popular demand?'
'You must be joking!'
Amos had another trouble on his hands at this time - the return of a particular native called Mensah, with at least two feathers in his cap: a white wife, and an economics degree from Manchester University. He did not allow the former to 'cramp his style', as Amos put it, with the 'local talent'; and that was Amos's problem.
Mensah was presently focussing on the wife of Ebrahim, a clerk in the accounts department. Such liaisons have their problems in small places, so Mensah took Ebrahim's wife out into the bush with him in his Mini. But even that was not plain sailing, or even motoring.
'Now you must understand,' explained Amos, 'that the bush is practically like a cathedral to us.' (And he was not using the poetic imagery I employed in my first chapter.) 'There are so many ancestral spirits and goblins and things that you practically can't have a pee, and certainly not what Mensah had in mind. And Ebrahim's wife being an old-fashioned type, Mensah wasn't getting much joy.
'But it's all right in a house, and somehow Mensah managed to persuade Ebrahim's wife that a motorcar is the same as a house - even his Mini.
'Only I can imagine it's pretty difficult in a Mini, and I believe at one stage Mensah had one leg sticking out of the right window and another leg sticking out of the left window.
'So he decided to risk it at his own house. (Being a Fanti he was too big a coward to risk it at Ebrahim's house.) And I believe he actually enjoyed Ebrahim's wife on the floor of his sitting room while his own wife was asleep in the
bedroom.'
Amos paused as if shocked at his own words.
'Well, even by our standards, that's pretty bad!'
'Well, before long Ebrahim, got to know about it, and I knew there could be murder. I got the two of them together in my office - Mensah and Ebrahim, I mean. I said to Mensah,"Look, Mensah! This has got to stop. We are not living in Accra. You can't carry on like this in a small place like Samreboi." And Ebrahim said, "I'm only a poor clerk, but I've got my rights!" Den what you tink dat clown Mensah said to Ebrahim? He rounded on him and said: "You ought to be proud," he said. "You ought to be proud to get your wife laid by a graduate of Manchester University!"!!!'
I have implied that our little multiracial group was untypical, and that was true. The white members were mostly young unmarried birds of passage (I was a not-so-young unmarried bird of passage), and the Africans were adventurous individualists, like Amos, which most Africans (who are nothing if not conventional) most certainly are not. And most of the whites were as conventional as Surrey: Les Cady was about as typical as Lawrence of Arabia.
In short, most people on the station (of all classes, as well as races) kept to their own kind, as was only natural. They were happy enough to work together, and did so happily, but at home they preferred to be at home. They dined at one another's houses, and the dinner parties were racially unmixed. When not at home, the managers had the club, at which, apart from the bar, there were tennis, snooker, golf, etc, including the swimming pool. The latter was not greatly used: in that torpid climate most people were too overwhelmed even to 'cool off', which the tepid pool was not very good at anyway. In fact, the pool was chiefly used by the children of the African managers, who sprang in and out and ran about with much shouting and laughter and uncertain knowledge of swimming, in which they had certainly received no formal instruction. Most had started life where the only water they had seen was the river (in a few cases the sea), which was used for washing, drinking, fishing and other useful purposes - never for swimming, in which no useful purpose would have been recognised whatsoever, and would rightly be considered a dangerous form of 'exercise', if even the word or the concept existed in their languages. And those who started life in the cities rarely did so in leafy suburbs with private swimming pools. And another thing they never received was any kind of supervision from their parents, even from the tenderest of ages. As one African manager remarked to me, during a discussion of comparative African and European philosophy at the Monopoly/Scrabble Club one night: 'We are careless of our lives.' When Jesus enjoined us to take no thought for the morrow (or much else in the way of safety-consciousness), our black brethren took the words to heart more than most.
Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa Page 8