“Oh, hundreds,” I answered.
“And do you know,” he said, “that long ago, when the Portuguese first arrived here and started buying up ivory, they were struck by the fact that Africans didn’t have a great deal of it. Why, they wondered? After all, the tusks are very rugged and long-lasting, and if it is difficult for them to hunt down a live elephant for its ivory—they usually did this by chasing the animal into a hole they had dug earlier—then why don’t they collect the tusks from elephants that have already died, and whose corpses are doubtless lying somewhere? They suggested this idea to their African middlemen, but heard something astonishing by way of reply: there are no dead elephants, there are no elephant cemeteries. The Portuguese were intrigued. How do elephants die? Where are their remains? At issue were the tusks, the ivory, and the large sums of money they commanded.
“The manner in which elephants die was a secret Africans long guarded from the white man. The elephant is sacred, and so is his death. Everything sacred is surrounded by an impenetrable mystery. What caused the elephant to be so admired was that he had no enemies in the animal world. No other beast could conquer him. He could die (in the past) only a natural death. It occurred usually at dusk, when the elephants came to the water. They would stand at the edge of a lake or river, reach out far with their trunks, and drink. But the day would come when a tired old elephant could no longer raise his trunk, and to drink clear water he would have to walk farther and farther out into the lake. His legs would sink into the muck, deeper and deeper. The lake pulled him into its cavernous interior. He fought for a time, thrashed about, attempted to extricate himself from the bog and get back to the shore, but his own weight was so great, and the pull of the lake’s bottom so paralyzing, that finally the animal would lose its balance, fall, and vanish under the water forever.
“There,” Dr. Patel finished, “on the bottoms of our lakes, are the age-old elephant cemeteries.”
Dr. Doyle
M
y apartment in Dar es Salaam consists of two rooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom, on the first floor of a house that stands amid coconut palms and luxuriant, feathery banana trees not far from Ocean Road. In one room I have a table and chairs, in the other a bed draped with mosquito netting; its festive presence—it resembles a white, trailing wedding train—is meant more to reassure the tenant than to deter mosquitoes: a mosquito will always manage to slip through. It almost seems that these small but insistent aggressors establish each evening a battle plan meant to exhaust their victims, because if there are ten of them, say, they do not attack all together—which would allow you to deal with them all at once and have peace for the rest of the night—but one by one. The first to take off is, as it were, the scout, whose reconnaissance mission the rest closely observe. Well rested after a good day’s sleep, he torments you with his demonic buzzing, until finally, sleepy and furious, you organize a hunt, kill him; you are just lying down again, confident of returning to sleep, just turning off the light, when the next one begins his loops, spirals, and corkscrews.
After years (or, rather, years of nights) spent observing mosquitos, I reached the conclusion that this creature is possessed of a deeply seated suicidal instinct, some uncontrollable need for self-destruction. Witnessing the demise of the predecessors does not discourage them, instead they hurl themselves one after the other, clearly excited and desperately determined, toward an inevitable and quick death.
Whenever I return to my apartment from some longer trip, I bring great confusion and discomfort into the lives of those I find there. For the place doesn’t stay empty during my absence. Barely have I shut the door behind me than a teeming, bustling, and meddlesome world of insects takes possession. From cracks in the floor and walls, from behind window frames and out of corners, from under moldings and parapets emerge into the light of day armies of ants and centipedes, of spiders and beetles; out fly swarms of flies and moths: the rooms fill up with the countless and varied little nothings, which I am unable to either describe or name; and all this moves its wings, grinds its chops, and minces its limbs. I most admire a certain variety of red ants, who appear suddenly out of nowhere, marching in a superbly even formation and in a perfectly synchronized rhythm, briefly enter one cabinet or another, consume whatever is sweet there, then leave their feeding ground and, walking again as before in an equally ideal order, disappear without a trace whence they came.
It was this way now, too, when I returned from Kampala. At the sight of me, part of the assembled company departed without any deliberation or delay, the others reluctantly, pouting. I drank some juice, looked through the letters and newspapers, and went to sleep. In the morning I got up with difficulty—I had no strength. Making matters worse, it was already the dry season, a time of terrible, withering heat waves that begin from the earliest morning hours. Rallying what strength I had, I wrote several dispatches about the situation in Uganda during the first weeks of independence and drove them to the post office. The clerk who took them from me wrote the date and time into my notebook. They were transmitted via teleprinter to our office in London, and from there to Warsaw: it was the cheapest way. I was astonished by the skill of the local teletypists: they transcribed the Polish text onto the telex without making a single error. I asked them once how this was possible. Because, they answered, they had been taught to copy not words or sentences, but letter after letter. “That is why it makes no difference to us in which language the telegram is written,” one of them explained to me. “So far as we’re concerned, we are not sending meanings, but marks.”
Despite the fact that quite some time had already elapsed since I’d left Kampala, instead of feeling better, I was feeling increasingly worse. It’s the remains of the malaria, I told myself, and on top of that the unbearable temperatures of the dry season. Despite the fact that I now began to feel an unfamiliar, intense warmth within, I thought it was the external heat somehow settling down inside me and radiating from there. I was dripping with sweat, but others, too, were drenched—sweat prevented you from being incinerated on the summer’s blazing pyre.
After a month of this diminished and wretched existence, I awoke one night feeling that my pillow was wet. I turned on the light and froze: my pillow was covered with blood. I rushed into the bathroom and looked in the mirror: my whole face was smeared with it. In my mouth I felt something sticky, with a salty taste. I washed, but was unable to get back to sleep until morning.
I remembered seeing a sign on one of the houses near the main street, Independence Avenue, with the name of a doctor on it. I went there. John Laird, a tall, slim Englishman, was bustling about his office, which was stacked high with crates and packages. He was returning to Europe in two days, but gave me the name and address of a colleague whom I should see. Close by, near the railway station, there’s an outpatient clinic; I would find him there. His name is Ian Doyle. “And,” he added, “he’s an Irishman” (as if in medicine, at least in this country, what mattered was not so much one’s specialty as one’s nationality).
The clinic occupied an old military building, which had served as the army barracks during the days when Tanganyika was a German colony. A listless crowd of Africans was camped out in front, suffering no doubt from all manner of illness. Inside I was greeted by a tired, drawn-looking middle-aged man, whose warmth and kindness struck me momentarily. His very presence, his smile and friendliness, acted like a balm on me. He told me to come to the Ocean Road Hospital that afternoon, because that was the only place with an X-ray machine.
I knew things weren’t right with me, but blamed everything on the malaria, and very much wanted the doctor to confirm my diagnosis. As we left the X-ray ward—Doyle had X-rayed me himself—he placed his hand on my shoulder, and we started to stroll over the gently rolling grounds covered with tall palm trees. It was pleasant here, for the palm trees gave shade and a light breeze blew from the ocean.
“Yes,” Doyle said finally, and lightly squeezed my arm, “it’s definitely tuberculosis.”
And he fell silent.
My legs buckled under me and grew so heavy I could raise neither one. We came to a stop.
“We will take you to the hospital,” he said.
“I can’t go to the hospital,” I said. “I don’t have enough money.”
A month’s stay in the hospital cost more than my quarterly salary.
“Then you have to return home,” he said.
“I can’t go home,” I replied. I felt the fever consuming me, I was thirsty and weak.
Then and there I decided to tell him everything. I had trusted this man from the start, and believed he would understand. I explained to him that this stay in Africa was the chance of a lifetime for me. That an appointment like mine was the first of its kind in my country: Poland had never before had a permanent correspondent in sub-Saharan Africa. That it came to pass thanks only to an enormous effort on the part of the editorial department, which is poor, for ours is a country where every dollar is precious. That if I inform Warsaw of my illness, they will be unable to pay for my hospitalization and will simply order me to return, and that I will most likely never come here again. And that the thing that had been a lifelong dream of mine—to work in Africa—will vanish forever.
The doctor listened to all this in silence. We were walking again among the palm trees, shrubs, and flowers, amid all that tropical beauty, poisoned for the moment by my defeat and despair.
Silence. Doyle was weighing something, deliberating.
“There is really only one solution,” he said at last. “You were at the local clinic this morning. Poor Africans go there for medical attention, because it’s free. Unfortunately, conditions are dismal. I don’t go there often myself, because I am the only pulmonologist in this whole large country, where tuberculosis is common. Your case is fairly typical: a strong malaria so weakens the system that you then easily succumb to another illness, frequently tuberculosis. Starting tomorrow, I will put your name down on the list of the clinic’s patients. I am authorized to do so. I will introduce you to the staff. You’ll come every day for an injection. We’ll try, we’ll see.”
Dr. Doyle’s staff consisted of two people, who did everything: they cleaned, gave injections, and for the next part directed the flow of traffic, admitting some of the sick, and for reasons unclear to me, chasing others away before they so much as got to the door (suspicions of corruption did not apply here—none of the prospective patients had any money).
The older and heavier one was called Edu, the younger, shorter, and muscular one Abdullahi. In many African societies, children are named for an event that occurred on the day of their birth. Edu is an abbreviation of “education,” for on the day he came into the world, the first school was opened in his village.
In places where Christianity and Islam had not yet become deeply rooted, there was an infinite richness to given names. They were expressions of the poetry of adults, who called a child Brisk Morning (if he was born at dawn), or Shadow of the Acacia (if he came into the world beneath an acacia tree). In societies without a tradition of written history, names were used to affix in memory the more important events, long past or recent. If a child was born as Tanganyika was obtaining its independence, it was called Independence (Uhuru in Swahili). If the parents were supporters of President Nyerere, they might name their child Nyerere.
Thus a historical record, albeit a spoken one, was created over centuries, and being highly personal, one with a particularly strong claim on the individual: I am at one with my community because my name celebrates a deed inscribed in the collective memory of the people to whom I belong.
The introduction of Christianity and Islam reduced this exuberant world of poetry and history to several dozen names from the Bible and the Koran. From then on there were only Jameses and Patricks, or Ahmeds and Ibrahims.
Edu and Abdullahi had hearts of gold. We quickly became friends. I tried to create the impression that my life was in their hands (and it was, actually), and they were tremendously impressed by this fact. When I needed help, they dropped everything. I arrived every day after four, when the afternoon heat was waning, the clinic was already closed, and the two of them were sweeping the old wooden floors, raising unimaginably large clouds of dust. Everything proceeded just as Dr. Doyle had ordered. In a glass cabinet in his office stood an enormous metal can (a gift from the Danish Red Cross) full of large gray pills, a drug called PAS. I took twenty-four of those a day. As I was counting them out into a bag, Edu would remove a massive metal syringe from boiling water, snap on the needle, and draw two centimeters of streptomycin from a bottle. Drawing his hand far back, as if to hurl a spear, he would then drive the needle into me. I would leap—with time this became part of the ritual—and emit a sharp hiss, at which Edu and Abdullahi (who was observing everything) would explode with homeric laughter.
Nothing creates a bond between people in Africa more quickly than shared laughter—for example, at a white man jumping up because of a little thing like an injection. So I began to play the game with them, and despite the pain from the needle that Edu plunged into me with such dreadful force, I laughed with them.
In the disturbed, paranoid world of racial inequality, in which everything is determined by the color of one’s skin (calibrated by shades of difference), my illness, while physically incapacitating, had an unexpected benefit. Rendering me weak and defective, it diminished my prestigious white status—that of someone formidable, untouchable—and put me on a more even footing with the black men. Now a diminished, disowned, flawed white man I could be treated with familiarity, although I was still a white man. A warmth entered my relations with Edu and Abdullahi. It would have been unthinkable had they met me as a strong, healthy, imperious European.
First of all, they started to invite me to their homes. I gradually became a habitué of the African districts of the city and came to know their life as never before. In African tradition, the guest is treated with the utmost consideration. The saying “Guest in the house, God in the house” has a nearly literal meaning here. The hosts prepare a long time for the occasion. They clean, they cook the best possible meal. I am referring to the home of someone like Edu—an attendant at a city clinic. When I met him, his position was relatively good. Good, because Edu had a steady job, and there are few of those. The majority of the city’s inhabitants work sporadically and rarely, or not at all for long periods of time. Perhaps the greatest riddle of Africa’s cities is how these masses of people earn a living. How, and from what? They are here not because there was a demand for them, but because poverty expelled them from the villages—poverty, hunger, and helplessness. They are fugitives seeking rescue, refugees cursed by fate. When a group of such people finally reaches the outskirts of town, driven from areas affected by drought or famine, you will notice the fear in their eyes. They must now search among these slums and mud houses for their El Dorado. What will they do now? How will they proceed?
So it was with Edu and several cousins from his clan. They belong to the Sango-speaking people from the interior. They had been farmers, but their land grew barren, so several years ago they came to Dar es Salaam. Their first step: to find other Sango-speaking people. Or people from communities who are affiliated with the Sango through ties of friendship. The African is well versed in this geography of intertribal friendships and hatreds, no less critical than those existing today in the Balkans.
Following a ball of yarn, they will finally arrive at the house of a countryman. The neighborhood is called Kariakoo, and its layout is more or less planned—straight, perpendicularly aligned sandy streets. The construction is monotonous and schematic. The so-called swahili houses predominate, a type of Soviet-style housing—a single one-storied building with eight to twelve rooms, one family in each. The kitchen is communal, as are the toilet and the washing machine. Each dwelling is unbelievably cramped, because families here have many children, each home being in effect a kindergarten. The whole family sleeps together on the clay floor covered with thin raffia matting.