gore
Special writer Ruaridh Nicoll spends 12 hours in the hell halls of Baragwanath Hospital
Friday 6.48pm
T HE night-porter waits. Lounging in a wheelchair, he watches as the darkness begins to strangle the eve-ning’s flaring sun. At his feet, pools of water from earlier rain stand in the hollows while the tools of his trade, 30 stretchers, lie chaotic around him like flotsam at a breakwater.
He knows that beyond the walls of this vast hospital the harvest has begun, the first of the night’s crop of smashed humanity is on its way. He stirs, marking a car’s hurried approach along the glistening road.
Pulling up, Ruffus Ngxekisa leaves the driver’s seat and opens a back door, pulling a bloody mess – a friend – from the vehicle. He turns and looks beyond the porter helping the patient on to a stretcher, into the doorway of the squat barracks which glows yellow with foul light. The porter begins to roll the stretcher towards the door and Ngxekisa follows.
Like Alice through the looking glass, they arrive in a parallel universe, Chris Hani Baragwanath – the world’s largest hospital. A notice on the wall cautions newcomers to stay quiet and wait their turn while trolleys garnished with shuddering bodies stand in line.
A man moves among the cut and dazed taking details. A doctor spreads his palms and leans heavily on a patient’s chest before he pauses, straightens up and pulls a sheet over the dead man’s head.
It is still early.
“He hit a wall, somebody else was driving but they ran,” Ngxekisa says to the man taking notes. “Somebody phoned me because I knew him.” He shrugs and looks down at his friend – all he has ever known is a first name, Jabulani. “The car is in pieces,” he says, explaining all the blood.
Jabulani joins a queue of patients waiting for admission, their stretchers lining up like cars at a tollgate. Beyond, the activity intensifies; the graver the injury, the more a force like gravity pulls the victim into the interior.
They go down the corridor: stitching room to the right of them, orthopaedic pit to the left of them, resuscitation room and the operating theatres in front of them. Possibly into the jaws of death, certainly into the mouth of hell.
7.53pm
A man rages incoherently and a nurse, the milk of human kindness a dried-up stain on her heart, complains tiredly that the patients are always drunk.
“You don’t have to be drunk to fight in this place,” mutters Trevor Herbst, shifting with the pain of five stab wounds. “It was about a lady,” he says of his injuries. “Just a friend of mine. There were two of them, one had a bottle and the other had a knife.” He begins to go pale. “I feel dizzy,” he says, and then more urgently: “Water”.
Blood seeps along the fibres of his meagre blanket and his skin feels deathly cold to the touch. A nurse arrives, piles him on to a stretcher and feeds a saline drip into him. Looking at the blood seeping from a wound in the back of his neck and another in the small of his back, she quickly rolls him into the stitching room.
8.26pm
Inside, nursing auxiliary Sila Mbatha is ready with the scalpel and the crescent needle. The skin of his face looks as if it has been scrunched into a ball and left out to dry in the sun. Using the blade between finger and thumb, he scrapes away Herbst’s hair around the head wound, revealing a strong flow of arterial blood.
He pauses and turns Herbst over, pushing his little finger into the wound on his back, causing Herbst to squeal as the finger goes in up to the knuckle. Mbatha frowns and looks quizzically at the red stain on his rubber-covered hand before sending him further down the corridor.
8.35pm
As Herbst arrives, a white Afrikaner is shouting. “I love my wife,” he cries, holding up his hands like a boxer, an inappropriate gesture. “I don’t hit my woman.” A nurse laughs at him and shakes her finger mischievously.
“I was sent here from the suburbs,” he shouts. “There are hospitals that side, why did they send me here?” A number of patients shift on their stretchers.
Doctors move towards a communal table in an alcove, flurry, talk and then break off to continue their work. Here is Michael Barrow, the 27-year-old whose aged eyes offer reassurance. There goes Nasser Lahlahi, a handsome Belgium of Moroccan descent, serious, flu-ridden and intense.
Here comes Stefan Vukasonivoch, a Serb who refers to himself as a Yugoslav and speaks with the tongue of a philosopher. Tamara Burchard, a 20-year-old intern who feels the need to work at Baragwanath because of her white guilt, sits down.
9.25pm
“Now it starts,” says Dr Jabu Moyo, the chief resident, as chaos comes flooding down the corridor.
10.30pm
The barracks fill with the smell of blood. Rose Mesani is with her sister’s father-in- law, Amos Mzwantile, who lies beaten senseless on a stretcher. “His landlady organised for thugs to beat him up because our children were fighting,” she says. “I came home and found him walking around with no mind. I’m worried about the children because they are still there and we are here.” The children are under six.
The trolleys are piling up, shapes shaking under blankets and dripping gore, many of them shot. Strangely, there is very little sound. The Zulus and the Xhosa don’t scream, rarely even complain, frequently laugh with appalling courage in the face of the most hideous pain. “Blood river,” says Vukasonivoch as he wanders past.
11.25pm
Glen Makabe, a bandage around his foot, is wearing a pink-and-white polka dot hat. There is a large pool of blood under him. “This life is too fast,” he replies. “I was at a street party and suddenly people start shooting. I was shot in the foot, but it was a mistake.”
He takes off the bandage, displaying a small hole in his ankle and another in his heel where the bullet exited. In the 1980s Makabe had spent a year and half in Baragwanath. “They are treating us better now.”
I notice a trail of blood spots on the floor and follow it; Hansel without his Gretel. The trail ends in a large lump of drying gore that defies metaphor. “They estimate a third of the blood here is HIV- positive,” says Burchard. A passing man says, “God bless you”.
Barrow says around 300 000 people are admitted to Baragwanath every year. That does not include the people treated and sent home on the same day or the 1 400 babies who emerge weekly into the world here. “It’s good fun,” he says – laughter the only exit. A doctor introduces himself as Harley Simon, as in the motorbike. “That’s where I was conceived,” he says.
12.11am
Reginald Silas has two bullet wounds in his leg, tiny marks, just a little hole on each side. He was walking home with his girlfriend when three men approached, told him “we’re living in a gangster’s paradise” and shot him. “They took my girlfriend. I don’t know whether she is alive, dead or if they raped her. I trust my ancestors to do the best they can.”
In the stitching room the nursing auxiliary sews a large L-shaped piece of flesh back on to a man’s head with lightning speed. Earlier, a security guard had said the worst thing he sees is people with their upper lip cut off: “Their teeth shine on the outside.”
The nurse pulls the patient’s head back and looks at his chin, split open vertically to the bone. It is the bad facial wounds that move bile up a throat.
1.55am
By now Makabe’s shock is wearing off and he is feeling cold. Herbst has disappeared after a chest X-ray, hopefully home to his sister. The doctors are spending ever more time in the resuscitation room in their attempts to save patients from death in a pool of their own vomit, blood and shit.
Bernard Kujamo and his brother Fernando have suffered multiple gunshot wounds. Gert Kruger, a policeman who looks as if he has seen everything but lost none of his compassion, is talking to them.
“There were five brothers,” Kruger says later. “Apparently some men came into their house with guns, led them down the road, forced them to lie on the ground and started shooting. Two are here, two are dead and the fifth has disappeared.” I ask how this registers on the scale of Soweto crime. “This is pretty bad,” he says.
2.50am
“Soweto, my friend, forget it,” says an old man. “It’s getting worse, everyone wants a gun. The innocent people are killed by thugs, and those thugs are protected by law.”
Burchard wanders over with a severed ear while, a little way off, the owner pleads with a doctor to sew it back on. “We can’t, it’s dead,” says the doctor. The patient insists.
The doctor takes the ear from Burchard and pulls at the white flesh. “It’s more than five hours old,” he declares. “It is a dead ear.” The patient, who had it bitten off in a bar brawl, shouts, “It’s not”, while Burchard struggles with laughter. “The plastic surgeon will make you a new one,” she says kindly.
4.03am
The doctors begin to relax as the tide of violence recedes. The admission clerks listen to Zairean music, dozing behind their glass screens. The porters are asleep, wrapped in hospital blankets amid the detritus of the outside world. The pools of water are now tinted red, the stretchers are gone; there are bandages, rubber gloves and cigarette butts in their place.
Barrow is treating a drunk and incoherent Zulu. The patient has a length of string wrapped around his arm to protect him from bullets. “Where’s it hurting, Bubba?” the doctor asks, and when there is no reply adds: “You never know whether it’s drink or something worse.”
Barrow’s grandfather was a GP, his father and eldest brothers are surgeons and his younger brothers are studying to be doctors. He looks around him. “You know, it’s not as if I’ll be here for the rest of my life,” he says.
4.45am
“I was never one of those little girls who didn’t like blood or bugs,” says Burchard.
4.53am
Earlier a disembowelled man had arrived with a cop. “I didn’t want to know the story, but the policeman insisted on telling me that he had raped a girl and killed her mother,” says a doctor. “How can you avoid it affecting your treatment?”
The community had disembowelled him before the police got there. The doctors had pushed it all back in and sewn him up.
Dawn
The darkness is lifting and Barrow heads for the ward where the most seriously injured spent the night. The beds are packed tightly next to each other and trolleys are end-to-end down the aisle. Bernard Kujamo is in a wheelchair, he complains of lack of sleep, he looks terrible.
Barrow stops by each bed and examines the wounds. He sends a gunshot victim home. The next patient is not so healthy, he has been beaten with iron bars and the doctor packs him off for more tests.
The third’s lung is punctured after a beating, a bottle full of blood from his chest stands under the bed. Barrow checks how much has come out during the night. “Good, good,” he says and moves on.
Light pours through the ward’s windows and through the prism of exhaustion the events of the night drop back through the looking glass. Suddenly, above the fruits of Soweto’s grim harvest of crime, voices break out in harmony – the nurses are singing Amazing Grace with a beauty intensified by the suffering around them. The suddenness of it is a shock, unlike anything else in the world. As the day brightens, the voices bring calm.
— Ruaridh Nicoll is The Observer’s Southern Africa correspondent