Which some of the whites much resented: the lack of supervision of the black children, I mean. Their own children were closely supervised by their parents, who felt uncomfortably responsible for the black children too. They felt morally bound to hang around until all the little black tadpoles were safely off the premises, when they wanted to be off to the bar, to say nothing of their suppers. And any white parent will understand their feelings.
For a boring month or two I had to take my turn as chairman of the club committee, and one morning a white manager rang me up at the hospital to complain about the dereliction of the black parents. In turn, in what I thought was my official capacity, I got in touch with Solomon, whose default had been especially castigated by the complainant. In short, Solomon's children had formed a conspicuously large proportion of the little black free-floating bodies (in more ways than one) in the pool the previous Sunday. Solomon sounded very penitent and promised to do something about it. Somehow the matter reached the ears of the GM - maybe that was what Solomon had 'done about it'. At any rate, the GM got on to me and explained the constitution of the Samreboi Club, which included no connection with the swimming pool. That was the exclusive province of the GM. (Maybe Solomon had an idea of this. I may say he was a good friend and was not trying to get me into trouble.) The GM explained this to me with all courtesy, but I could see I had got myself into a culture clash of long standing from which I was rescued by the GM as Amos had rescued me from the politics of labour problems. And I could also see that the GM had a trickier problem to deal with than Amos's.
British mothers-to-be were sent home to UK to have their children, and the children sent home for schooling even at primary school age, and came out in the school holidays. This subject first entered my life on my first day in the country at the beach club of the hotel, when I was accosted by a very persistent Dutchman on the matter. 'Vot is the thing vith this International School?' he pressed me, who had not the least idea what he was talking about. 'All the teachers are English, but the English don't send their kids to it. All the kids there are Dutch and Germans and French and things like that. I send my kids there, but the English don't send their kids there, only all the teachers are English.' (I may say he had had a few.) 'So tell me, vot's the matter vith this International School? Vy don't the English send their kids to it?'
I forget how I wriggled out of that one - I suppose I told him it was my first day in the country. He seemed to think I was Her Majesty's High Commissioner. I need not have bothered. The questions were all rhetorical. He was thinking aloud, and thinking darkly.
'I tell you vot it is,' he said. 'The companies pay for the English kids to go to school in England. Now vot I vont to know is, vy don't they pay for the Dutch and German kids to go home to school?'
Well, not being in fact 'HE', I was not in a position to answer that question. But in time it made me think - or rather it became a factor in my growing thoughts about my whole position in Africa.
For as I said, as I lazed on the river with Les, the continent was laying its hold on me. I did not know it - I had some ideas of Australia as the next, and permanent, step (for I am not by nature a wanderer, as I shall shortly explain). But it was at work on me - and 'work' is the operative word: for not only was the deep charm of the continent seducing me, so much more was the work itself. On my first excited letters home (which were all about medical adventures and must have been a bit much even to him) my old partner and friend in England had commented, 'You're in your element, that's for sure.'
So somewhere in my heart I wanted to stay in Africa - and stay for good. But I was a normal man with a normal man's desires for wife and family and home. And I could see that was what even the married white folk in Samreboi did not have.
They had one foot in Africa and one foot in Europe, and God knows where their lives were. Most of their money was paid in Europe, and their children received expensive education there (at least the British did). But that was not what I called a life.
For what I am working up to is my great thesis: in Africa (and places like it) there are two types of European - sojourners and settlers.
I do not wish to run ahead of myself. The thesis referred to matured through much living and thinking (and some pain) over many years. But, as I have hinted, I felt dissatisfied with the situation of the expatriate in West Africa, which I have described. Though many of them spent their whole working lives there, they were still what I call 'sojourners'. They spent their long leave at home, they sent their children home to school, and eventually retired to what they called 'home'.
This is no denigration. Such people have done, and continue to do, good work. Moreover, it is now almost impossible to work in Africa on any other terms, and in a reduced form at that: the form of the short-term contract. The days are past when people went to Africa on the terms they go to Canada or Australia: the terms of the immigrant.
And those, vaguely, were the terms I had in mind, which in Africa were always called the terms of the settler.
The first-water settlers in Africa are the Afrikaners of South Africa. Indeed, they would not even recognise the term 'settler'. The last settlers, as far as they are concerned, were the 1820 Settlers, who were all rooineks (Englishmen) anyway. The Afrikaners called themselves (in their own secret language, at any rate) 'Africans', though as far they were concerned, in its English form, the word meant 'Kaffirs'.
I am jumping ahead, but before we move south, I will affirm that nobody ever accused the Afrikaners of what I sometimes called 'flirting' with Africa: as I have already hinted, they were married to the place.
Now I was far from that stage, but I can remember a significant conversation with the GM over Sunday lunchtime drinks at the club. I asked him whether they had ever thought of opening an English-speaking primary school.
There would be nothing 'racialistic' about this. The African managers would welcome it for their kids: most primary education in Ghana was in the vernacular. They would have readily recognised the advantage for their children of primary education in English.
The GM said they had thought about it, but there was not the demand, and I had to leave it at that. The reader will perceive the direction of my thoughts: I was against all this to-ing and fro-ing anti-family business.
There I will leave the subject for now: as far as it had developed in my mind.
Les Cady (who was technically a sojourner but spiritually a settler - indeed, I believe, like me, he will spend the first thousand years of eternity between the forests and plains of Africa, when the call comes), Les had a theory which I have learned to appreciate more profoundly since: for indeed, it is a profound theory, and has added its weight to my sojourner-settler thesis. As he had naturally given more thought to it than I to mine, he had defined it more closely, which I had yet to do. He called it the 'three tour theory'.
'On your first tour,' said Les, 'you drink one finger of whisky in your glass and think the Africans are angels. On your second tour you take three fingers of whisky and think they are devils. On your third tour you take two fingers and settle down to a comfortable view which hopefully is permanent.'
Further than that he did not elaborate. He was a philosopher of the slow pipe-smoking school. I may say he was not a member of the Monopoly Society, which he probably considered, perhaps rightly, as an affair for first tourers (or even tourists).
He did not believe in miscegenation, which he thought brought out the worst in both breeds; and even wondered if he had not overstretched things in marrying a Pole. He expressed these genetical opinions, including the last, in the presence of his wife, who heard them without comment; which in a Polish lady must have signified agreement as to the main proposition and wifely acquiescence in the codicil - as Jeeves might have put it; meaning, in Bertie Wooster's words: otherwise there would have been jolly old fireworks!
There were actually two clubs in the town: the Samreboi Club, which was for managers, and was fifty per cent black; and the Forest Club, f
or the workers, which was wholly black. Members of the first club were encouraged to patronise the Forest Club occasionally, in an officerly sort of way, to encourage the lads - who needless to say, would not have received much encouragement if they had tried it the other way about.
When we (meaning almost exclusively the bachelors) dropped into the Forest Club on a boring Sunday afternoon, or seduced by the jolly sounds of a Saturday night dance, which were rarely echoed in the Samreboi Club, we were treated like royalty. At the dances large if battered armchairs were manoeuvred for us, and beers pressed upon us by hands which could afford them abysmally less than our own. Other times we would join the crowd at the bar. On one occasion Ralph found himself beside two gentlemen from the Ivory Coast who, of course, spoke French, and a jolly conversation ensued.
Standing by was a beefy foreman - Henry, who did not wish his underlings to think him, though a Ghanaian, ignorant of the great world beyond. After listening in to the exchange for a minute or two with a very wise look indeed, he explained to the bumpkins: 'Dat's dee French language dey are spikkin'. But dem boys for Ivory Coas' is on'y spikkin' pidgin French. Mistah Philipp is spikkin' dee proper English French.'
Ralph and I attended at least one Saturday night hop at the Forest Club. As soon as we entered, the usual armchairs and beers were produced, under the direction of the same Henry, a bearded black Falstaff, who smoked a large Meerschaum pipe. Henry was a sidesman at the Anglican church, a member of the PCC as vicar's warden, and therefore well known to me. When he had made sure we were comfortable and had everything we wanted, I gazed into the throng of dancers, amongst whom I thought I recognised one of my nurses. (As a matter of fact, she was not.)
'Who is that girl, Henry?'
When the girl had been sufficiently identified, Henry laid aside his pipe, breasted the sea of dancers until he reached the girl, whom he briskly separated from her astonished partner by grabbing her by the hair, dragging her after him like a sheep in the market, and flinging her into an empty armchair beside me.
Reappropriating his pipe as a pointer, he instructed the girl: 'Dee docketa want you. You go wid him. You get a bath. You pleasure him, and when dee docketa say fack off, you go for house one time!'
So far from resenting this treatment, the girl (who had probably never heard of Germaine Greer) sat back with an expression of the utmost complacency, and look-at-me-I'm-the-doctor's-girl written all over her.
I thought I owed her a turn of the floor, at any rate. Then I resumed my seat. She calmly resumed her seat beside me.
Presently Henry returned. He had evidently expected more progress. He removed his pipe from his mouth. 'Doan' you want dat one, docketa?'
'Actually, Henry, I only wanted to dance with her.'
Without a word, Henry once more discarded his pipe, grabbed the girl again by her woolly head, and flung her back into the pool of dancers like an unwanted fish, her eyes nearly popping out of her head in dismay and astonishment.
Teresa was a pretty girl of seventeen. She had sickle-cell disease, for which there was then, and is now, little effective treatment. It was heart-breaking to see the young face creased and crying with the bone-breaking pains of the disease in its acute bouts, as she lay and writhed on the hospital bed.
She followed up in outpatients and was as merry then as any other African young girl. As I passed her in the waiting queue, she smiled and chanted without shame: 'I lav you!'; which was some compliment to a bald-headed old man of forty. Nor was she at all shy of the sympathetic grins which accompanied her on all sides.
With all the gallantry I could muster, I felt the least I could do was to reply: 'I love you too, Teresa!'
Bigger happy grins and approving 'eh-eh's' all round!
The sequel came the following Sunday as I left for church. There was Teresa at the front door. 'I have come!' she announced with a happy smile. As I closed the door behind me, her eye fell on the hymn book in my hand, and the smile vanished. 'O! You are going to church?'
Once again, I felt the least I could do was give her a lift back to her village.
At the London office they had touched on the European patients. Not much trouble with the men, they said cheerfully: they have their work to keep them occupied. The women are the trouble. They have nothing to do and are bored. I do not know what the ladies would have thought of that opinion, and I never asked them. At least I found that neither they nor their men folk gave me much unnecessary trouble: they were glad to have a doctor in such a place at all, and seemed to consider his time.
It is true the men were happy at their work. The money was good, but it would have held neither the others nor myself but for the challenge of the work. For in Africa, where skilled men (and women) are so thin on the ground, everyone's job undergoes a certain elevation of responsibility.
This must be obvious even to the lay reader in my own case. How many family doctors in England do caesarean sections?
And it was true for everybody else. Mechanics became engineers, bookkeepers became accountants, general managers only fell short of deities. And this went down to the grass roots also, to one's subordinates. I have already said how the maternity assistants delivered breeches (something a GP no longer does in England) and the medical assistants were mini doctors.
In short, as well as aspiring upwards, one had to delegate downwards. And sometimes one delegated things which one had done once but had come to forget. And one such sad case was Sam's, the chief engineer.
As he grew older and the climate weighed heavier on him, Sam saw fit to delegate. He delegated the entire telephone system to his most promising technician, whom we shall call Kwasi. Now I should explain that one's responsiblities expanded outwards as well as upwards. Just as I ranged between surgery and public health, besides the more usual engineering tasks of road-making and bridge-building, Sam embraced the telephone system too. But as he felt the strain he leaned more and more on Kwasi until he rather lost his touch with the technical side of telephones. (For I might say that later, in my general enthusiasm for my job, I once got a radiographer to teach me to take X-rays; but never having kept it up, for the life of me, now, I would not know where to start.)
This would not have mattered, except that Sam had a northern directness, which was sometimes felt in those southern climes as downright rudeness. At any rate, that is how Kwasi felt it.
Kwasi downed tools. He did not sulk in his tent, or even his house. Why should he? Africans, as D H Lawrence said of the Italians, are not creatures of the home like the introvert denizens of northern lands: they are the outgoing citizens of the street, the forum and the tavern.
In Kwasi's case it was the tavern; and there, although he was not Sam's true love, he sat him down.
And the telephones in Samreboi fell silent. And what is more, Sam could not get them going again.
This did not please the GM, who as a Welshman did not take kindly to silence, telephonic or otherwise. He told Sam to do something about it - quick!
Sam, in his Gaullist fashion, issued a command to Kwasi in his tavern (by special messenger, of course) to get back to work - or else! Kwasi replied (by return of messenger) that he required an apology first. Sam's reply to that may be imagined.
And this is where Amos came in. I never inquired into the full details, but I gather that it ended with Sam eating rather more humble pie than Kwasi. As I have hinted before, the paradoxical obduracy of the African can wear down what Kipling called the 'granite of the ancient north'.
West Africa in those days was run by gentlemen amateurs, white and black - or at least, competent amateurs (and in my experience, most of them were gentlemen); for I might say, even the great United Africa Company was not a charitable instititution, and would not carry duds for long. Qualifications were considered, and looked for, but what counted was not so much what you knew (still less, who you knew), but what you could do on the ground. There was no room for duffers, and there was no room for funkers.
(In passing, I m
ight add that it was not surprising people had called the UAC the real government of West Africa: it was greater than most people knew, and in its house were many mansions; not only in British but French and Belgian Africa too. And the company had one great commandment: THOU SHALT NOT BREAK A CONTRACT. You would not actually be nailed to a tree for this offence, even in the Northern Territories, but sure as heaven or hell, you would never get a job in West Africa again - and I mean all West Africa. One awful example will serve.
Finding life a bore on his particular station, a certain Mr A N Other applied for what seemed a more sexy job, advertised in the Times of Ghana, with a French company on the Ivory Coast. Perhaps he was attracted by the name: Société Heureuse du Soleil de l'Ouest Africain, or perhaps he remembered the famous filles de joie he had met on short leave in Abidjan. But apply he did, not imagining for a moment that the Happy Society had the remotest connection with the dull old African Water Closets, where he felt he was wasting away his young life.
Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa Page 9