Standish had been a nurse, and people could not grasp that Anna had not the same skill. “We have to know our limitations,” Anna said. “I’d feel easier in my mind if we had a doctor on call.”
Ralph said, “Koos is on call. In effect.”
Koos had his surgery on Victoria Street, in a dusty single-story building with a tin roof. There was a waiting room and a consulting room, and another room at the back where Koos slept on a camp bed. In the yard were two shacks, one for cooking and the other fitted out as the laboratory and sometime cathouse of Koos’s dispenser, Luke Mbatha.
Koos might have been thirty, might have been forty. He had straw-colored hair and a worried face; his smile was rare though his general disposition must, one supposed, be benevolent. He wore stone-colored shorts; his legs were mottled and stringy, his knee joints large and starved. His face and arms were red from scrubbing with a fierce antiseptic soap. Ralph washed his hands once at Koos’s place, and felt that the skin had been taken off them.
Koos had a vast number of patients. He treated them for a few coppers. “But they must pay,” he told Ralph. “If they don’t pay for their treatment they don’t believe in it, you know? If you just give them the medicine, they think, this thing must be rubbish, if he is
Ralph said, “Anna’s trying to persuade our kitchen girl Dearie to bring the new baby down. Anna’s worried about him, she says he’s not gaining weight. Dearie won’t admit there’s anything wrong, but I suppose she must care, mustn’t she? We can’t work out what she’s up to. She’s got colored strings tied round his wrists and his ankles. Yesterday, Anna thought he’d been dropped and got a big bruise on his head, but it turned out to be some ash he’d been rubbed with.”
Koos said, “She’s been to see one of my rivals.”
“No harm, I suppose,” Ralph said.
“Except it makes for delay.” Koos shrugged. “Then, you see, perhaps she thinks it’s some African disease.”
“Are there such things?”
“In people’s minds,” Koos said. “They think there are diseases that white people can’t understand. It’s right, up to a point. If I get a woman in here complains of palpitations, fainting, short of breath, I can listen to her chest and send off a blood sample, but sooner or later I have to say to her, look, what’s your church that you go to? Have you been dancing at your church? Have you got possessed by a spirit?”
“They’re not barbarians,” Ralph said, needled.
Koos’s sandy eyebrows shot up. “No? So quick to learn, man. Do you know what I think? I think we’re all barbarians.”
Ralph always wanted to ask Koos, why are you here? It was like meeting a man with only one leg: you feel desperate to know what has happened to him. Accident? Illness? You want to ask, but you can only hope he’ll tell you.
Six months in Elim. Ralph wrote to his uncle James:
We could manage better if there were thirty hours in a day and nine days in a week, and yet I wonder if we are usefully employed at all. We don’t have much time to stop and think, and I don’t know whether that’s bad or good. But every week we have to make some decision which seems a matter of principle rather than of procedure, and there’s no one we can go to when we want to talk things over. My nearest approach to a friend is our Afrikaner doctor, but though I think he is a good man and he has a lot of experience he looks at the world so differently from us that I can’t go to him for advice, because I probably wouldn’t understand the advice he gives me.
Most of these matters of principle we call “blanket problems”—this is our shorthand for anything that derails us, in the ethical line. Now that the cold weather is here, some of the poorest people come to the door every day to ask for blankets. We have or can get or can knit blankets, but it seems that Mr. and Mrs. Standish, after they had given them out, would visit the recipients in their homes to check that the blankets were really needed and that they had not been sold. Anna and I, we feel terrible about this. It seems demeaning to all concerned. Yet Lucy Moyo says that if we don’t do it, it will be widely understood that we are fools.
What should I do? I feel that, if I had had some training in England, I would have been aware that I would meet such problems of conscience—or am I dignifying them, are they indeed just problems of procedure? I keep saying it: I wasn’t ready to come to Africa. Anna says, what is the use of all this effort? There is nothing an individual can do against a political system which, it seems to us, becomes more regressive and savage by the day. I try to urge people to think ahead, to show initiative, to help themselves, but what’s the point when we know that in five years’ time our town will no longer exist?
Lucy Moyo explained Koos, in her usual easy manner: “The doctor went with some bad type of colored girl.” She laughed. “She thought it was for payment. He thought it was for romance.”
Anna reported it to Ralph. “The colored girl had a baby. A small-town scandal, you know?” She had picked up some Afrikaans now, and her voice had taken on the local accent, the lilt. When she saw something pretty and helpless—a child, a kitten—she spoke in chorus with Lucy and Rosinah: “Ag, shame!”
“Yes, I think I do know,” Ralph said. “And I suppose that it happened in the days when it was only a disgrace, not a crime.” He shook his head. “What happened to the woman and the child, does Lucy know?”
Anna was back to herself, her English tone: “Oh, Lucy wouldn’t stoop to know a thing like that.”
He thought of the doctor scrubbing himself, scouring his hands with the blistering soap. Had Koos a home, other than the back room with the camp bed? Seemingly not; not anymore.
Uncle James wrote back:
My dear Ralph, of course you were not ready to go to Africa. You went out of your own need, not out of the need of the people you were supposed to serve. Don’t blame yourselves for that. It is the usual European way. When we find we lack a sense of purpose at home, we export our doubts; I have known people who—mis-guidedly, in my view—have gone to China to save their marriage.
The problems of our own country seem so complicated, that intelligent people wonder if it can be right to take a stance. It seems a thing only professional politicians can do—as we pay them, they can bear the burden of being simpleminded. But when we think of other countries, we imagine their problems are easy to solve—they are clear- cut, and we are so sure of the right moral line. Why do they make such a muddle of it? It is so obvious what ought to be done.
