of disease were almost always blamed on witchcraft. He taught them how, at the first sign of diarrhoea they should shake the gas out of a bottle of Fanta or Coca-Cola and drink it at room temperature. It was a simple trick: the equivalent of sugar and salts. But it was a life-saver.
When my mother was alone in the city and our father was in the regions planning the clinic, a measles epidemic gripped Freetown. In Britain measles is an ordinary childhood illness; in Africa the same virus kills as recklessly and easily as a child tumbling a tower of wooden blocks. That year hundreds of children died. At Connaught Hospital they didn’t have space to admit any new cases. All three of us children were infected; spots even erupted down the inside of my brother’s throat. My father wasn’t due back for many days and there were no telephones up-country, no way to reach him. So my mother nursed us at home, letting us sip flat Fanta when we were too weak to eat anything else.
Eventually a colleague of our father’s was reached and he drove over to see us. He put my brother on a drip and told my mother she had done just the right thing. She was so relieved when we began to improve after ten days that she ran across the road to Patterson Zochonis, the expensive and only department store in Freetown, where she bought us absurdly expensive Swiss maraschino cherry ice cream, and spooned it down our tender throats one by one.
In Koidu there was so much to do and no other doctors with whom to share the load. The building of this clinic was the realisation of a simple dream for our father. Many of the western-trained doctors preferred to stay in Freetown and work in the larger hospitals. With a modest private practice on the side within a few years they could own a Mercedes and be waited upon by servants wearing white gloves, like Dr Panda and his wife. But our father had a vision that one day there would be a network of cottage clinics across the country. The success of our clinic was important to him and his motives were plain.
When our father was a child during the war, a vaccination programme was announced. Scores of families left their villages to make the trip to the mission hospital. They settled on the rows of long wooden benches under the sun in the courtyard, alongside patients who arrived with other complaints. When the benches were full, the line continued along the walls and encircled the building. My father sat for hours on the ground, his back against the wall, listening for his name to be called. In front of him in the queue was an old man. When the Fornas appeared, the old man asked for help going to the toilet and he gave my father some cola nuts in thanks afterwards.
The hours passed and when at last his name was called the old Pa seemed to have fallen asleep, so my father leaned over and shook him lightly. The man slumped over sideways and lay face up, blue cataract-filled eyes reflecting the sky. A few minutes later the orderlies pulled him up by the arms and carted him away. They were used to it: the old ones who died before they made it to see the doctor.
Following Ndora’s death our father left the village to live with Teacher Trye. Soon after he left, a second tragedy struck his tiny family. A letter arrived in Bo, written by a hired letter-writer, informing Mohamed that his elder brother Morlai had died ‘of a headache’. He lay down one afternoon saying his head hurt and simply never got to his feet again.
We never, ever turned a patient away. And if someone couldn’t pay, we treated them for free. It was hard to imagine, given the principles that governed our father, that the clinic was making money but remarkably it was.
In the town there were a small number of extremely wealthy diamond dealers. They operated cheek by jowl with the Sierra Leone Selection Trust, who paid the government millions to exploit the country’s reserves, as well as the Diamond Corporation, a holding of the De Beers empire, who held the rights to buy the lion’s share of gems. Some independent dealers bought government permits allowing them to mine restricted quantities of gems. Others dispensed with the law and sent teams of their own men to dig illicitly in the restricted area. Many did both.
After dark on most nights just outside Koidu hordes of young men and some women scaled the fences, easily avoiding the single SLST helicopter that patrolled the area with search lights. In the early morning they wriggled back under the wire, gritty brown diamonds wrapped in small pieces of cloth tied round their necks. The dealers paid their illegal diggers a retainer to bring the gems, which they then sold on through the official government offices or shifted illegally on the black market. The world of the dealers was a closed one, a tightly run business controlled by a few men who maintained a private code of honour designed to hold on to their monopoly and increase the sum of their wealth.
The men who risked their health and liberty to dive hundreds of times to the bottom of the river bed and bring up pans of silt had no option but to sell the gems they found to their patron at the price he chose to give them. There were frequent accidents: several times we were all roused in the middle of the night or early morning because there had been a drowning. Sometimes the illegal diggers were caught and prosecuted – they were the only people who ever were. If their patrons couldn’t bribe the judge to let their man off, well, he’d be well compensated for doing time on behalf of the boss. In Koidu everyone knew their place.
Regularly men would arrive at the clinic bearing notes which simply stated to whom the final bill should be sent – inevitably one of several Lebanese dealers: After my father had treated their ailments and given them drugs, he sent the bill through to my mother to prepare and he instructed her to charge the dealers at the highest rate. At least eight out of every ten people who passed through our clinic paid nothing, even for their medicines, which my father fetched from the dispensary in the house and handed to them; people who could afford it were charged at the regular rate; and between them the diamond dealers paid for the healthcare of the rest of Koidu and the surrounding villages.
Almost always people who had not been charged came back on another day with something in return: a pair of live chickens, a sack of oranges or a basket of yams.
Late one night we were all woken up by a frenzied rapping on the door of the house, so loud it sounded as though they were trying to hammer their way in. When our father undid the bolts, there on the step was a young man, sweating and teetering on the edge of hysteria: ‘Oh, Doctor, I say do ya help me. I get syphilis.’ He babbled in Creole, fidgeting and jumping, utterly unable to contain himself. ‘I able feel am crawling pan me skin.’ He shuddered at that. We all did. ‘I need tchuk.’ He made the motion of giving himself an imaginary injection in the left arm. Our father, still half asleep, led him through to his surgery and treated him then and there. When the young man confessed he had no way of paying, our father waved him away.
A few weeks later my mother was out at night She had been to a dance at the Diamond Corporation, alone because my father was working. On the way home she drove over a pothole and burst a tyre. The road was dark and empty as the DiaCorp compound was some way out of town; dense elephant grass grew up on either side to well over seven foot. She couldn’t see a single light and within a few moments she began to consider her predicament: a woman, in an evening gown and high heels, without a torch on an empty road in the African bush. She had been there some time when she saw a car’s headlights in the distance. Conflicting thoughts occupied her mind and she prayed that this was someone who would help her, perhaps someone else on their way back from the party.
As the car came closer she saw that it was dented and old, obviously belonging to a local because no European would drive a car in such a state. It drew alongside, slowed and stopped next to her. My mother could see that there were several young men inside.
‘Na de doctor een wife,’ someone announced. It was ‘Tchuk’. He jumped out grinning and proud, evidently in the best of health. Within a few moments Tchuk and his companions changed the punctured tyre and saw her away.
By the time we had been in Koidu a year our father’s name and reputation had spread for miles. As with my mother, everywhere he went people greeted us, yelled and waved at the passing car. Yet to me at that time he was a distant figure.
