Rhodesia
– Zimbabwe – Into the Wilds
I finished my internship at the end of 1958 but was now left with a
profound financial problem. How to support myself, and help my mother, and
sister Gloria and brother, Arnold?
Frankie Forman suggested that I move northwards to Rhodesia and
join Ray Mossop, an excellent general practitioner in Gatooma in Southern
Rhodesia.
Southern Rhodesia is a land locked state located between the
Zambezi and the Limpopo Rivers. It was developed by Cecil Rhodes who directed the British South African company. It was an important English colony, directed from
London by the British civil service. The
country is rich, the land is fertile, it has adequate water supplies, fertile
farming land and unlimited mineral resources including gold, copper, platinum,
nickel, tin, asbestos and lithium.
It had a large, black population made up of the Mashona and
Matabele tribes, and a smaller European population of colonial settlers and groups
of traders who had migrated in the wake of the farming and mining boom. It was
simple to start a trading store or a small factory and earn a good living. It had a small Jewish population some of whom
had migrated from South Africa; others had come from the island of Rhodes where
life was difficult for the Sephardic population.
Gatooma (Kadoma) was located in the middle of a rich gold outcrop
with deep hardrock mines and rich seams of gold. Experienced miners migrated
northwards from the South African fields and local workers were recruited from Nyasaland.
The surrounding land was fertile with rich grazing veld for cattle and sheep
and extensive flat expanses suitable
for maize and cotton farming.
The town was located on the main highway, 200 miles from Bulawayo
and 100 miles from Salisbury. It was a typical small Southern African village
with a population of about 5000 whites and a large African population. The Cam and Motor and Golden Valley gold
mines were run by the wealthy British Rio Tinto company and had a very
profitable output.
The white and black populations formed a strong contrast. The
whites were simple folk who owned the shops, owned and ran the farms, developed
and expanded the small factories and controlled the infrastructure and civil service.
The local indigenous population had a rudimentary education and undertook the
manual tasks. The white-black polarization was complete although there were
also “poor whites” who were unsuccessful in their occupations and who had
become accustomed to alcohol. Some of the blacks were educated but the
difference was much sharper than in South Africa. Apartheid existed with clear demarcations
between the white and black areas. The schools were segregated.
The town boasted a small government hospital and another more
modern hospital on the mine. It had five general practitioners and two
government medical officers.
My mentor, Ray Mossop was a patient and experienced general
practitioner who was looking for a new assistant to run his mining practice.
January 1959 was a major milestone in my life. My sister Gloria and
I set out in my father’s grey Austin A55 on our 2000 miles trip to the
North. In the middle of the Karroo
desert we ran out of coolant in the radiator and burnt the main bearing of the
car. We found the nearest garage in a small town, Richmond, but there were no
spare parts. We left the car and hitch hiked to Bloemfontein where we spent a
week with my cousin Bubbles Gersovsky.
We parted with our last pennies to pay for the repairs and took a small
loan to cover the expenses for the remaining drive northwards.
We were exhausted, when, a week later, we arrived in Gatooma, but
found a pleasant furnished house on the mine compound with a large vegetable
and flower garden. My predecessor, an older general practitioner, who had
retired, had been a widower and had spent his spare time cultivating flowers.
It had an unusual collection of dahlias and gladioli strains and the mine provided
an expert gardener. Behind the house was a large vegetable garden and many
banana, mango and avocado trees.
It was a simple house but was more than adequate for our needs.
The weather was quite different from Cape Town. It was tropical
with hot summers and torrential rains that would erode the land and flood the
shoulders of the roads and warm, dry winters where the land became parched and
barren.
I started work immediately. My main practice was in the mine
hospital where I had a comfortable office run by an experienced nurse and my
own pharmacy. This was attached to a small 40 bed black hospital run by Charles
Marais, an experienced male nurse who dealt with the emergencies and cared for
the administration. He was a great administrator and we had a well trained
group of male orderlies and nurses.
The mine was located in Eiffel Flats about 6 kilometers from Gatooma.
The town had its own 100 bed hospital to serve the local population and the
surrounding district. We all had privileges in the hospital and helped the 2
full time Government Medical Officers with the overflow and emergency and night
calls.
Dr Mossop had converted a house in the town into a clinic office
and practice and there was also a small African practice which was under my
care. I had a good interaction with the non-white population. I had an
excellent male nurse who was the interpreter but soon I started to learn the
local Mashona language. The missionaries had produced several excellent grammars
and textbooks and had developed a new written language from its previous oral
tradition.
I soon slipped into the daily routine. Morning rounds in the mine hospital,
outpatient clinics for the mine workers and their families; a clinic in town in
the late morning, ward rounds at the Government hospital at lunchtime and then
back to the mine hospital for the afternoon clinics. On Wednesday we worked in
the operating theatre where Ray did most of the surgery and I gave the
anaesthetics. We had a good relationship and dialogue and often we would be
assisted by one of the local doctors. Charles Hossey was very interested in
surgery and later he left to continue further surgical training
The work was varied and interesting. The white mineworkers and
their families needed good common sense general practice: viral infections,
cuts, pregnancies and minor injuries.
The black workers had more serious diseases.
The mine injuries were often serious due to major underground cave-ins
and accidents: fractures, burns, asphyxia (gassing) and poisonings from the
extraction processes. I soon became an expert in underground mine safety, explosions,
and drilling related injuries. Mine collapse
occurs when the structure of the underground mine became unstable and could not
sustain itself. Workers were trapped under the rubble, leading to injury or
even death for some or all of the crew.
I became an expert in orthopaedic surgery and learned how to treat
and reduce major fractures.
There were also many other mining related diseases such as severe respiratory
disease (chronic bronchitis and silicosis) and musculoskeletal strains from the
heavy physical exertion. Fortunately the black manual workers were young and
resilient. They came from Nyasaland on three year contracts and did not return
if they had any disability.
Many of the workers were single or had left their families at home.
Venereal disease was rife and there were several new case of gonorrhea or
syphilis at every morning round. Stephen, my chief orderly would look at
the smears and we always made a precise diagnosis. My favourite drug, Bicillin,
had appeared on the market. It was long acting Penicillin: a single injection
lasted for four weeks and eradicated the organisms. Later I spread my medical net
into the African compound, invited all “the ladies”, treated their venereal
infections and eliminated the epidemic.
Tropical
diseases were endemic. Malaria, carried by the anopheles mosquito was rampant.
The mosquitoes breed in any collection of water and transmitted the Plasmodium protozoal
parasite. The mosquitoes bite an infected host, feed on their infected blood,
the parasite multiplies and then when they bite and feed on a new host’s blood,
transfer the plasmodium. These multiply in the new host; damage the new host’s
cells with a predilection for red blood, liver and brain cells. It causes a fever
every 3 or 4 days. The parasites settle in the deeper cells of the body where they
cause later reactivation.
We
were fortunate to have available a group of new effective antiplasmodial drugs.
Quinine was the well tried agent, but was now replaced by chloroquine, amodiaquine
and primaquine. The drugs were expensive but the mine was interested in an effective,
healthy work force. We also had regular daily spraying teams to eradicate the mosquitoes
with DDT.
Before I left we had almost eradicated malaria from the mine
precincts but new infections arrived from the migration of workers from outlying
district.
The
second major endemic disease was bilharziasis also known as Schistosomiasis. It
is a parasitic disease caused by a trematode: flatworm (Schistosoma haematobium).
Larval forms of the parasites are released by freshwater snails and penetrate
the skin who swim or walk in the water. In the body, the larvae develop into
adult schistosomes, which live in the blood vessels. The females release eggs,
some of which are passed out of the body in the urine or faeces. Others are
trapped in body tissues, causing an immune reaction. The eggs released in the urine live in
rivulets, penetrate into snails, their secondary host, cercaria are released
into the water and enter through the skin to infect a new human host.
In
urinary schistosomiasis, there is progressive deposition of the eggs and larvae
in the bladder walls with damage to the bladder, ureters and kidneys. The
disease eventually damages the bladder and the ureters and causes severe
infections, obstruction and kidney failure. In intestinal schistosomiasis,
there is progressive enlargement of the liver and spleen, intestinal damage,
and hypertension of the abdominal blood vessels.
Control of schistosomiasis is based on drug treatment, (Prazaquantel),
snail control, improved sanitation and health education. When I worked in
Rhodesia, the available drugs were partially effective but today prazaquantal
is really effective and the disease is disappearing.
There was a large cotton spinning factory in the town where we had
Monday morning asthma from allergy to the cotton fibres or toxins from bacteria
and also a chronic lung disease, Byssinosis, due to inhalation of the fibres.
I worked very hard physically and mentally with many night calls
and frequent emergencies. There was a continuous psychological stress load from
the variety, intensity and severity of the practice. I was a young man who
lacked the extensive clinical experience of my older colleagues, but this
improved as I gained more confidence.
I had a continuous learning program. Once a fortnight I went to the
large government hospital, Harare, in Salisbury. Michael Gelfand was a pioneer
in investigating the local diseases of the region. He was a good teacher and
every Monday morning would send me the British Medical Journal, Lancet and The Practitioner
of the previous week. I built a solid library of medical books and spent every
free moment, learning and reading: internal medicine, surgery, obstetrics,
tropical medicine and ear nose and throat diseases. How useful would it have
been to have had the internet.
The medical material and experience was unbelievable. I became an
experienced general practitioner. I learned how to give modern anesthetics. In
Cape Town I had learned about good oxygenation, nitrous oxide and ether. In
Gatooma my world changed. Pentothal, a short acting barbiturate for induction,
suxamethonium for muscle relaxation and intubation, flaxidal for longer muscular
relaxation and then short acting anaesthetic agents like cyclopropane and the
newly introduced drug halothane. It was a new world and I spent short periods
at Harare Hospital in Salisbury to learn from the more experienced anaesthetists.
Orthopaedic surgery was interesting. I saw all the fractures in the
book. Treatment was conservative but I soon learnt to reduce the different
fractures and fix them with plaster casts and treat larger bone lesions with
effective pinning and traction.
There were several deliveries of newborn babies every day and the
local midwives were very effective. Nevertheless some of the mothers needed a
breech delivery or a forceps extraction and I soon became proficient in
Caesarian Section. In retrospect the treatment was primitive, but our infant mortality
rate was very low.
Surgery was more complex. The major procedures were sent to
Salisbury, but I became expert at intestinal obstructions, volvuli and simple
ear nose and throat surgery. My eye-finger-brain coordination had improved and
found myself very comfortable in the operating room.
Severe, acute diseases of children were common: diphtheria, scarlet
fever, measles and whooping cough with all their complications. Gastroenteritis
caused severe fluid depletion and dehydration, particularly in the hot summers,
and this was followed by severe protein malnutrition Kwashiorkor (protein malnutrition) in the
black children kept me busy but their image still exists in my mind: the thin
emaciated and dehydrated child with no skin turgor, underdeveloped muscles,
protruding ribs, and a skull-like head. The disease is still common in many
parts of Africa and the peri-Saharan desert scrublands where the intertribal
wars have caused extensive migration of innocent families, lack of food,
recurrent gastroenteritis and severe malnutrition, Vitamin deficiencies were
also common. Most of the children had worms and other parasites and soon I
became expert in identifying them and their eggs. Gasteroentiritis, cholera and
typhoid fever also affected the adults with severe fluid losses, dehydration
and even death. Fortunately we had good antibiotics and an efficient
intravenous fluid replacement programme.
We also had a small mobile clinic dispensary and once a week I
would travel to the smaller surrounding mines where I also saw patients from
the surrounding farms.
There was little time for social interaction. My sister Gloria left
for Salisbury where she met Morris Fleischman who was a wholesale butcher, they
were married and had two children. The town had a small Jewish population of
Ashkenazi Jews who had come from Lithuania and settled first in South Africa,
and a larger Sephardi population who had come from Rhodes and whom had settled
either in Rhodesia or the neighbouring Belgian Congo. They were all traders or
shopkeepers. Mr. Burke had been the mayor and also ran the local printing
press. There was a small synagogue with a Friday night prayer meeting and the
Rabbi from Que-que came once a week to teach the children. Medicine was more
than a full time occupation and the occasional spare time was reserved for
reading. I had little in common with the senior mine staff who would have their
evening beer or drink and spend their free time on the golf course.
I met my wife Aileen in the local hospital and we were married.
The greatest event was a shattering motor car accident. I was
called to the hospital to deal with an obstetric emergency. I rushed along the
road from Eiffel Flats to Gatooma and a herdsman tried to cross the road with a
small herd of cattle. As I came around a sharp bend the cows appeared and the
car hit them from the side. There was a loud bump, I was thrown into the front
windscreen and the bonnet of the car and two cows crumpled. The grey Austin was
unrecognizable, and I was badly shaken. The car as replaced by a brand new Ford
Zephyr.
Gatooma was an incubator for my medical development. I had become a
mature independent doctor with a wide practical experience in many aspects of
medicine, able to take major decisions and to practice human medicine with the
patient at the centre of the process and able to interact with them at eyeball
level. The metamorphosis had started and would continue in England.
After two years of hard work I had saved a small financial nest egg
and we decided that my career needed advancement. I had made my small
contribution to medicine in Gatooma and the time had come to move on.
There were no vacant positions in Internal medicine in Cape Town so
I decided to continue my studies at The School of Tropical Medicine in
Liverpool.
Rhodesian history has since undergone some interesting twists.
Unilateral declaration of independence under Ian Smith with an international
trade embargo made the country very self sufficient as small local industries
flourished. Finally Black independence with poor government and corruption,
eviction and murder of the whites led to total chaos and collapse of most of
the government institutions.
The white colonial government was one-sided and did little to
develop the deprived black population, white independence was unilateral, but
black emancipation has almost destroyed a rich and fertile country.