by Robyn Scott
Here, halfway down a small side street, we stopped outside the dingy Three Sisters bottle store. Adverts for Castle Lager and Chibuku, the horrible smelling sorghum beer, covered its walls. Empty cans and fried chicken wrappers littered the surrounding red dirt. Thin, mangy mongrels nosed through the greasy paper and bones.
Both the bottle store and Dad’s clinic, which stood on the opposite side of the road, buzzed with customers. Not unusual for the end of the month: beer and private doctors – in that order – were two considerable drains on the monthly paycheck. In the villages, where much of the wealth that afforded such luxuries lay in cattle, Dr. Meyer’s old clinic days had followed the cattle-selling days, when the bottle stores too fared well.
But today, even for a post-payday spending spree, the Phikwe clinic was busy. And more than that: an air of recent excitement seemed to linger amongst the clusters of people who sat chatting beneath the trees in front of the small white clinic, framed by the vast boulders of the koppie that loomed up behind the building.
Inside the waiting room, all of the plastic chairs that lined the walls were occupied, small children and babies consigned to the floor or their mothers’ laps. Everyone was black, except for one flustered-looking white woman, who stood in a corner pretending to study posters that advised you to eat more green vegetables and to beware of STDs.
She smiled and rolled her eyes at Mum, giving the conspiratorial, despairing look that whites shared in long, slow Botswana queues. Mum just nodded and said a general, cheery ‘Dumela’ to the room.
After a few minutes, Dad’s nurse, Maria, emerged from the consulting room to summon the next patient. “Dumela, Mrs. Scott,” she said, giggling as Lulu rushed forwards and enveloped her white skirts in a hug. “Ah, you are a naughty one.” She chuckled, patting Lulu’s head.
We followed Maria into the examination room, where Dad greeted us with a secretive grin and beckoned us towards the storeroom.
He dismissed our stream of questions. “Patience, chaps. Patience.”
The sharp, minty smell of wintergreen was eye-wateringly strong in the storeroom. On one wall, high shelves held bottles and tubs of medicines, labelled and ready to be given to patients. There were also boxes of rubber gloves, needles and syringes, and a collection of small red and green food-colouring bottles that Mum reluctantly bought for Dad when she did the grocery shopping.
The colouring was added to white liquid medicines before they were given to the patients, who believed colourful medicines worked better than white ones. Using food colouring was one of Dr. Meyer’s old practices, which – as a purely aesthetic modification to effective medicines – Dad said was an acceptable concession to local beliefs. And while Mum objected, both in principle and because the use of artificial colourings in medicines so contradicted her and Dad’s history with natural medicine, Dad just said, “In this environment, something has got to give.”
Dad also bought gold- and silver-coloured vitamin pills instead of the white ones usually dispensed by the government clinics. But here he stopped. Some went much further. One notoriously greedy doctor had different-coloured stethoscopes, for which he charged patients different fees, starting with black – the cheapest and least effective – and finishing, at the other end of the price and potency range, with silver and finally gold.
In the middle of the room, instead of the usual rows of empty bottles waiting to be filled with medicines, a large cardboard box stood on the sorting table.
Dad lifted two big buckets of tablets off the lid of the box.
“Meet your first python, guys,” he said, pulling back the cardboard flaps with a flourish.
The black, brown, and white patterned body curled up inside was the biggest, longest snake I had ever seen. Much bigger than the picture in the Snakes of Southern Africa book; too big even to fit comfortably in the bottom of the large box, its fat coils piled on top of each other in several layers.
We all gasped.
The python had been the last of the great snakes to elude us. The others had all eventually appeared in full view around – or sometimes inside – the house: mambas, cobras, puff adders. Once, a slim green boomslang, quivering in the bougainvillea on the bathroom windowsill. All except for the rock-loving, buck-eating python, not satisfied by plants for cover and mice for dinner.
“Can I touch it?”
“Me too.”
“Me first.”
“Hang on a sec.” Dad lowered his hand towards the snake. Then, very quickly, he grabbed its fist-thick neck, holding the head, with its non-poisonous but piercing fangs, safely immobile.
The snake shifted irritably as we stroked its thick, cool body. It was hard, seeing and touching the beautiful coils like this, to imagine it strangling goats – or possibly small children – and swallowing them whole.
On one side a fist-size patch of scales had been ripped off, revealing raw red flesh.
“The poor chap was pelted with stones before I got to it,” said Dad. “But it’s not too deep, and I’ve put a bit of antiseptic on.”
“Why the excitement outside?” asked Mum, gently prodding the edges of the wound.
Dad explained that he’d found the python after noticing a group of people hurling stones at something in the boulders of the koppie behind the clinic. He’d rushed up the koppie, stopped the stone throwing, and pulled the snake out from between the rocks.
“Kill it, kill it!” the growing crowd chanted, as Dad picked up the struggling python.
“No, no,” Dad shouted. “Friend. Friend.”
But the shouting only mounted. The Batswana’s general indiscriminate loathing of snakes was almost impervious to argument. Dad had tried often before with Matthews and Ruth: explaining that, left alone, snakes generally stay clear of humans, that they hardly ever bite people, and that they no more deserve to die than any other bush animal quietly minding its own business. But even when Ruth asked him to kill a harmless mole snake she’d found in the kitchen, and Dad replied that it could harm no one, Ruth remained unconvinced. “Ah, they are very bad!”
Now, Dad started to speak again but hesitated. He cleared his throat and stared at Mum with an amused smile.
“And?” prompted Mum.
“Well, I held its head up to mine,” he said. “To show it really was a friend.” He paused again, looking slightly embarrassed. “And I kissed it.”
“Where?”
“On the top of its head.”
“Goodness gracious, Keith.”
“Couldn’t resist.”
“Show-off!” Mum laughed. “You’re worse than Ivor.”
For once, Dad didn’t seem offended by the comparison.
“Made me a bit of a hero, I think,” he grinned.
After the kiss, amid wild cheers and laughter from the crowd, Dad carried the python to safety in the clinic. Midway down the koppie, it pooed, the enormous brown pile landing squarely on one sock and shoe.
Python poo turned out to be the most durable and foul-smelling poo in the world, and no amount of scrubbing that evening would banish the stench. Lamenting his bad luck and the loss of his favourite pair of shoes, Dad put them aside for gardening. “At least” – he smiled ruefully – “the kiss should do wonders for business.”
A year into his practice, he could now smile about it – now that he no longer actually needed wonders done for business. During the first few months in his new Phikwe clinic, Dad had spent most of his time in blue overalls, sawing wood and erecting splendid cupboards for all the medicines he wasn’t dispensing. In his first month, he saw, on his busiest day, five patients, and we soon stopped enquiring about the dispiriting figures.
It was only after about six months of agonising waiting and intensive interior decorating that word of a new doctor and a new clinic finally got around. Thereafter, however, his numbers rose steadily, and by the time he had to replace his shoes, Dad was seeing enough patients to keep him busy throughout the two and a half days a week he spent at the Phikwe cli
nic.
When Dad established this clinic, there was only one other private doctor, a gentlemanly Indian man, practising in Phikwe. Dad’s growing practice had, however, little effect on Dr. Cho-thia’s busy clinic: most of Dad’s patients were either old patients of Dr. Meyer’s, who had previously made the long trek to his village clinics, or those who otherwise relied mainly on government doctors. Despite a free government health service, private doctors are widely believed in Botswana to be more effective, and worth the expense. Add to this the country’s relatively high per capita income – relative, that is, to the rest of the continent – and there is no shortage of patients for good private doctors.
On the occasions that one of Dr. Chothia’s patients did visit Dad, Dad would ask them why, interested to hear any complaints that might help him hone his own service. He never got further, however, than obstinate repetitions of ‘Ga ke itse.’ Worried he was missing out on crucial strategic information, he eventually consulted Maria. It had, she told him, nothing to do with speed of service, medicines dispensed, or bedside manner – for all of which Dr. Chothia had a good reputation. Often, she explained, if one doctor’s medicines did not work immediately, patients would simply go straight to another. “And sometimes,” she said, “we just prefer white doctors. We don’t trust the Indians’.”
The whites also preferred white doctors. But almost all the whites in Phikwe worked for the mine, the heart and the lifeblood of the town. And the mine families received free treatment from the mine doctors, who were, conveniently, all white too. Of the few whites that did try Dad, most defected to Dr. Chothia, complaining bitterly that Dr. Scott didn’t keep an appointment book, working on a first-come-first-served basis. Which meant they had to wait for hours in the waiting room, “with everyone else.”
Later, there would be one exception.
Half a decade on, when a greater horror dwarfed the discomfort of the crowded waiting room, whites would begin visiting Dad for HIV tests. The mine doctors did HIV tests too. But they also played golf, and attended dinner and cocktail parties with their wives, who played bridge and tennis. The doctors were senior figures in the mine hierarchy and upstanding, well-connected members of Phikwe mine society. For anyone mixing in similar circles and worried about their HIV status, the prospect of something slipping out over a glass of wine or on a pillow, was unbearable. Even if the result was negative, questions might be raised: about the motivation for the test, about whether that scurrilous rumour might actually be true.
♦
For the moment, though, Dad’s Phikwe clinic was essentially black.
Dad’s village clinics were also all black. But while his Phikwe patients were often well educated, less keen on traditional healers, and spoke good English, his other patients – drawn from small villages or cattle posts – were, as a rule, the opposite. And while Dad might have been joking about snake kissing increasing his business, doctors’ popularity was indeed governed by much more than their effectiveness.
Most important, necessary or not, patients paying for a private doctor expected a comprehensive examination, at least one injection, and a wide range of medicines – preferably brightly coloured – to take home. The system Dad inherited from Dr. Meyer, the most successful private doctor in the country, catered for both preferences, while being quick enough to make the relatively low fee per patient profitable.
The consultation price was fifty pula: around a third of the monthly salary of the lowest-paid domestic and farm workers, many of whom were counted among his patients. The fee, which included all medicines, was equal for all patients, and Dad called it socialist medicine, because the hypochondriacs subsidised the really sick patients. As a dispensing doctor, he also provided an additional service in the villages, where the nearest pharmacy often involved a journey of several hours.
A straightforward consultation took Dad just under five minutes, which began when the patient, already naked beneath a blue gown, walked into the examination room.
Over the next five minutes, Dad took a history while giving the patient a full-body examination, which included a rectal examination on almost every man and a vaginal examination on every woman. Then he injected every patient, whatever age, even if it was just a shot of vitamin B12. Finally he sent each away with at least one tub of ‘rubbing’ ointment, several packets of pills, and a bottle of some sort of liquid medicine. All this was in addition to any specific requirements, and every patient, their hands full of medicines, would leave prodded, palpated, and thoroughly satisfied. There was no time or place in this new regime for alternative therapies, and Dad abandoned them all.
However, as Dad had discovered soon after we arrived in Botswana, in the minds of many of his village patients, there was more still to the powers of a private doctor.
♦
Tonota village, half an hour’s flight north of Selebi, was from the start Dad’s busiest village clinic. At Lesenepole, he spent just a few hours, flying back to his Phikwe clinic for the afternoon. The queue of patients at Tonota, many travelling from the nearby city of Francistown, could take him all day. In the early months, Tonota had been particularly important in supplementing the sluggish Phikwe clinic, which Dad established from scratch, instead of the easier route of taking over an existing practice.
Then one day, suddenly, patient numbers at Tonota mysteriously began to drop.
Bemused but not overly worried, Dad put it down to an unfortunate fluke, a slow month. A few weeks later, he had his explanation. His clinic cleaner informed him that Dr. van der Westhuizen, a private Afrikaans doctor working in the area, had changed his clinic day to coincide with the one day a week that Dad visited Tonota.
“That’s not all,” said Dad, storming into the house, red with indignation, “the rascal has moved to a building just near mine.”
Over the following quiet weeks, when Dad’s nurses had time to wander to the local takeaway for a sadza and greasy fried chicken lunch and a gossip, they heard that Dr. van der Westhuizen was spreading rumours that Dr. Scott was a bad doctor.
Dad was stuck. He had no real evidence. Even if he reported Dr. van der Westhuizen, and the legendarily slow and inefficient Health Department did act on the complaint, it would take months.
Every week Dad returned, furious, bearing news of some new slander.
“The rotter has been intercepting people on the way to my clinic,” he fumed, “diverting them to his own. Bloody dkeltum. Wish there was a way to teach him a lesson.”
Mum said, “I’m sure he’ll learn his lesson one day. Ratbags like that usually get their comeuppance.”
“I’d prefer him to get it now.”
“Well,” said Mum cheerfully, “think of it this way, the more badly he behaves, the sooner he’s bound to get it.”
In the face of the full force and creativity of Mum’s optimism, argument was fruitless. Dad shrugged and laughed, “You know best, Lin.”
♦
One day, a few months later, Dad arrived to a packed waiting room at Tonota.
No, Dad was told, the doctor had not left. He’d been deserted, in disgust.
Dr. van der Westhuizen’s clinic was just beside the small dirt runway. The week before, at the sound of Dad’s plane approaching, he had hurried outside. Standing on the dust in front of his waiting patients, he’d muttered angrily and shaken his fist at the descending plane.
In the eyes of his audience, he was trying to bring down Dr. Scott’s plane with some kind of curse. Word flew around the stores, water pumps, and bars of the village, and it was not long before another much more damaging conclusion was drawn.
Dr. van der Westhuizen had been practising at the same time as the great Dr. Meyer. It was already public knowledge that many doctors had resented Dr. Meyer – the busiest doctor in Botswana, who hadn’t even lived in Botswana. Every day, ignoring the border, Dr. Meyer had flown in across the Limpopo from his farm in South Africa. Once some of the local doctors had complained, and Dr. Meyer had been stopped
from entering. The public fury was so great, however, that the government had granted him special dispensation to enter Botswana without going through the normal customs and immigration formalities.
Then Dr. Meyer had crashed, and Dr. van der Westhuizen was later seen cursing Dr. Scott. Dr. van der Westhuizen, the reasoning went, must have obviously and unforgivably cursed and killed Dr. Meyer to finally get rid of him.
Dad’s clinic became steadily busier. Not long afterwards, Dr. van der Westhuizen closed his. Later he left altogether and returned to South Africa.
∨ Twenty Chickens for a Saddle ∧
Four
Ngaka and MmaNgaka
Ngaka. ‘Doctor’. Magic word, in Botswana. Even Mum had a special name. Mma Ngaka, wife of the doctor – hotline to Dad, which could be inconvenient for Mum.
“Dumela, Mma Ngaka.”
“Dumeta, Rra,” said Mum, smiling at the thin man standing behind her in the queue. She turned quickly back to face the till and murmured something to the three of us who sat sprawled on the floor, immobilised by boredom and heat.
The line in the stuffy little hardware store was stationary. Four or five people waited in front of us. Behind us, the tail of the queue rounded the end of the nail, screw, and bolt aisle. No one was going anywhere, and a discussion about ailments, should it start, would be inescapable. So Mum made a point of looking busy with her children, of being unusually sympathetic to our whining.
We had ‘popped in’ after the weekly grocery shop in Phikwe for a few odds and ends: sandpaper, paint, glue, drill bits. Now, half an hour later, the already ‘wilted lettuce would be slimy brown on the outside, and the milk would be curdling on the backseat.
At the till, moving as if the hot air was syrup, a brightly clothed, enormously fat Motswana woman prodded buttons on the cash register. Only her mouth was animated, smiling and firing a stream of rapid Setswana at her customers. Other customers chatted amongst themselves. No one else seemed to mind the wait.
“My kidneys are bad.” The man behind Mum pulled a face. “Botlhoko. Botlboko.” He tapped his shirt in the vicinity of his kidneys. “I need to see the doctor.”
