African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [165]
One of the nganga’s concerns after learning that Aids was contracted through contact with infected blood was the fear they could catch and spread the virus through unhygienic practices. Njekeya says how now he makes his customers pay for a new razor each time he uses one, mostly for small incisions into which the healer rubs mushonga (medicine).
Anna Dondo, another healer, says they have stopped the practice of biting into the flesh of a patient, and sucking out what they have diagnosed as the cause of illness. Instead, she cuts a tennis ball in half and uses the concave side as a ‘mouth’.
They have accepted they cannot cure Aids, but Western medical experts here believe that the healers, with their experience of treating sexually transmitted, diseases, have a knack for identifying the symptoms. In Gutu, they have begun to refer patients to the local clinics, telling them that they have gone as far as traditional lore can help them, and that Western medicine is needed.
THE SCHOOL IN THE BUSH
‘The man without character’, dismissed as headmaster and now a primary school teacher, was ordered to return the money he stole from the school and from the pupils. Everyone knows he cannot do this because of his small salary. Everyone argues about whether it was a good thing he was not put in prison. ‘It would teach him a lesson!’ ‘Yes, but how would his family live if he was in prison?’ ‘But it is already a terrible punishment to be a primary school teacher after being headmaster.’
The new headmaster began well, working furiously, ‘from dawn to dusk, making all us teachers jump’. Then he turned out to be an alcoholic. It is this man who so terribly beats the pupils. Jack tackled him: ‘How can you beat a child for being late when he couldn’t cross the river because of rain? How can you beat the big girls? It isn’t right! Besides, it’s against the law.’
The beatings continued, by the headmaster, and by other teachers. Jack went into the local office and reported the headmaster, who was formally rebuked.
Later Jack had to ask this same headmaster for a report on his work as a teacher. ‘Mr Jack Pettifer’ (this is a made-up name) ‘is a hardworking and conscientious teacher. God forbid he should ever be employed at the same school as myself again. He has no loyalty to his colleagues.’
Jack said to him, full of reproach, ‘Now, this isn’t right. It isn’t just. You were breaking the law and I had to do my duty by reporting you. How can I get another job with this unfair report?’
So the headmaster gave Jack a fair report, but went on beating the children.
Jack wonders if he should stay another year. ‘What’s going to happen to the school library when I go? No one is going to keep the school newspaper going. No one is going to stand up for the kids.’
Three months later Jack left. Within a month most of the books were stolen from the library. The school newspaper ended. Jack asked his successor if he would like Jack to set up a couple of issues for him, but he said No, it was not necessary. All the machinery for keeping the grounds in order was stolen. But: there were six qualified teachers instead of only one.
On a hot November afternoon Jack, Ayrton R., and myself are again in the classroom that still has a cracked rafter and a broken windowpane, though the dust has been swept away. We are with fifteen strong young men and buxom young women, who are in their penultimate year in school. They look like adults and they are adults. Often on this trip and the last one I have misjudged ages, thinking youngsters years older than they are. This goes for infants too. You see a large and energetic baby strenuously reaching all around itself for new experience, and with alert, observant eyes–you think it is ten months old but no, it is five weeks, or two months.
An irrepressible physical vigour–that’s what you see everywhere.
The young people are noisy, laughing, uninhibitedly full of enjoyment. They have