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

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