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 doct
or!' 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.
One's European informants on these matters would offer explanations (as if they thought they were Professors Frazer or Malinowski) in terms of such nonsense as chimpanzees and the lianas which hung from the trees: but that is the kind of thing Brunis would say, wouldn't they?
But most dreaded of all was Tano, the spirit of the river (which bore his name) who had certainly placed a number of people on my mortuary slab. Amos (who was taking a bit of risk himself in doing so, when you think about it) would use the 'Tano' test (though he was never so facetious as to call it that) in extracting the truth from people he suspected of concealing it.
'You swear?'
'Yes, massa. I swear.'
'You swear by Jesus?'
'Yes, massa. I swear by Jesus.'
'You swear by Tano?'
'Ah - Massa!'
Nobody was going take Tano's name in vain.
9 - The Forest and the River
The forest formed the perpetual backdrop to all our lives, and surrounded the square mile of Samreboi like a green wall. Two roads ran out of town, one north, one south, passing through the outstations on their way to other places. The northern road ran over the river by a Bailey bridge about a mile beyond the town.
What the forest is like now I dare not think. Even at that time the Sahara was marching to the sea at the rate of ten miles a year. This was not due to the work of the timber companies - at least, at that time. Since then the local governments have driven them to cut down the forest as quickly as possible - a fast buck for now and devil take the future! At that time the chief culprits were illegal timber cutters and the growing mass of the population, who cleared the forest to make farms. Short-lived farms, alas! because the soil that supports the forest giants and all that teeming vegetation is thin and fragile, as was demonstrated dramatically when one of the big trees fell. Guess how deep the roots went! - about three feet. Their support came from the buttresses I have described and the interlocking of the canopy.
And the denuded soil was drastically washed away when the rains began and the sluggish brown rivers rose thirty feet and turned into boiling torrents.
The timber companies at that time actually preserved the forest through the system of forest reserves and incremental cutting, whereby only a part equivalent to the annual wastage was taken, so the forest was called the Perpetual Forest in a beautiful book of that name (long out of print) by a colonial forest officer - Collins, I think - a mine of information on every last treasure of the forest.
Once a week as I said I visited one of the outstations. I was driven by a chauffeur. It was well known that doctors were not mechanics, and there was little traffic on the laterite road in case of breakdown, which moreover turned to mud in the rainy season, when the car might get stuck. If that happened, the doctor of course was pressed to remain in his lordly back seat, while the chauffeur did his best or got some help from passing pedestrians, who were never too infrequent.
Sometimes we passed tiny villages where naked children dashed out of huts shouting: 'Docketa! Docketa!' or men and women waved: the women at their duties, the men sitting around with their cronies smoking or drinking palm wine. But though I travelled those roads scores of times, to the last the sudden appearance of the outstation was always a surprise to me. It was the same on the river when a lad would take us fishing in a canoe. Never did I guess which wind of the brown water through the green walls would bring us back to the Bailey bridge, where we were to alight. Such was the monotony of all that featureless beauty.
Sometimes a tree would fall across the road, necessitating a return journey either to town or outstation. Out would come a team with chain saws, and a section would be cut out of the giant trunk (whose thickness was the height of a man) and rolled aside to let us through. I had a photograph of a friend of average height standing against the cross-section of such a log, which must have been near the base for, so far from his equalling its diameter, he came no more than half way up it, like the minute hand of a clock at half past the hour.
At the clinic I would see cases that the medical assistants there had screened for me over the previous week: a hernia, a baby with malnutrition, an old person with heart failure - patients often needing admission to hospital. The ambulance would be sent for them on my return to the hospital. Urgent cases arriving at the clinic in office hours would be transferred to the hospital, after calling for the ambulance on the station telephone. But most of the urgent cases got themselves to the hospital direct. And they came either to clinic or hospital by many means: in the local headmaster's car or contractor's van, if they were lucky; by canoe down the river, or slung on a bamboo hammock,
carried by a couple of strong and devoted friends; and when available the more regular service known as the 'mammy lorry', the main bus service - fleets of such vehicles run by those pillars of West African trade, the 'mammies' or market women.
And I never failed to educate the MAs at the clinic through the cases presented, which I early recognised as the most important purpose of such a visit.
After the clinic I would drop in on friends, usually for a cup of coffee; but at Wadjo I had a standing invitation to lunch. John, the mechanic, lived with his African mistress, and while she prepared the fufu (which I was learning to relish, especially with a delicious palm oil stew), he would play his only record: Beethoven's Violin Concerto. Sitting in the cane armchairs with our beers, listening to that utterly incongruous music, with the gloomy forest pressing in on all sides, we felt we were keeping some sort of flag flying.
Walter was the mechanic at the northern outstation, which was called Brudjo. He lived with his wife Maria and their two little girls. They were an Italian family. He was an exuberant little man as well as a clever mechanic. He had fitted up his car to play 'We were all in the garden playing leapfrog' (or whatever the Italians call it), with which he announced his arrival on his visits to town.
Walter's Mediterranean logic sometimes clashed with the local culture.
'Massa, dee tractor never fit.'
'So!' retorted Walter. 'Why don't you take him to the witch doctor?'
'Ah, massa, he never savvy him proper.'
'But he savvy your mammies, your pickins, no?' Which was a kind advertisement for me.
No reply.
I had served in Trieste with the British Army, and had a fair knowledge of Italian. Walter and Maria came from the same city, so we had something to talk about and in. One day he invited me and an English couple to lunch.
Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa Page 6
