David Beresford
Another Country
Some years ago, trying to get an interview with the Rain Queen, I was persuaded to have a lesser sangoma (male) throw the bones for me in a hill-side kraal near Duiwels Kloof, in the northern Transvaal. I was seated in a position from which I could look out the door of his hut across an open space, on the other side of which an old crone was tethered to a stake with what looked like a collar around her neck.
She seemed to take a fancy to me. That is to say she spent some time, between gibbering and capering, staring and gesticulating at me, then bursting into fits of laughter. A bit disconcerted, I asked who she was. To which the sangoma replied with a proud smile that she was his mother.
He resumed sorting out his bones and, reluctant to disturb his concentration with further questions, I was left pondering whether the place where she was tethered was the equivalent to a doctor’s waiting room, or whether it constituted her home. When the son later acknowledged that ”the bones” did not seem to want to work in my case, it came as something of a relief, because I felt vaguely that if he was unable to remedy his mother’s misfortunes I could hardly rely on his insights and assistance where my well- being and circumstances were concerned.
The incident is brought to mind by the plight in which the British medical profession finds itself regarding the reputation of its doctors. This follows a series of scandals like that of Harold Shipman, the ”kindly” GP who bumped off his more elderly patients by the dozen, and Dr Rodney Ledward, the Kent physician who boasted he was the ”fastest gynaecologist in the south-east” for the speed of his hysterectomies and enjoyed a R7-million stud farm and a Rolls Royce in proof of it until he was struck off the register for general incompetence. So enraged has the profession in the United Kingdom become with the impact of such cases on its image that it passed a vote of no confidence last week in its own governing body, the General Medical Council, presumably with an eye to replacing it with a more suitable public relations company.
The expectations that the cures to one’s physical complaints lie readily to hand with the medical profession are deeply buried in the psyche and are encouraged there, no doubt, by a fundamental need for reassurance that everything will turn out right in the end. Logic should disabuse us of such notions. A hospital, for example, is by its very nature a plague house and a patient entering its precincts in search of a cure is comparable to Orpheus venturing into the Underworld – you are deserving of a place in legend if you return alive, much less clutching Eurydice by the hand.
When one considers the difficulties man has in getting a man-made machine like the motor car fixed there is no reason for much hope in man’s tinkering with a machine as complex as the human body, whose very manufacturer is a mystery to us.
So superficial is the attention that a garage will give to a motor car nowadays that it strikes me the whole business of ”taking the car in” for repair amounts to little more than a gesture, a rite dischargeable by mere ceremony.
Recently I determined to have my Jetta ”fixed up” and, with the blind faith that one has in the medical ”specialist”, submitted it to the ministrations of the local agent, an establishment called Lindsay Saker.
Before doing so, to make their job simpler, I had the car examined by the Automobile Association (AA) and submitted its list of items requiring attention to the garage. They replied with a quotation – something over R5E000 – which I accepted.
When the car was returned to me I took it back to the AA for re-examination. They presented me with a second list, of work which Lindsay Saker had failed to complete. I sent the list and car back to the VW agents, asking them to finish the job.
The garage replied by faxing me a second quotation, requesting something over R2 000 to complete the outstanding work. I wrote back, conceding that in American baseball the hitter was allowed three strikes at the ball and that in five-day cricket the batsman was allowed two lives at the crease, but putting it to them that in the commercial world one quotation was considered one’s lot.
Presumably someone in authority at the garage was persuaded, or sufficiently baffled, by this to take the car back without comment. When the car came back to me I took it back to the AA who returned it to me with a third list of incomplete work. I returned that and the car to Lindsay Saker who accepted it without comment. When the car was returned to me I took it back to the AA who informed me that I had struck out. The rule, they explained, was that I was allowed one examination and two re-examinations. To have any more I was required to start again, by paying for a second time the original examination fee.
I decided against that in recognition of the foolishness of my expectations. The British doctors are quite right believing that today form is everything and substance – whether by way of goods, or craftsmanship – nothing more than a ride at the funfair.
The old crone laughed at me for the act of faith implicit in consulting her son. It is in recognition of a fellow lost soul that I caper and gibber back.