This second installment of our series of classic Dalrymple writings on Africa, excerpted from his beautifully written, unrecognized classic Fool or Physician: The Memoirs of a Sceptical Doctor, illuminates the colorful and provocative life of one of the Western world’s greatest thinkers and writers. In 1976, having spent six months working in a hospital in Rhodesia and several months traveling through Mozambique and substituting for an alcoholic doctor in South Africa (an experience which is itelf replete with anecdotes), the 27 year-old took a position in a hospital in the misnamed, violence- and poverty-ridden black township of Edendale, near Pietermaritzburg in South Africa’s Natal Province.

Unlike the other doctors, who had flats or houses in town to return to after the day’s work was over, I lived on the premises, over the shop as it were. I was therefore isolated and lonely, enclosed in the dismal embrace of an institution, unable to leave it at night for fear of the violence in the unlit township. I had no means of my own to travel the nine miles to the city centre, and had therefore either to walk in the hope that someone would stop to give me a lift, or to travel on a black bus ― that is, a bus reserved for blacks ― where my presence was nothing if not conspicuous. Indeed, it created a sensation among the other passengers, and caused not a few drivers’ heads to turn dangerously as they drove past. No doubt my presence on the bus was construed in some quarters as a political gesture, subversive or brave according to taste; in fact, I was only trying to get to the best restaurant in town.

At the weekend, and during daylight hours, I ventured into the township. It was then perfectly safe. At first I was apprehensive, fearing I might be met with hostility, for whites were uncommon visitors (it was illegal for them to go without a permit), and usually they went only on some mission of oppression. But I was either ignored or welcomed with smiles, my demeanor not being that of a policeman, secret or otherwise. One Sunday morning I was walking along a dirt road, finding even the bleak landscape of the township under the open sky a refreshment after a week in the entrails of the hospital, when I was attracted to some choral singing in Zulu coming from a Methodist church, a simple construction of brick and tin. I entered quietly from the back, hoping not to be noticed. The altar at the far end of the church was a simple table, covered with a snowy white cloth lovingly embroidered with a floral border. On the altar were two jamjars filled with flowers, a tribute to the beauty of God’s creation not easily come by in Edendale.

As though somehow sensing my arrival through the backs of their heads, the entire congregation stopped singing and turned to stare at me. Their astonishment was plainly written on their faces. Blushing, I sat on the rear pew. With the habit inculcated by a lifetime in the townships, and necessary for their survival, they sized me up and, deciding I was harmless, resumed their hymn, if anything with greater gusto. They were dressed in the chiffon finery of two decades before, when no woman went shopping without her white gloves. It was here once again that the bourgeois virtue of good orderliness seemed not ridiculous, which as a member of the intelligentsia I had always considered it, but heroic. Were these the same people that I saw daily in the casualty department?

The hymn, as it happened, was the last of the service. I had thought to slip out unnoticed after the service was over, already feeling awkward at having interrupted it; but the preacher, the moment the last strain died away, rushed forward to welcome me. It was a great moment, he said; and he wondered whether I should do them all the honour of attending a little feast and ceremony they were about to hold in the adjacent hall. His manner was ingratiating, obsequious almost, but it was clear that my acceptance gave him genuine pleasure.

I was ushered into the hall with great ceremony, and immediately sat at the head table as guest of honour. I was dressed casually while they were all in their finest; I had come idly, drawn by their singing, while for them it was an important day; and yet, purely by virtue of my race, I was the guest of honour. Such were the rewards and pleasures of being a white liberal (this was a year before the great Soweto riots). It spoke eloquently, I thought, of the deep longing of the blacks to be recognized and treated as fully human by the whites for whom, despite themselves, they had a kind of abject respect. Things, I believe, are different now.

The ceremony and feast were to celebrate the graduation of a batch of black nurses from Edendale Hospital. The official presentation of diplomas had already taken place within the hospital: this was the proud tribute of the township to its new nurses.

Food was continually pushed towards me during the ceremony, the choicest morsels available. I was the only one eating during the speeches, but I consoled myself with the thought that it was evidently expected of me as the guest of honour. No sooner had I finished one chicken leg than another was pressed into my hand. I even listened to the hymns sung by the nurses’ choir with a drumstick suspended halfway between the table and my mouth. Then came an address to the audience by the man who would have been guest of honour had I not arrived.

He was dressed in a dark business suit with the exaggeratedly wide lapels that were the fashion of the time. A man at my side translated from his Zulu. First he extended a welcome to me, and said how honoured he was ― they all were ― that I should attend. But it was obvious to all, he continued, that I had neither been born in South Africa nor lived there long, or else I should not be sitting where I was now. Just let me stay a few years, however, and I should be indistinguishable from all the others. Turning to me, he appealed to me in Zulu to go home, if I wished to remain a decent man.

He went on to tell the nurses that qualifying was a great personal achievement, but they should use their education to serve the people from whom they sprang. It was strange to hear nurses spoken of as highly educated, but in Edendale they had joined an élite. He said they must never forget their diplomas were not the result of their unaided efforts, but of those of their parents and the whole of their community as well, who had made sacrifices that they might learn.

He spoke of a future that was coming, one in which the lion would, as it were, lie down with the lamb. He had just returned from a trip to West Germany where all men were equal, he said, and there was no apartheid. At this point an elderly man in a battered and grease-stained brown homburg hat jumped up and asked whether this meant that in Germany black and white sat next to one another in the cinema. This, for him, was the ne plus ultra of liberation. Certainly, replied the speaker. And had he been in such a cinema, asked the old man. Yes he had, only last week in fact. The man, half-incredulous, half-bewildered, removed his hat from his head the better to scratch it, and sat down.

The speaker finished what he had to say and the feast began. I was expected once more to eat as though I had gone hungry for days. I managed before long to make my excuses and slip quietly away: the other guests at the head table were constrained by the need, out of politeness, to speak English and to attend to my wants before their own. I left having exchanged assurances of high regard and in the afterglow, as I walked back to the hospital, I wondered why such meetings could not be expanded into political arrangements. It was naive even to wonder, of course: the township had as many tsotsis, as many nationalists of contending factions, as many police informers, as respectable Methodists; and as for the whites, there were probably only a handful who could even contemplate the prospect of sitting at the same table as a black without being overcome by nausea. Not everything can be solved by gestures of goodwill.

Feeling ever more isolated and dejected in the hospital I decided to leave. I manufactured a pretext – the illness of a close relative at home in England – and, to my shame, Mr Malan could not have been kinder or more considerate. As luck would have it, a friend of mine was visiting South Africa. His brother was a doctor in Zululand, with a practice in the lush green rolling hills that shaded blue into the distance. He lent us his pickup truck to travel the country, so that while I should have been going home to comfort my dangerously ill relative I was sojourning in the Drakensberg, the long mountain chain with saw-tooth peaks like a drag
on’s crest.

I was indeed fortunate, as I later discovered, to have left Edendale when I did. The day following my departure the Special Branch called for me. I had offended in some way. Perhaps they had heard about my bus rides into Pietermaritzburg; or there had been an informer in the midst of the Methodists; or they had read my letters home; or the Portuguese doctor was a police spy. To everyone in the hospital my fortuitous departure must have looked as though I had some knowledge of the Special Branch’s movements and was therefore engaged in some secret political activity. In fact, it was only the luckiest of coincidences. Several doctors were arrested that day, blacks amongst them. (So effective had been the segregation of doctors within the hospital that I was unaware until then that there were any black doctors working there.) So while I was enjoying the beauties of the Drakensberg, several of my erstwhile colleagues were enjoying the amenities of the prison service.

Copyright 1987 Anthony Daniels. Reprinted with permission.

This is the first installment of what will be a recurring feature at The Skeptical Doctor: the posting of classic but mostly unknown Dalrymple writings organized around specific topics.

Perhaps the most prominent subject of Dalrymple’s early writing was Africa. Three of his first six books (published under his real name, Anthony Daniels), as well as many of his earliest periodical pieces, focused largely or exclusively on the continent: Fool or Physician recounted his experiences as a young doctor in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa; Zanzibar to Timbuktu detailed his East-to-West journey across the African continent by means of public transportation; and Monrovia, Mon Amour documented the scale of destruction of the Liberian capital and analyzed the causes and effects of the country’s civil war.

On January 31, 1987 the Spectator published the following essay, in our view one of his best early magazine pieces, following a series of reports he filed from Africa using the psuedonym Edward Theberton as protection from the many African dictators he criticized.


Not As Black As It’s Painted
Anthony Daniels, who wrote as ‘Edward Theberton’ on Africa, sums up his experiences
The Spectator – January 31, 1987

EX Africa semper aliquid novi — except, of course, good news.

For the last 20 years the news from Africa has been unremittingly bad. It is the playground of the Four Horsemen, the continent where Malthus may yet be proved right. It is the only region of the globe where per capita food production has declined over the last two decades. Desertification is advancing more rapidly than industrialisation. Forests are being hacked down with no thought of replanting, the population is doubling relentlessly every 25 years (unless checked, that is, by the spread of Aids). In some countries, there is hardly an animal, except a goat, to be seen. Perhaps most depressing of all, one is now grateful for a president who, however dictatorial, does not actually eat his opponents.

Expressing pessimism about Africa is therefore the order of the day. Another fashionable pastime, righteous indignation being what it is, the most gratifying of emotions, is finding someone, or something, to blame for the present lamentable state of Africa’s affairs.

Africans themselves tend to blame the World Economic System which, they say, also brought them colonialism. They point out that, in general, the terms of trade have moved consistently against them: it now takes much more of their produce to buy a tractor (or a Mercedes) than it once did. They forget the world has moved on while they have not. Besides, it is less than luminously clear what is the ‘just’ price of, say, a personal computer, calculated in pineapples or peanuts.

They are no doubt right when they allude to the nefarious practices, such as transfer pricing, of multinational companies. However, as several nations have found to their cost, there is only one thing worse for an African country than being exploited by a multinational, and that is not being exploited by a multinational. And even if it were true the World Economic System were entirely to blame for the present mess in Africa, it would be a sterile discovery. As I remarked, no doubt cruelly, to several young African radicals, even if Africa were to unite economically, it would still scarcely amount to Switzerland. Politics is, or should be, the art of the possible.

Visitors to and foreign residents of Africa, on the other hand, tend to blame the Africans themselves: indeed, African incompetence is to their small talk what the weather is to English conversation. Certainly, there is no shortage of grounds for castigating the collective laziness, rapacity, stupidity and corruption of African officialdom, from the highest to the lowest. It makes little difference whether the leader of the country is a cheap plaster saint like Nyerere or an out-and-out villain like Mobutu. Almost the only way to assure oneself of a decent standard of living in Africa — at least, one which allows the consumption of western goods — is by joining the pigs at the trough.

Governments have consistently favoured the urban, parasitic classes at the expense of the rural, productive ones. The reason for this is quite simple. If the modern history of Africa teaches anything, it teaches that he who controls the capital controls the country. Maintaining its own power has, not surprisingly, been the chief preoccupation of every national elite (and explains, incidentally, the Organisation of African Unity’s principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of member states).

An overvalued currency, that has disastrous economic effects which are then not automatically corrected by the imperative IMF devaluation, has been one of the elite’s favoured mechanisms. No less an authority than Nyerere admitted as much when asked why he refused to devalue the Tanzanian shilling. ‘There would be riots on the street,’ he said, ‘and I would lose everything I have.’ In response, the peasants tore up their coffee bushes — at a time of record world prices — and grew maize for their own consumption. Meanwhile, there was no money to pay for the shipment of oil, let alone for the oil itself, while the Central Bank resorted to filching private accounts.

There are, no doubt, purely economic constraints on Africa’s advance. If all of Africa were to produce tropical commodities as efficiently as possible, supply would so far exceed demand that prices would fall catastrophically. And there is little hope of industrialisation. Africa is so technically backward that it would be cheaper to ship things from Mars than to produce them on the continent. An arms embargo on South Africa has produced an arms industry; an arms embargo on the rest of Africa would produce bows and arrows.

It is above all the cultural condition of Africa that prevents economic expansion. There is little in traditional African culture that is compatible with a modern economy, and much that is inimical to it. The early missionaries, who wanted to change Africa, understood this. They may have been intolerant, but they were surely not wrong. They merely underestimated grossly the power of formal education to change deep-rooted patterns of thought. No doubt the award of the Nobel Prize for literature to Wole Soyinka is a legitimate cause for pride: but an award to an African in physics or chemistry would have been of far greater import.

The cultural impact of the West on Africa has been, in the main, disastrous. It has caused confusion and disarray, and awakened aspirations that cannot be met. Chinua Achebe, with regard to Nigeria, has written of a cargo cult mentality, in which Nigerians believe that one day, without any creative effort on their own part, all the good things of the world can and will be theirs. In one form or another, this mentality is present throughout Africa and is by no means discouraged by Western efforts at assistance.

Very few Africans have — can have — the faintest notion of the depth of the cultural and scientific tradition necessary to produce a Mercedes, or even a simple light bulb. For them, education is simply an obstacle course to a government post, from which they will be able to extort happily for the rest of their lives. (Failure to do so would be regarded as both foolish and reprehensible, insofar as it would be a failure to do the best for one’s family, village, clan etc.) The idea of trade exists in Africa, but the idea of developing products does not. Industry, except of a very second-rate kind, will not be possible in Africa for a long time to come. The trouble is, Africa does not have a long time.

Yet all this is profoundly misleading if it is taken to mean that Africa is a continent of unrelieved gloom and misery. To that extent, the proponents of the New World Information Order, who want the world’s press rendered safe for dictators, have a point.

The pictur
e I have painted of Africa — surely by now a commonplace one — may injure the amour propre of the deracinated African elite, but it is far from capturing the whole of African life. We too easily assume that poverty, even increasing poverty, equals misery. We also assume too easily that what would make us unhappy must make African peasants unhappy.

But two years in an African village, and thousands of miles of travel through Africa, during which I reported for obvious reasons, under the pseudonym of Edward Theberton, have convinced me this is not so. Within very wide (but not infinitely wide) limits of governmental incompetence and mismanagement, people in Africa are capable of leading lives whose major concerns are not the large questions of economic or political philosophy, but the small change of everyday existence. Perhaps I can best illustrate what I mean by reference to the life of Alice, my housegirl in Tanzania.

Alice was very poor. Before she came to work for me she had no monetary income of any description. She lived with her aged mother in a mud hut through the cracks in whose walls daylight was visible. Alice was, well, receptive to the charms of men, all of whom left her the moment she became pregnant. She had four children, all by different fathers. The first child was called Bahati, which means Luck or Fortune; the fourth was called Matatizo, which means Problem. The six of them lived off a little piece of land, growing maize, beans and bananas, and with a chicken or two. As soon as the children were able, they worked; they fetched water from a stream half an hour away and weeded the fields.

Alice was a charming woman and completely honest. She laughed whenever she caught your eye. Simple things delighted her: she once spent a week’s wages on Polaroid pictures of herself and her family. On returning from England I brought her a stereophonic headset. I have never seen anyone derive such pleasure from a material object: she went round the house squealing with happiness. The batteries were exhausted in a day and she was devastated, until I gave her some more. Thenceforth, she wore her headphones even when she had no batteries, just to increase her status in the village. Chocolates made her laugh for joy. She asked me for a loan to buy fertiliser but, discovering it had sold out, used the money for a kanga, a piece of cloth the Tanzanian women use for a skirt, instead. How could I be angry? When there was fertiliser again in the village shop, I gave her more money.

One day she brought little Matatizo to me. He had stepped on a puff adder and it had bitten him. His leg had swelled and she was worried he would die. I put him to bed, gave him a paracetemol, and in a few days he was better. She was convinced I had saved his life.

Not long afterwards, I found her deep in acrimonious discussion with a man whom I discovered to be her current lover. (In two years she had two pregnancies aborted by a village wise woman, resulting in horrible infections.) She was in the process of breaking with him. Two days later she came to me in a state of great agitation: her erstwhile lover had planted some stolen goods in her fields and had denounced her to the police. She was soon to be arrested.

I rushed off to the police station with her and testified to her honesty. Looking back on it, it seems extraordinary that the police should have dropped the matter merely because I told them to. However, in Tanzania police cases are rarely decided by strict evidence, so I had no hesitation in using my prestige as a doctor in defence of someone I knew to be innocent.

Her lover, however, took his revenge. While she was at work, he went to her hut and in full view of the children cleared it out of her few possessions, even taking from the walls the pictures she had gleaned from advertisements in my magazines. Naturally, she was very upset: her lover decamped for another part of the country and personal identity being a very fluid thing in Tanzania, there was no hope of catching him.

Still, she soon recovered and was even able to laugh about it. I visited her some time after I had left the area when once more she had no monetary income. I found her with her children shelling beans outside the hut. They were talking and laughing when I arrived. She seemed very pleased to see me and ordered Matatizo to fetch their only chair for me to sit on. Then the children came one by one to touch the top of my head as a gesture of respect. Alice gave me a chicken (a considerable gift in the circumstances) and I gave her some money, which she would have spent at once on some conspicuous trifle.

The simple point of this banal story is that while Alice’s life was far from easy, it was by no means miserable. It had its ups and downs, but these were not related to the operation of the London commodities market. She was a simple woman who could barely read, but this did not deprive her life of meaning. I think her lot was on the whole more tolerable than that of the unemployed in the north of England.

So I am both pessimistic about Africa in the sense I believe it is unlikely to develop economically fast or far, and optimistic about it in the sense this does not necessarily entail utter wretchedness for the great mass of the African population. There is as much misery in Geneva as in Kinshasa. Life in Africa, as everywhere else, is more complex than the schemata of intellectuals, or even of political journalists, would have us believe.


Copyright 1987 Anthony M. Daniels. Reprinted with permission.