Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa Read Online Free PDF

it is over. There
is empirical method in this custom, as the unripe plants contain cyanide, and
poisoning has resulted from their premature consumption.
    The festival opens with the
witch-doctors, looking very spooky, smeared with white clay, running through
the streets with antelope tail switches to drive away evil spirits. It finishes
with a grand procession of the chief and other important persons and their
wives being borne on palanquins through the crowded streets.
    On the great day, music (or something)
was provided by the Mango town band, which comprised drums and bugles. One
could take no exception to the drummers, who performed as to the manner born,
but the playing of the buglers was somewhat idiosyncratic. I could only
describe it as 'action playing', after the manner of the famous school of
action painters. Their method consisted in marching up and down the main street
behind the drummers, 'chucking sound about'.
    This was an entertaining interlude
before they headed the main procession, in which they were followed first by a
crowd of young men, firing off the famous 'Dane guns'. These ancient muskets
came, not from Denmark, but Birmingham, and in the sanctity of Victorian trade,
were actually unloaded at a point down the coast, for transport up to Kumasi,
at the same time as Wolseley's troops were disembarking to face the same wares
up country, in the Ashanti war of 1874. But what caught my eye especially were
the two gentlemen who brought up the rear, behind palanquins and all, marching
abreast with sixteenth-century Portuguese helmets on their heads and cutlasses
over their shoulders.
    I had a shrewd suspicion who these might
be, but decided to seek confirmation from the bystanders. I asked at least two
men, and in each case, received the embarrassed reply: 'I don't know how to explain
it in your language.'
    Finally I saw Samson: not the ambulance
driver, but my 'small boy'. A 'small boy' is a second house servant. I first
met him when James crept up to me in his indoor bare feet, after lunch one day,
to inform me that 'someone wants to see you, sah, at the front door'.
    There I found a stalwart young man of
about twenty, who mystified me with the statement: 'Please, sah. I am Samson.
Dr Burns make me be small boy in the school holidays.'
    Dr Burns was my immediate predecessor,
and I certainly wondered at first what strange experiments he had been up to,
involving the temporary conversion of full-grown men to small boys, before
James, who had silently appeared beside me, explained what Samson meant.
    I might also add that many Africans, for
various reasons, mostly economic, like Neddy Seagoon, who came home after
forty-two years at school, spend an indeterminate time on their education.
    A few days after engaging Samson (who
James assured me was indispensable), a little old man appeared at the door, who
informed me that 'Dr Burns let me sleep in the Wendy house' (a structure I had
already observed in the garden). So now I found myself with no less than three
servants, including a gardener. Although I was well aware that for a bachelor
this number was superfluous, I was beginning to learn enough about Africa to
realise that such mercenary calculations were beside the point: this was the
proper noblesse oblige of such a 'big man' as a doctor.
    Samson, perhaps because of so many years
at school, had the unworldliness of the scholar, and could be relied on to give
an honest answer to a question, if only out of pure naivety. So it was on the
present occasion. When I put my question as to the two mysterious officers to
him, he answered simply:
    'Those are the executioners. They cut
the heads off when the chief dies.'
     

7 - Triumph, Tragedy, Victory
     
     
    As I said, I can remember the names of my
first main victims. The name of my first hernia was Sammy.
    I had received some theoretical teaching
in inguinal hernia repair from my old chief, Howell. This dear man had an
unfortunate career. He slaved for years as a