Free Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa by Warren Durrant

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 doctor!' 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