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

Author:Warren Durrant [Durrant, Warren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographies & Memoirs, Travel, Personal Memoir, Nonfiction, Retail, Medical
ISBN: 9781291443431
Amazon: 1291443436
Publisher: lulu.com
Published: 2013-07-08T04:00:00+00:00

Beyond the town lay the white farms for twenty miles, and more in some directions; and beyond them the tribal lands (now called 'communal lands'). We covered a number of hospitals and one clinic over an area as large as North Wales, which has since been rationalised to form two districts. There were two mission hospitals, as large as Umvuma; and one of them (Gutu, sixty miles out) was later made into a de facto district hospital.

Gutu marked one boundary between white farmland and tribal land. We had a rural hospital there, where an ambulance was based to cover two further rural hospitals in the tribal lands themselves. Once a week I would visit Gutu and take in one of the other hospitals, except for the week I visited a hospital in the opposite direction - Chilimanzi. Once a week, on another day, I visited our clinic at Lalapanzi, which will be remembered as one of the railway 'watering points'.

I travelled to Gutu in my own car along a metalled road. After the usual clinic and ward round, I would be taken in the Land Rover, banging and snapping like a biscuit tin over the rough dirt roads to the outer hospital: Chinyika or Chingombe, each twenty miles further on. Now we were in the typical tribal lands of Central Africa. We passed villages: not the large villages of West Africa, but small family affairs, often bearing the family name: Moyo; or the family totem: Gudo (baboon), Garwe (crocodile), Tsoko (monkey). There was the family hut, made of mud and wattle and thatched, each in its tribal manner; and round, so that evil spirits would have no corners to lurk in (unlike the rectangular huts of West Africa), though richer people had brick houses which were rectangular with tiled roofs. The women built the walls and the men the thatched roof after. People from neighbouring villages cooperated in the building.

Beside the hut were the granaries, also of mud and wattle and thatched, like tiny huts themselves. There would be the cattle kraal made of wood stakes and woven with branches, to protect the beasts at night. There were overhead holders for storing grass feed. Outside the huts were racks for pots and pans. Everything showed the shapeliness of skilled hands.

Women hoed the fields and reaped the meagre crops of maize and native corns. The men did the ploughing and planting. Young children minded cattle and goats out in the veld all day. Older children walked to school, sometimes ten miles each way, with no food from breakfast till supper, sometimes crossing fords where crocodiles lurked.

Evening was a time of much activity. Women and older girls fetched water from dams and rivers, which they carried in buckets on their heads, cushioned with coils of cloth. Older children watered the beasts at the same time, while boys ran about hunting a hare for the pot with their half-wild, skinny, whippet-like dogs. Women fetched firewood which they carried in bundles on their heads.

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