Читать книгу Mukiwa - Peter Godwin - Страница 13

The best thing about school was when it stopped. The atmosphere was dizzy with anticipation. We folded our OHMS bedclothes in neat square piles on the ends of our narrow iron beds and packed up our clothes in our black tin trunks. We had a final assembly, after which we threw our hats high into the air and ran whooping and screaming down the pavement to the gravel car park, where parents, or African drivers sent by our parents, would be waiting for us in mud-splattered pickup trucks, ready to ferry us back to the farms and timber plantations and tea estates.

During the holidays, my mother tried to make up for having sent me away to boarding school so young by letting me come with her on her medical rounds. We went in the Mini, which was like a mobile clinic, equipped with a medical chest built by Francis the carpenter to my father’s design. It was a cross between a tool box and a fishing tackle box and it fitted exactly into the boot, opening out in tiers. Inside was a wonderful array of equipment: chrome scalpels with glinting blades, cotton-wool swabs, curved needles and catgut for sutures, and dozens of bottles of pills and tubes of ointments.

We covered hundreds of miles, servicing a network of African clinics and small rural hospitals. All of life was there. And death. It was death that left its image most vividly on me. Death was clearly something special. People reacted to it in dramatic fashion, often screaming and howling when news of it was broken to them. Death could apparently happen to anyone, although obviously it happened mostly to Africans. Whites only tended to die if they were very old. Africans died at any age.

Death didn’t seem to worry my mother too much. I suppose she was used to it by now. She sometimes let me come with her to PMs. That’s what they were called, postmortems, when the police asked her to cut bodies up to see if there’d been foul play. Our dead bodies were not chilled and odourless like town bodies were. They weren’t filed in the drawers of big fridges by men wearing green overalls and white aprons who squeaked about in tennis shoes on cement floors.

Our bodies were often dug up from their graves weeks and weeks after they’d been buried. You could tell how long ago the people had been buried because of the makonye, which was Shona for maggot larvae. When Africans buried their dead they got a hollow stick, a length of bamboo or a reed, and placed one end touching the body and the other sticking up out of the grave. They came every day and put some food by the grave, until one day they saw that the makonye had come up the bamboo and were wriggling about on top of the grave. Then the family stopped bringing food.

It seemed like a waste of the food, and when I asked my mother why they did it she didn’t seem to know. Violet didn’t really want to talk about it.

It was only some years later that Father Kennedy the Carmelite told me what grave food was all about.

‘Africans practise ancestor worship,’ explained Father Kennedy, and we all wrote it down in our exercise books. ‘They take food to the graveside because they believe that the spirit of the departed is wandering in a forest, a sort of equivalent to our purgatory, I suppose. And while the spirit is lost, it requires daily sustenance to keep it going.’

Father Kennedy was telling us all this because I had asked, so I put my hand up again to show I was paying attention.

‘Yes, Godwin, what is it now?’ he sighed. I think he found me a bit tiresome.

‘But when the food is still there the next day, don’t they realize that the spirit isn’t eating it at all?’

‘Hmm. That’s an interesting point,’ Father Kennedy conceded. ‘In fact the food is almost invariably eaten by wild animals at night, or by birds, or dogs, thus sustaining at least the myth, if not the spirit.’ He chuckled indulgently at his little joke.

I wrote down: ‘Spirit food eaten by animals in dark.’ And I drew a picture of a grave, and next to it a smiling hyena with a napkin tied round its neck, sitting at a candlelit table piled high with food.

Father Kennedy continued, ‘Once the makonye appear, the relatives stop bringing the food, because they believe that these grubs represent the spirit, and that it has now successfully navigated its way home.’

Europeans didn’t believe in that sort of stuff. We didn’t leave food by our graves, only flowers. I wondered whether the spirit of oom Piet was still lost in the spiritual forest, weak from hunger as it tried vainly to find its way back to South Africa, where he had come from originally.

My first PM was in Cashel. We went to the police station, where we met up with a white section officer, two black constables and a black civilian called the complainant. To reach the graves, deep inside Mutambara Tribal Trust Land, we bounced along for hours down a narrow rutted road in a grey police Land Rover which had a spare wheel bolted on to the bonnet and a metal grill over the windscreen.

The bodies to be dissected that day were a mother and her two children. Their father, the civilian man in the other Land Rover, believed they had been murdered. Unfortunately for us he only reported the matter to the police three weeks after they had died, and after he’d completed all the traditional burial rituals.

‘Why did he wait so long to tell us if he thought they’d been murdered?’ I piped up as we bounced along.

‘Well, think about it,’ my mother explained patiently. ‘This is one of the most remote areas of Cashel. He can’t read or write, how can you expect him to know about the finer details of forensic medicine? And anyway, it took him five days to walk to the police station. What was he supposed to do in the mean time, leave the bodies of his nearest and dearest rotting on the floor?’

I couldn’t think of an answer. But the section officer, who was driving, seemed to agree with me. He was deeply unenthusiastic about this duty.

‘The complainant arrived at night,’ he explained. ‘There were no Europeans on duty and instead of waiting until the next morning, the bloody charge office sergeant entered the report into the Crime Register and gave it a CR number, so we’ve got no option but to follow through the investigation. I really am most apologetic, doctor.’

He’d been apologizing for the inconvenience the whole trip.

Finally the road ran out and we drove slowly through the bush, following a footpath, the long grass and shrubs scraping along the bottom of the vehicle. We stopped in a clearing among the msasa trees. The air was hot and the cicadas’ screech filled the still afternoon.

In the clearing there were three graves, though they were difficult to make out because they weren’t marked by anything. No cross or headstone, not even a little cairn. They were just mounds of fresh earth against the side of a granite boulder, one big one and two smaller ones.

The constables pulled out shovels and picks from the back of the Land Rover, unbuttoned their khaki tunics, wrapped cloths around their mouths and noses, and began digging up the big mound. They dug forcefully at first and then more gently when they thought they were getting close to the body.

My mother put on a white gown with tapes that fastened at the back. On top of the white gown she put on a big red apron made of rubber, just like the rubber wetting sheet I had to put on my bed at school. She tied a white mask over her face and pulled on thick black rubber gloves which reached right up to her elbows.

On the tailgate of the Land Rover she had laid a selection of jars with rubber seals on the lids like the ones you put homemade jam into. There was a big biscuit tin there too, and she was scrabbling around in it for scalpels, forceps and scissors.

The biggest tool of all was so big that it wouldn’t fit into the tin and had to be packed separately, bundled into sackcloth. It had long iron handles and looked like a cross between a pair of pliers and garden shears. These were the rib-cutters.

The constables were calling to us through their muffles. They had reached the body. It was folded into a sheet. The SO had set up a wooden trestle table, and he told them to lift the body on to it. Gingerly holding each end of the sheet cocoon, they tried to hoist it out. But the sheet was completely rotten underneath and the body ripped through it and fell heavily back into the grave.

‘Be careful!’ snapped the SO. ‘You’ll damage the evidence.’ One of the constables stumbled off into the msasas to vomit. The SO took his place and the body was finally lifted on to the table. A dark cloud of flies hovered over it.

My mother handed me a spray gun. ‘Here, this can be your job. You can be my special little assistant.’

I grasped the spray gun, stepped forward proudly, aimed at the flies and began pumping the wooden handle in and out, until most of them had gone. After that I was told to wait back at the Land Rover while my mother got on with the dissection.

The man they called the complainant was a short barefoot man in torn shorts and a disintegrating T-shirt on which was printed Things go better with Coca-Cola. He had come along in the other Land Rover to give us directions, but the SO suggested he stay back from the graves, so he sat with me behind the vehicles while my mother cut up his family.

After a while I asked him what had happened to them.

‘I came home late at night,’ he said quietly, ‘after my wife and children had already eaten their supper. We all went to bed and the next morning I woke up and found them already dead while they were still asleep.’

‘How?’ I asked. ‘How did they die?’

The Coke man lowered his voice still further, so I had to strain to hear. ‘It was a spell,’ he whispered, ‘a spell cast on them by my neighbour, who is a muroyi.’

A muroyi was an African witch. They didn’t have long noses and warts, and they didn’t wear silly pointy hats or ride on broomsticks. African witches were much more dangerous than European witches, and they rode around on the backs of hyenas at night.

‘He suspect me of stealing his goat,’ continued the Coke man, ‘so he cast a spell on my family and they died.’

‘I see,’ I said gravely. Africans often died of spells.

‘And I didn’t even steal the goat,’ he added indignantly as I got up to sneak a closer look at the PM.

My mother was inserting the scalpel at the base of the ribcage. She sliced downwards and the flesh fell away easily, but there was no blood. The smell was terrible. I’d smelt lots of dead animals before, rotten ones too, but this was different. It was so bad I felt like being sick, and I had to hold my shirt over my nose.

Now my mother picked up the rib-cutters. She had made just enough of an incision so that the bottom blade of the ribcutters could get a purchase there. Using all her strength she grasped the long handles of the rib-cutters, manoeuvred the blades into position and squeezed them together, grunting with the effort. Nothing happened for a couple of seconds and then there was a loud crunch as the sternum cleaved in two.

She crunched the blades down the ribcage until she reached the bottom. Then she pulled it open like a chicken breast, to reveal all the insides. I belly-crawled forward again to see my mother cutting out various organs with her scalpel. Her forehead was covered with sweat now. As she cut each organ out, she picked it up in a pair of surgical forceps and plopped it into a jar of formaldehyde.

Finally it was over and my mother pressed the ribcage closed, like a pair of double doors. There was no sign of the constables, they had disappeared into the bush. The SO shouted for them, and eventually they stumbled into the clearing looking ill. They reburied the mother and set about digging up the two children, and the whole process was repeated, only this time it was much easier to cut the ribcages open.

One of the children was a little boy about my age, and when they dug him up they found that he had been buried with his favourite toys: a hoop made of a car wheel rim, with a stick to guide it, and a little model bicycle made of copper wire. It was beautifully made, with all the right detail: revolving pedals, mudguards, brake handles, a chain, even a rear-view mirror. The toys were packed in the sheet by his sides, where his hands rested, in case he wanted to play with them while he was lost in the spiritual forest. I wondered how he could see to play with the hoop, though, because he just had empty sockets in his head where his eyes should have been.

‘They steal the copper wire from the phone lines, you know,’ said the SO, looking at the toy bike. That’s why the phones are always out of order. It’s a bloody nuisance.’

After we’d put the bodies back, the widower approached and looked blankly at the disturbed graves. He said something to one of the constables.

‘He wants to know how they were killed and who did this thing,’ said the constable.

‘Hell, we don’t know how they died yet,’ explained the SO. ‘The specimens have to be sent to the forensic lab in Salisbury to be tested. That’ll take weeks and even then we might not be able to tell.’

The constable translated this and the widower spoke up again, quietly insistent.

‘He wants to know, if you are not able to tell these things, then why did you dig up his wife and children?’

‘I didn’t say we definitely wouldn’t be able to tell, dammit, I said we weren’t sure. He didn’t make things any easier for us by delaying so long. And anyway, even if we can establish cause of death, we still won’t necessarily know who’s responsible.’ The SO was getting irritated. ‘And constable, you tell him from me that if he tries to take the law into his own hands, and does anything to harm his neighbours, I’ll have him arrested so fast his feet won’t touch the bloody ground. Goditt?’

It took ten minutes to drive from the graves to the widower’s kraal. It was a poor kraal, three little pole-and-dagga huts under ragged thatch that badly needed replacing. Several scrawny chickens foraged in amongst the huts. They were surrounded by a modest field of stunted maize and millet.

My mother nosed around the sleeping and kitchen huts, while the SO wandered over to the granary – a miniature hut raised up on five-foot stilts. This was where Africans stored their mealie meal, to protect it from scavenging rodents. He climbed up the crooked home-made ladder and disappeared inside.

‘Doctor, I think you’d better see this,’ said the SO, emerging fom the granary a few minutes later. He had a large makeshift bucket, a drum with its top cut off. Inside was mealie meal. On the drum was a label which read: Contains arsenic – POISON - do not take internally. Do not re-use container. It had a black skull-and-crossbones sign on it.

They called the widower over and asked him about the drum.

‘My wife found it at the grinding mill when she went to get our mealies ground,’ he said, through the constable.

‘When?’ asked my mother.

‘The day before she died,’ he said.

‘Did you eat any mealie meal from here?’

He thought for a moment.

‘No. I did not.’

‘Mr Mtsoro,’ began my mother, consulting her clipboard – it was the first time anyone had addressed him by name all day – ‘I think it has been a terrible accident. This drum used to contain arsenic, a very poisonous chemical used to kill weeds. I think your wife put the mealie meal inside without first washing out the drum. It only needs a small amount of arsenic mixed in with the mealie meal to kill someone.’

Mr Mtsoro looked sceptical.

‘I am going to take a sample of the mealie meal and have it tested,’ said my mother, ‘and then we will know for sure.’

The SO gathered a specimen amount in a plastic bag and labelled it. Then he ordered the constables to dispose of the rest. When the widower realized their intention, he was horrified and remonstrated with them.

‘We have to throw it out or you may be poisoned and die also,’ said the SO firmly, ‘and dogs too or goats or chickens.’ He ordered the constables to dig a shallow pit and empty the big drum of meal into it. They sprinkled a little petrol on the heaped mealie meal and set it alight.

Mr Mtsoro watched as half his season’s food slowly burnt away in the thick black smoke. He began to cry silently.

I felt sorry for him and tried to think of something kind to tell him. I walked over to him and patted him awkwardly on the arm.

‘Don’t worry, Mr Mtsoro,’ I said, ‘there aren’t so many of you to feed now, so you’ll still have plenty to eat.’

And he cried even harder.

My mother did lots of postmortems and I began to realize just how many different ways there were to die. You could drown, for example. Drowning was a common cause of death in PMs. Africans were forever falling into rivers, usually on their way back from beer drinks. Few of them could swim even when they were sober.

You had to be careful with deaths by drowning. If drowned bodies had been left for a few days they could turn into ‘bloaters’ – all swollen up. On the first incision bloaters could spray a fountain of watery blood all over you.

Violet nearly drowned in Silverstream river. We were allowed to swim there, in a deep rock pool between two waterfalls, though we had to be careful to stay well upstream of the bottom waterfall. As far as we knew no one had ever seen a crocodile this far up, either. There were leguaans here, water iguanas which looked like mini-crocodiles, but they didn’t eat people. Sometimes there were water snakes too.

Violet was supposed to be looking after me while I swam in the rock pool but it was such a hot day that she stripped to her underwear and jumped in too. Then she remembered she couldn’t swim. Her head bobbed up a couple of times, and she panicked, uttered a single piercing scream and disappeared coughing beneath the water again.

I swam over to her and, remembering my life-saving lessons from school, I manoeuvred her into the correct position to life-save her. But she was much, much heavier than a tin plate, which was the only thing I’d actually life-saved before. Her head kept going under the water and her eyes started rolling around so I could only see their whites.

We started to drift slowly down towards the waterfall, and I could hear it roaring close by. We were both going to get sucked over the edge, I thought. Violet was getting heavier and I felt weaker, but I still held on to her and tried to life-save her. Then suddenly Jain was there, and together we managed to drag Violet to the river bank and haul her out. I lay on my back on the bank, breathing hard, while next to me Violet vomited up water.

It was amazing how much water she vomited up.

Postmortems could even be quite funny, although of course it was very bad manners to laugh at them. I did laugh once, though, at a man who had hanged himself from a msasa tree because his wife no longer loved him. He worked at the factory and had been missing for several days when it was reported to my father that some men hunting in the bush had seen him hanging there.

My father reported it to the police and they asked him to send the body in to the station. So we drove out to retrieve it, taking one of the hunters for directions.

We climbed up a little kopje, and there, near the top, was the man, hanging from a msasa tree. His neck was tied to a branch by a piece of bark plaited into a rope. There was a strong breeze ahead of a thunder storm, and the body swayed in the wind, almost as if it were still alive. And it slowly rotated one way and then the other, as the rope twisted and untwisted against the branch.

‘Hmm, well there’s nothing for it, I suppose,’ said my father, and he called me over. From his pocket he took his Swiss Army knife that I was usually not allowed even to touch.

‘You’re the tree climber in the family,’ he said. ‘Climb up the tree and cut the rope.’

He considered several different bits of the knife, including a little saw and some pliers – folding them back into the wide red handle in turn.

‘You can use this blade,’ he said finally, indicating the biggest of all the blades. ‘But don’t open it until you get up there.’

I shinned up the tree easily and out along the branch, and got myself in position over the rope. From up above, the dead man’s body looked somehow different. He had a bald patch on the crown of his head and his chin was resting on his chest, making him look as though he was in mourning.

‘OK, you ready?’ I called down.

‘Yes, yes. Get on with it,’ said my father, and I began hacking away at the bark rope. It was surprisingly brittle, and tough to cut, and I had to have a rest halfway through. Finally there was a ripping sound and the body plunged to the ground below. He hit the ground feet first, and then collapsed forward on to his face, with his knees tucked in under his chest and his bottom in the air. And as soon as he fell, he began to fart. It was a loud, foul-smelling fart that went on and on as if he were farting the life out of himself.

I was still at the age when I instinctively found farts amusing, and I began to titter, up on my branch.

‘Have some respect!’ my father hissed.

I noticed him glancing at his watch. Later he told me that the fart had lasted for over five minutes, which we both agreed was probably the longest fart in the world.

Of course, most of my mother’s patients were still alive. At the African clinic on the edge of Melsetter there were hundreds of them. They lined up from early in the morning, sitting in a ragged queue that often meandered all the way down to the main road, more than eight hundred yards away. The Africans were very patient and it was an orderly queue, with no shoving or jostling for position. Just the sounds of coughing and hawking and chattering, of children crying and mothers murmuring to their babies as they breast-fed them.

The patients flocked in from the surrounding tribal lands, and they brought their own provisions with them in bundles balanced on their heads; maize cobs, sweet potatoes, mangos and bananas. And for those that hadn’t, a flourishing market had grown up around the clinic’s permanent queue.

The clinic itself was a small ramshackle building, easily overwhelmed by the swell of humanity that swarmed there to audition their various ailments. It consisted of two rondavels joined together and each topped by a conical roof of galvanized tin that gave off noises as loud as gunshots as it expanded in the sun, and again when it cooled in the late afternoon.

Every time the roof cracked, the purple-headed lizards that sunned themselves on it got a terrible fright. They scuttled desperately down the walls and slithered off into the bush. A few minutes later they returned and the whole routine would begin again. They never seemed to learn.

Janet, the nurse, lived in another double rondavel next door with her husband and two children. She would deal with the routine cases and keep the complicated or serious ones back for my mother to look at. Even the very serious cases would take their places patiently in the queue.

Once, when my mother was busy inside the clinic, I was playing outside with Janet’s children, and I was astonished to see a man towards the end of the queue with a barbed fishing arrow straight through his head. He was sitting cross-legged, messily eating a mango with great gusto. The point of the arrow stuck out of one temple, its tail into the other.

Janet hadn’t noticed him because she’d been swamped in her office processing other cases. No one else had thought to bring him to her attention. In fact no one else in the queue showed any great interest in this man who appeared to have an arrow lodged right through his brain.

I went up to say hello and he went through the whole Shona greeting rigmarole, without appearing to be in any pain.

‘May I have a look?’ I asked politely, as though I might have been seeking permission to inspect a piece of handiwork. He was happy to oblige and bowed his head to my level so I could examine its resident arrow. I fingered the arrowhead gingerly; the tip itself wasn’t that impressive, it was very narrow, like a flattened nail, but sharp too. The impressive feature was the fearsome rows of barbs down either side of the shaft, that disappeared into a surprisingly small wound in the side of his skull.

‘It is to stop the fish from escaping away,’ he explained. And he launched into a learned account of the finer points of arrow fishing, which I found fascinating.

‘So how did the arrow end up through your head,’ I asked finally, when there was a lull in the conversation.

‘It was my friend,’ he said. ‘My friend slipped on the mud when he was aiming the arrow.’ He cocked his head to one side and laughed as though it were a minor inconvenience.

‘Doesn’t it hurt?’ I enquired.

‘No. When it first went in, it felt like a bee stinging me. But once it was inside my head, it didn’t hurt too much. And my wife gave me aspirin for making headache better.’ He gave his wife, who was sitting next to him, an appreciative pat and she grinned.

‘Come with me,’ I said. ‘You should be a priority case.’

I led him to the clinic door, and called to my mother through the bead curtain that was supposed to keep the flies out of the examining room.

‘Mu-um. There’s a patient here that I think you should see.’

‘I’m busy,’ she said. ‘Anyway Janet’s already picked out the acute cases.’

‘I think you’ll want to see this chap,’ I said confidently, nodding reassuringly at my companion.

I was eventually allowed to bring him in after she’d finished with her previous patient. We were delayed while I disentangled the fly beads that had got caught up on his arrow. Then we made our triumphant entrance.

My mother had her head down, writing out case notes on a filing card.

‘Meet Mr Arrow Head,’ I introduced.

Janet gasped and my mother looked up.

‘Good God!’ she spluttered.

Mr Arrow Head looked gratified that he was of such interest, and he smiled cordially as he accepted the chair Janet proffered him.

Since I had scouted him out, I was allowed to stay for the examination. They dabbed disinfectant on the entrance and exit holes, and they injected him with antibiotics and antitetanus serum. Then my mother shone her special torch into the pupils of his eyes, and did various other tests to check his reactions.

Finally she took hold of the tail end of the arrow and joggled it very tentatively. Mr Arrow Head gave a sharp intake of breath.

‘Sore?’ asked my mother, unnecessarily. He nodded vigorously and his arrow rotated with each nod.

‘I’m afraid there’s nothing more we can do for you here,’ she explained to him. ‘We’ll order you an ambulance to take you to Umtali, and there they will x-ray you and see what to do next.’

Mr Arrow Head seemed disappointed that she wasn’t going to pull the arrow out there and then.

‘Will I be all right?’ he asked, sounding fearful for the first time.

‘Of course you will be,’ said my mother. ‘They’ve got all the latest equipment in Umtali, and I’m sure they’ll take very good care of you there.’

Mr Arrow Head seemed very grateful for this reassurance, and insisted on shaking everyone’s hand before leaving to sit outside on the grass once more with his wife, waiting for the ambulance to collect him.

‘Remarkable!’ said my mother to Janet, after he’d left. ‘Absolutely extraordinary. The arrow’s gone directly through his frontal lobe without any apparent ill effect on his neurological activity. Incredible.’

A few weeks later I was playing Indians in our garden before breakfast. Albert the Mozambican had helped me pitch my wigwam on the front lawn, and I was parading around barefoot on the dewy grass in a home-made cloak and a feathered headdress, armed with my bow. I reached into my quiver for another arrow to shoot at the old gum tree when I suddenly remembered Mr Arrow Head.

Over breakfast I asked my mother what had happened to him. She continued to crunch loudly at her burnt toast, behind her newspaper, and then said through the crumbs, ‘He died, of course. He never had a chance. It was a complete fluke that he lived as long as he did.’

‘Well, I wish you’d told me at the time,’ I grumbled.

Her newspaper came down.

‘What is it now?’ she asked, exasperated.

‘Nothing. It’s just that if you’d told me then, I would have said goodbye to him properly.’

I got down from the table and mooched around outside for a bit. Then I fired off a couple more arrows at the old gum tree, in memory of Mr Arrow Head.

One of them was a bull’s eye.

Some of the women who came to see my mother in the early days were insistently vague about their ailments. It began with one young woman who refused to give any useful medical details to Janet, the nurse, and preferred to face relegation to the back of the queue. Eventually she made it to the examination room, having revealed only a general headache and nonspecific pains. She threaded her way through the gaudy fly-bead curtains and saw Janet at my mother’s side.

‘I will not be needing a translator,’ she said, fiddling with her hands on her lap. ‘I can speak to doctor myself.’

‘But nurse Janet is my assistant, not just a translator,’ said my mother huffily. They couldn’t start taking this sort of strop from patients.

The patient sat in pointed silence. My mother broke first. She caught Janet’s eye and nodded her to the door. Janet departed, sniffing with indignation. I was sitting just outside the bead curtain, pretending to be absorbed with my colouring-in book.

My mother consulted the unhelpfully brief case card.

‘Now what seems to be the problem, Mercy?’ she asked when they were alone. ‘Remember that anything you say to me is confidential. It is a secret. No one else will know.’

The woman hesitated again, and then seemed to come to a decision.

‘Doctor, I am not yet twenty-four years of age and I have six children. My husband has no job and we have no money.’

It sounded like a punt for charity, not an altogether unknown tactic. But the young woman continued:

‘Doctor, children is now enough. No more. You must give me muti for to stop more babies.’

This was the early sixties and modern contraception was almost unheard of in rural African communities.

‘I have read about birth control. In a magazine. From town,’ said Mercy. Then, expecting to have her word doubted, she continued, ‘I went to school until standard eight. I wanted to train to be a nurse or a teacher, but my father was poor and he had only enough money for school fees for my brothers. So he married me to another for lobola.’

Lobola was the Shona bride price and was a widely accepted custom. Among ordinary folk it usually amounted to a few head of cattle and goats, and sometimes cash too. Cash was paid on a sort of instalment plan. A down payment followed by regular premiums until the full amount was reached.

‘I have had a child every year since I was married,’ said Mercy. ‘Now I want no more.’

My mother outlined the contraceptive possibilities. The condom, the diaphragm, the inter-uterine device—

But Mercy interrupted.

‘It has to be something that my husband will never find out about. If he discovers that I have done this contra ...’

‘Contraception,’ coaxed my mother.

‘If he finds out, then he can divorce me, according to our custom.’

My mother talked to Mercy for a long time. Then and on subsequent occasions. She learnt a lot from Mercy. She learnt that if an African woman fails to conceive within the first two years of marriage, this is grounds for divorce. She learnt that in some cases if a woman bears only a small number of children, one or two, then this too can justify the husband returning her to her father, as a poor breeder. She learnt that many African women, educated for the first generation now, no longer wanted the tyranny of a dozen children, especially when ten were likely to survive, unlike the old days when they were lucky if two or three made it to adulthood.

‘The pill?’ suggested my mother. ‘You could use that without him noticing. Where could you hide it?’

‘In the tea tin,’ replied Mercy confidently. ‘African men will never ever go to the tea tin. That is only a woman’s job.’

And so my mother began her family planning advice service. Mercy evidently had a lot of friends, and within weeks dozens of women were turning up at the clinic with ‘non-specific ailments’ – ‘NSA’, as Janet now noted it down on the cards in their code. Word got around that Janet too could be trusted, and she soon took over family planning services.

In time Mercy broke cover and went on a family planning course in Umtali. She came back as a qualified ‘educator’ and was given charge of a mobile family planning clinic that traversed the Tribal Trust Lands in a converted Land Rover. Their announced function was to check on the health of new mothers and young children, but surreptitiously they also doled out contraceptives to those women who wanted them. Even today* in many huts throughout the eastern highlands and further afield, you will find a little something extra at the bottom of the tea tin.

Years later I heard that Mercy was killed in the war. She had chosen to ignore warnings from the guerrillas to stop her family planning services. Contraception, the guerrillas said, was a white man’s conspiracy to reduce the black population. By carrying it out, Mercy was the white man’s stooge.

The guerrillas pointed out that at the same time as the government was encouraging black people to have fewer children, they were also trying to encourage more white people to immigrate to Rhodesia. The government even had a special settler campaign where all the whites in the country were asked to write letters to ten of their friends abroad, telling them what a pleasant life Europeans could have in Rhodesia. The government would pay for them to come and would find them jobs.

In reply the guerrillas launched their own ‘have a baby for Zimbabwe’ campaign, and told Africans that the more children they had the sooner the country would be theirs.

Mercy, by then a grandmother, scoffed at the politicization of family planning and not long after her Land Rover detonated a land mine. Her legs were blown off and she died before they could get her to hospital. Her driver and some passengers who had hitched a lift were killed too. It didn’t get much publicity, though. By then black civilians were being killed by land mines every day.

When the Africans did finally inherit the country in 1980, one of the first acts of the new government was to ban the Family Planning Association, as a racist organization. The ban lasted less than a year. It was overturned after a mutinous horde of African women threatened to march on parliament and roast the politicians – most of them men – alive.

Now family planning trucks are once again traversing the countryside, tendering choice to women who have so little of it in their lives.

Easily the single biggest life-saving aspect of my mother’s practice was her vaccination programme. It was a long haul, though, to get it going. To start with the witch doctors were totally opposed to it. A vaccination might initiate rural Africans into western medicine and help to break down their fear of it. And for every patient who went west for medical treatment there would be one fewer for the ngangas.

The witch doctors put out the most hair-raising rumours about the dreadful things that would happen to people who were vaccinated. They would be rendered infertile, they would go mad, they would die a lingering, mouth-frothing death.

Eventually the Internal Affairs Department, and even the police, had to intervene, bullying the witch doctors into sullen submission by threatening to imprison them if they continued peddling these lurid warnings.

There was, in general, an ambiguous relationship between my mother and the local witch doctors. She took them extremely seriously, refusing to dismiss them as quacks, like my father and most other Europeans did. For my mother respected the power that the ngangas had over their believers.

The Shona believed that all illnesses had a reason, a cause that could only be found in the spirit world. So though my mother could usually treat the symptoms of an illness, the witch doctor still had to be consulted to divine the cause. Eventually she struck up an accommodation with certain ‘enlightened’ witch doctors, and she would even refer to them patients in whom she could find no medical symptoms. In return many witch doctors began referring their patients to my mother and then sharing credit for the cure.

My mother also became increasingly influenced by the obvious power of witchcraft. She was not above fighting fire with fire, developing her own spells to help convince patients that they would now get better as long as they continued to take their prescribed medicine as well.

By the time I was old enough to accompany my mother on her rounds, the witch doctors’ opposition to vaccinations was on the decline. Grand tours to inoculate people against smallpox, diphtheria, tuberculosis and polio had become part of our dry-season routine, and there is no doubt they saved thousands of lives. The same lives that the guerrillas would later claim we were trying to snuff out with hard-sell contraception.

I can remember one tour which took us high up into the mountains on the Mozambique border. It must have been in the mid-1960s and the war between the Portuguese and their black anti-colonial guerrillas was well underway. Large tracts of Mozambique were already without any real administration.

We had sent word out ahead that we would be carrying out the vaccinations, and when we arrived there were already thousands of tribespeople gathered – almost all of them Ndau from across the border. We weren’t really supposed to vaccinate Mozambicans, but my mother felt that it made good sense, to prevent disease spreading across to our side, because so many of the Ndau moved freely back and forth.

I was allowed to help with the polio vaccine for the children. I carried the tray of sugar lumps and behind me came a health assistant with a bottle of polio vaccine. He would squeeze a drop of the bright pink vaccine into each lump and place one on every tongue. Then I’d call for ‘tongues out’ and march down the line checking that they’d swallowed.

My biggest problem was to prevent the children from coming around again to get a second sugar lump.