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

patient had stopped breathing. All our efforts at
resuscitaion failed. There seemed no explanation. I sent a letter to the queries
column of The Practitioner , and received a kind and elaborate reply from
one of the most eminent anaesthetists in Britain - for I suspected it was an
anaesthetic death. I had used a spinal but there had been no evidence of
pre-existing shock.
    The specialist made a number of
suggestions, ending, almost as an after-thought, about a circulatory failure in
the blood returning to the heart.
    Nowadays, this would be the one and only
diagnosis, called supine hypotensive syndrome, caused by pressure on the main vein
(which is usual), uncompensated because of a rare defect in the collateral
circulation. The condition was barely understood at that time. On my return
from Ghana, I read in the British Medical Journal about three cases in UK that
year, one of them fatal. The condition can be corrected simply by placing a
sand bag under the right buttock, which displaces the uterus enough to relieve
the pressure.
    Now I had the miserable task of
informing the husband, who was waiting outside. I simply said: 'The pickin she
live. The mammy she die.'
    The man burst into the theatre, where
the dead body of his wife lay as on a sacrificial altar. He did not throw
himself upon her. He did not weep or do anything a white man would have done.
He danced. He danced round and round the table, shouting with grief. He danced
outside. He danced away to his village, still shouting.
    Zorba the Greek, it will be remembered,
danced for grief when his little son died. Africans also dance for grief,
strange as this form of expression may seem to Anglo-Saxons.
    Years later, I was performing a
post-mortem in Central Africa, when, through the window, I saw the family of
the deceased beginning to dance, twisting round and round and crying: ‘Mai-wei!
Mai-wei!’
    Beyond the fence was a crowd of about a
hundred people at a bus terminus. Africans are nothing if not social beings.
Privacy, except in intimate physical matters, is anathema. They also have a
mass telepathy, like birds. In no time, the crowd beyond the fence took up the
dance in sympathy, until they were all twisting and leaping and crying, ‘Mai-wei!
Mai-wei!’
    A colleague, who was assisting me in the
PM, rigidly Anglo-Saxon in spirit (although his mother was Polish), cast a cold
eye on the scene, and remarked: 'Not a tear!'
    But that was not the point: when you
express your grief or sympathy by dancing, it takes a different direction from
tears.
    Back in Samreboi, on a happier occasion,
I was attending a little boy with acute asthma, when he suddenly stopped
breathing. His mother, who was standing by, ran out of the ward and began
dancing round and round the small hospital, crying: 'Adjei! Adjei!' I
bent over and gave the little body the kiss of life. Immediately, he started
breathing again, and, as if by a miracle, his asthma had disappeared (a fact
for physiologists to ponder). Someone ran out and caught the mother, and she
returned to the ward, still dancing, but now for joy.
    The Lord of the Dance is black!
     
    In those early days at Samreboi, I would
sit on my balcony at the end of the day, with book and pipe and drink, where I
could see the hospital, half a mile away across a hollow. Sometimes I would see
the ambulance turn into the main entrance. My heart would sink, as I wondered
what new unfamiliar trial was awaiting me.
    The anxiety had begun in my London
hotel, on the eve of my departure. I fell into a restless sleep, in which I was
confronted by a line of black faces, with unfamiliar diseases, whose treatment
I had little knowledge of. When I arrived at my post, I found myself confronted
by a line of black faces, with unfamiliar diseases, I had little knowledge of;
but my fear was masked to a large extent like a paratrooper, who goes into
action as soon as he hits the ground.
    Fortunately, at that time, the British
Medical Association had put out a