Black and white and mad

A. M. Daniels

Once, in the course of my less than distinguished medical career, I found myself in Cape Town with only five pounds in my pocket. I had spent a month in the South African Library reading about the history and politics of South Africa, but my financial predicament forced me to seek paid employment. Accordingly, I acted for a time as a locum general practitioner in a small town in Natal which — before its grateful alumni burnt it down in 1976 boasted a university for blacks.

I was met at Durban airport by the wife of the doctor for whom I was standing in. She drove us the hundred miles or so to the town in the family Mercedes. Sitting in the back were her two young children and their black nanny. The, two children began to fight and, without looking back, their mother took a swipe at them. She hit the nanny instead of the children, and the nan- ny started to cry.

'What are you snivelling for?' the doctor's wife asked irritably.

'The Madam hit me.'

'Well, you should've kept those children quiet then, hey, shouldn't you?'

The doctor was an Afrikaner who had bouts of drinking two bottles of Scotch a day, which was why he needed a locum. His present bout was precipitated by the recent murder of his old father by a garden boy whom his father had recently fired. (Toy', incidentally, has no connotations of youth when used in South Africa of blacks.) The garden boy managed to escape in spite of having been shot several times by the doc- tor's mother, but was later caught and taken to the local hospital to be rendered fit for hanging. While the garden boy was in hospital, the doctor went to shoot him, but was restrained from doing so. Shortly after- wards the doctor began to drink heavily again.

Though the town was quiet during my stay, I was aware of an undercurrent of an-

ticipated violence. The practice recep- tionist, Mrs Roux, a very respectable lady with blue hair, went every Wednesday to the police station for shooting lessons.

'We have to learn to shoot', she said with gritted dentures. 'Some day we'll need to.'

The white population of the town was mainly Afrikaner, and betrayed an intense interest in the new arrival — die engelsman, the Englishman. They came to the surgery just to have a look at me for nothing ever happened in the town, when arson and murder were in abeyance. I was once asked by the doctor's wife, who had trained as a nurse in Pretoria, what the natives were like in England.

'Quite friendly', I said, 'but getting cheeky.'

All the white patients seemed eager to know what I thought of South Africa and apartheid; fortunately, they never gave me time to reply. Instead, they rattled off justifications of apartheid by referring to the psychology of the African, which only those born in Africa, and south of the Lim- popo at that, could ever hope to under- stand.

'We know the African', they said, as though speaking of an exotic species. 'The rest of the world doesn't.' They were anx- ious to co-opt me into their world view, but only once did I let slip an indication of what I really thought, when a patient tried to ex- plain apartheid on biological principles.

'After all', he said, 'the blackbird and the sparrow, they don't mate.'

'Well, there's no need to make laws about it then, is there?' I replied. But in a ruthless police state one tends (outwardly at least) to conform, unless one happens to be a hero, which I most decidedly am not.

My surgery was divided into two halves, for the whites and the blacks. The white part was not different from any surgery in England, but the black consisted of five cubicles in a row, so that I could process the patients like a production line. I had two stethoscopes, the one for blacks having an extra long tube so that I could examine them from a distance. The doctor, who spoke Xhosa fluently, explained that the African had special glands which made it unpleasant for Europeans to approach them too closely.

The black patients waited on stark rows of wooden benches outside the building un- til I had finished seeing the white patients. Their surgery was presided over by Regina, a half-trained black nurse. She said she was a member of the Zulu royal family, and I never managed to convince her that I was not a member of the British royal family.

Regina was a tyrant. Consultations were on a strictly cash before delivery basis, and Regina was completely without mercy on those who said they could not afford the five rand fee for a man, three for a woman, and two for a child. She said they were lying, and in the end they usually found the money.

Quite often I entered a cubicle to be faced with a ready-bared buttock waiting for an injection. The patient admitted there was nothing wrong with him, he just wanted an injection 'to make me strong'. He thought the exchange of his hard-earned money for a shot of sterile water good value indeed, and would return a few weeks later for a booster dose. I had a small crisis of cons- cience over this dubious practice, but dec- ided that as it gave satisfaction to people with blighted lives I should continue it.

One of the commonest complaints among the black women was that their body was the wrong shape and size. The uneducated Zulu women begged me for a potion that would make them fat for the delight of their husbands, though they looked quite fat enough to me already. The girls from the university, on the other hand, wanted something to make them slim, though they often bordered on the anorexic.

I arrived one morning at the surgery to discover a police truck waiting for me. In the back was a naked white woman draped in a blanket. She had been found wandering naked in the town, and the policemen brought her to be certified insane. The policemen were debating vigorously whether she should be taken into the white entrance because she was white, or into the black entrance because she was mad. I was asked to adjudicate in this arcane dispute, and I decided on the white entrance. The policeman who had favoured the black en- trance feared for the safety of the pregnant white women who were waiting to see me and who, he thought, might abort instantly at such a sight.

I was assured by whites that things were gradually changing in South Africa. These changes did not meet with everyone's ap- proval, however. The doctor's mother-in- law complained to me that nowadays in South Africa you had to call a native a Bantu.

'And if you can't call a kaffir a kaffir', she said, 'who can you call a kaffir?'