Mortals

“Good God.”

“If I dress you up, say, and put things in different pockets and so on, it doesn’t have the same power.”

Eros, he thought… Oh my.

She said, “I tack different items to different body parts.”

“My naked body.”

“Yes.”

“And this was your own idea, not something the good doctor suggested.”

“No, my very own.”

“Using my body as a sort of bulletin board. I guess I’m flattered. And so where on my body would you tack say the most important thing in an ensemble that you wanted to remember?”

“Try and guess. Where would I put the seminal item?”

“Shame on you. Ahem. Well. You were going to give me your doctor’s mission statement.”

“Don’t call it that again, if you don’t mind.

“It wasn’t something he was eager to talk about. It wasn’t an announcement. And how would you like it if someone was being so bold as to ask you why you were in Africa, you yourself, why? You wouldn’t like it. You’d be taken aback. But of course it’s a legitimate question to ask any non-African who’s hanging around in Africa. It’s just that it doesn’t normally get asked, people are too polite. The answer to the question of why people turn up in Africa is never simple. Look at us. But he was asked, so he answered.”

“Don’t be defensive.”

“I’m not. And one other thing, just refer to him as Doctor Morel or just Morel if you can’t stand to call him Davis. You’ve met him now. He introduced himself to you as Davis. I don’t particularly want to hear good doctor or your doctor anymore. So call him Morel, which is probably what he is to you. Call him that. Calling him Morel has a slight touch of hostility to it, which you have toward him, so be up front. It’s fine with me.”

“Done,” he said.

“Pointless hostility I might add.”

Say nothing, he thought.

“So. What he said. There are three gifts, donations was his actual term, three donations the white world has given Africa, three poisoned gifts that have wrecked or distorted Africa’s own course of development, however that might have come out if Africa had just been left alone a little longer. These are perduring, his word, donations, things persisting long after the physical occupation of Africa ended, persisting long after independence.

“The three donations are, one, plantation agriculture… two, the nation-state… and three, the Christian religion.

“There was a parenthesis on slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, which would normally be included among the main poisoned gifts. He leaves it out because, even though it stimulated local slave-trading into something much more monstrous than it already was, it’s over with. And there were even worse sponsors, like the Muslims. The Arabs, that is.

“This he sort of rushed through. He sees himself in some ways, at least, as a beneficiary of white or Western civilization, an African beneficiary to boot. And he feels an obligation to do something about what the West has done to Africa.”

Ray contained himself.

“And he thinks Africa is dying.

“Obviously nothing can be done about the nation-state system.

“And nothing can be done about plantation agriculture. And here there was a little exchange with Kerekang, who wanted to know if Davis was including extractive industries, like mining and timbering, in the category of things that nothing can be done about, to which the answer was yes. I would say also that Samuel Kerekang was reserving his position on whether or not something could be done about agriculture, if somehow or other export agriculture couldn’t be supplanted by something else, but he agreed that it was a titanic problem.

“But something can be done about Christianity, which Davis thinks has had the worst effects of the three. So the major thing he is pledged to do… in addition to his medical work… is to lift the yoke of Christianity from the neck of Africa, help to. I don’t exactly see who he’s going to be helping, since nobody else is doing it that I know of. But that was his formulation.

“Also, I know from things he’s said at other times, not today, that he probably should have included the standard Western urban diet as another one of the poisoned gifts, and also one of the things he wants to do something about, in a lesser way. But I know what he thinks of the town diet the Batswana are adopting, the Simba chips and the orange Fanta, the grease and sugar way of life, the reduced food palette…”

Ray said, “It’s funny to think of bush diet as a palette. People desperately scrabbling through the landscape for tubers and insects…”

“Yes, but you know what he means. In the bush the diet has hundreds of vegetable items that disappear in the town diet. You don’t disagree with this. People move to town and in old age they become obese, they gain mass, instead of getting leaner, which is healthier, and which is the norm in the countryside.”

“But he didn’t bring that up today, you said.”

“Right, he didn’t. Anyway, he laid some stress on his deciding to come to Africa and do this work particularly because he’s black, which brought a smile to Kerekang’s face because Davis is pretty light. His mother was white. I think he saw it wasn’t going down especially well, so he dropped it. But he has a perfect right to mention it. His background is Caribbean and everybody who’s black in the Caribbean was once a slave, even if his family somehow did very well in Montserrat and then when they came to the United States.

“His father was black. It’s an interesting family. His father taught at Harvard Divinity School for many years. Davis refers to him as a Protestant divine. His father also owned the company that produces the prewritten sermons Protestant ministers use when they don’t have time to write their own. It was enormously lucrative, I understand.

“I knew you’d find this interesting. His mother was an actual Boston Brahmin. Davis was close to her, but not to his father.”

“I wonder why not.”

“I don’t know, but this brings me close to the end of what I know about Davis. He trained for the ministry but not for very long. He switched to medicine.”

“Thus overthrowing his father.”

“I suppose. And then in medical school he fell in love with a Nigerian exchange student and married her and that didn’t work out…”

“What went wrong?”

“There was a divorce.”

“But over what?”

“His wife betrayed him, which almost killed him. There was a bitter divorce. There were no children, thank God. So then he finished medical school and went through a process of disillusion with conventional medicine, and he developed his own ideas of what goes on in healing…”

“Eclectic medicine.”

“Right. And that’s the story up to the present. He had his practice and he met these people from Botswana, government people, and he decided to come here.”

Ray said, “He tells you everything.”

“No he doesn’t. He tells me what I get out of him. You know how I am.”

“Well pardon me if I find this unusual. He could resist your curiosity if he wanted to, great force that it is. I would think. He could draw lines, right? He’s the doctor, you’re the patient.” Contain yourself, he thought.

“Well one thing he thinks is wrong is the conventional doctor-patient relationship.”

Great, Ray thought. “But tell me, was his wife unfaithful with a white guy or a black guy, what race, just out of curiosity. Just to fill the picture out.”

After a silence, she said, “That’s really all I know.”

“No it isn’t,” he said flatly, surprising himself.

“That tone. You are so certain sometimes.”

He said, “You don’t have to answer the question. That’s your prerogative. But don’t deny I’m right, that you do know.”