Gunpowder

About the end of primary school I started to make gunpowder as any right-thinking child would want to. This meant getting hold of potassium nitrate, flowers of sulphur, and charcoal. It had to be potassium nitrate because the sodium salt absorbs water from the atmosphere. Down the ages soldiers have been warned to “keep their powder dry”. This was not for nothing, without the chemical accident that true saltpetre stays dry warfare would have been greatly delayed. In Durban road, not far from the end of Woodhouse rd was Dix’s chemist shop, Mr Dix clearly understood a young person’s need to make gunpowder and sold me large amounts of saltpetre and sulphur without batting an eyelid or asking any questions. I made the charcoal from dead dried-up sticks of bamboo. The bamboo was cut into pieces about six inches long and packed into a large old tin with a small hole in the press-on lid, the loaded tin was then put on a fire to cook. The volatiles from the bamboo were driven off out of the hole and burnt well in their own right. Once the volatiles were finished I let the tin cool until I could remove the charcoal and pack the tin for the next batch, I made and used a lot of charcoal! The brittle charcoal sticks needed to be crushed to a fine powder, I did this in another large tin. This second tin had a roller in it made from a glass honey jar filled with lead shot. By rolling the whole contraption the charcoal was rapidly reduced to a fine powder. This powder became electrostatically charged and could be stirred like a liquid, with all the particles repelling each other.

I must have found the proportions by weight in an old book “Fortunes in Formulas” although soon I could calculate them anyway. In modern times gunpowder is compressed hydraulically to improve contact between grains of the ingredients but I could not do this. Instead of compression I made the mixture slightly wet and then dried it gradually in a flat pan in our Moffat oven. I felt that this was what ovens were for , but my long-suffering mother did not. I was very careful and just used the warmth of a pre-warmed oven, no bright red elements! At this stage I had hard dry lumps of gunpowder which needed grinding down, again the tin with the lead-weighted roller came into use. I was careful about this and rolled the tin up and down a concrete path with my foot. I hoped that if the gunpowder ignited it would blow the lid off the tin and direct the blast sideways, this was an untested belief. I was not the only boy my age making gunpowder, but mine got a good reputation and I started to get orders. However after someone was careless and nearly burnt themselves I decided not to sell anymore, everyone else would have to make their own (the careless one survived and is now a professor in the USA).

The gunpowder was my basis for fireworks, guns, bombs and rockets. This version of gunpowder was not very good for making coloured flares, the colours of potassium and sodium overwhelmed most other tints, you really need potassium chlorate instead of saltpetre and Mr Dix did not supply such dangerous materials which can detonate much more easily.

We made guns out of electrical and water piping blocked at one end i.e. they were muzzle-loaders fired by a fuse through a small touch hole. When I think about how such piping is made I reckon we were lucky that none of our guns ever ripped open along a seam. At this time there were some rather pointless earthworks going on in the middle of the racecourse, they made an ideal firing range for guns and gave us something to blow up with bombs. On the edge of the racecourse was a large acacia tree (sieberiana), if it is still there then the one inch glass goen that we fired into its depths is also still there  (could look on Google Earth, for the tree, not the marble!)

Bombs were often just a large water pipe screwed shut at one end and plugged shut with a deep layer of compressed newspaper. The pipe survived and the world was covered in paper confetti after a good bang. A variation was to put a compressed carbon dioxide cylinder , meant for making soda-water, into a tin filled with low-grade slow-burning gunpowder. The cylinders on heating split open with enough force to hurl bricks in all directions. Later on we experimented with ammonium nitrate and aluminium powder, but this is another more serious story.

A little bit of research into the history of rockets showed us that you do not just stuff powdered gunpowder into a tube, it will just blow up, not go up! The relatively loose powder allows the flash of flame to ignite all the powder almost at once. This is OK for guns and bombs but not for rockets. For rockets the powder must be compressed almost solid and there must be an open core down the centre of the charge, this way you get fast, but not explosive burning. The hollow core also protects the casing of the rocket from the hot gases until the last moment, otherwise cardboard rocket cases would never work.

Bamboo

The hedge between No 34 and the Mills’ house (later Scots) consisted of 2 feet of dense bamboo. This needed little upkeep and seemed to just look after itself, at its most vigorous the stems grew to about half an inch in diameter. (just for the record I will use Imperial units, because that’s how it was). Bamboo was an ideal raw material for young children (grow some! Both!), it was easy to cut with secateurs and could provide small bows, arrows, mini Kontiki rafts, peashooters and most important of all, charcoal for gunpowder.

The God of Sharp Things

“Water spray, hair cream?” asked Mr Jones the white-coated barber. Of course I wanted the cooling spray and the dab of La Pebra’s hair cream, I had paid 2/6 for my haircut and I wanted the full treatment. I was enthroned on a Theo Koch barbers chair , made in Chicago, a thing of beauty its wood and leather smoothed by use, the ornate steelwork proclaimed Theo Koch of Chicago in case the world was in any doubt. When I was a child too small for the chair a wooden plank was placed across the arms to raise me higher to barber level. The clattering electric shears were quiet, one step of the ceremony remained. Mr Jones took his cut-throat razor from the shelf, lovingly unfolded the long steel blade from the sheath of the ivory handle and honed it , slop-slap slop-slap, on the leather strop. Did it really need such a huge blade to skim off the stubble of hair on the nape of my neck? Perhaps the blade symbolized the authority of the barber down the ages, standing between mankind and the “God of Sharp Things”. In the local museum I loved the ancient stone tools, edges flaked from silky gray flint by ancestors unknown. Before Mr Jones the barber, with his steel blade, who first decided to risk a crystal-sharp blade on his own skin? Perhaps the risk deserved a ceremony and the barber was high-priest of the blade drawing a sharp line between the amenities of life and the risk of death?

Now my straw basher, symbol of my school, would no longer reveal a fringe of “ too long” hair and attract the attention of prefects with nothing better to do. On the other hand the basher would be more likely to be blown off my head as I cycled down town to one of my favourite places, the local scrapyard. My target was old ignition coils, preferably oil-filled ones, the insulated wires would be sparkling clean once the oil was washed off, ready to induce their magnetism as I directed them, wound to my purpose. As I looked through great piles of disembowelled machines for the coils that had once sparked them to life, trying not to be distracted by this charnel-house of the Periodic Table, I felt a strange unease in my stomach, I took my coils and left.

I cycled home with a stomach ache that grew worse by the minute, I was not prone to stomach aches and knew of no injury to account for the pain. At first the whole stomach hurt, I was rather vague about what bits went where, but then I realized that one testicle was swelling up, this was doctor time! I reckon that for each of us pain is a relative thing, we can only compare our pain to what we have previously experienced and certainly not to anyone else’s, that day set a new benchmark for me, that I would not pass until migraine and a burst appendix came along.

Our old Scottish doctor, Dr Mackenzie, instantly diagnosed torsion of the cord that leads to the testicle, in his rather dour way he explained that he could fix the problem without operating by twisting the testicle from outside, I would have a 50/50 chance of being cured or of doubling the problem. My gambling instincts were overruled by pain and I was soon in St Anne’s Hospital being prepared for the operation. This meant lying naked on a bed covered by a sheet and wondering “what happens next?” I found out, shaving! A nun in flapping habit approached me, she was vigorously sharpening a large cut-throat razor on a leather strop such as Mr Jones the barber used. My mind went into overdrive, this woman who I did not know from Adam, (or should it be Eve?), was about to shave my most private and vulnerable parts with a huge primitive razor. I did not know much about nuns except that they had forsworn the pleasures of the flesh, what was their attitude to other peoples’ desire to taste the pleasures of the flesh? I had not yet got round to actually investigating the reputed pleasures, but it would be nice to keep the option open. It would need only one slip and that would be the end of my flesh and my pleasures. My religious knowledge was sparse, but I realized that religious disputes had kept the world in a state of near permanent war for hundreds of years, there must be a lot of scores to settle! Who gave us “The Inquisition”? These thoughts took only seconds by which time the nun was doing the deed, perhaps she actually did understand the patient’s fears? Perhaps she really wanted the rest of humanity to enjoy their pleasures as part of the great scheme of things? Was she a priestess serving the “God of Sharp Things”, whatever, she and the razor did a good job!

The Moth of the Moon

Tamboti Lodge, Tamboti avenue, Tamboti Rest Camp, all over South Africa the name Tamboti grows more widely than Spirostachys africana, the tree itself. Broken twigs exude a white latex that is irritating and dangerous to us, as with the rest of the Euphorbia family. The old heartwood is dark and rich, while the sapwood is creamy, both are satin smooth, like dark and white chocolate. Desirable as the wood is it is hard to work with and the sawdust can be toxic. Scented Tamboti wood is Africa’s answer to sandalwood and it is reputed to keep insects away, well some of them anyway.

In the insect cage on the veranda of our house at No 34 the end of the brittle silvery cocoon, spun to a Tamboti twig, darkened and softened. A damp, rumpled, furry creature struggled out and hung from the twig. After a few moments of rest the urgent work began as the fat body pulsed and pumped its fluids into the soft crumpled wings to expand them. Any delay or setback at that stage and the crumpled wings dry and never expand, the poor crippled creature can only crawl away, prey for birds or ants. Our Moon moth, Argema mimosae, succeeded and hung apple-green, with long tails twisted at the ends. She waited for the night of calling.

We walked through the copse of Tamboti trees in Umfolosi Game Reserve behind our armed game ranger. In spite of the risks of a meeting with the rightful masters of Old Africa the ranger was telling us about the possible risks of our own foolishness. If we used Tamboti wood to braai our meat that night the smoke could make us ill and the meat could kill us. The story had the sound of a well worn routine, but that does not make a story either true or false, the warning is repeated everywhere you read about Tamboti. In spite of Tamboti’s reputation for repelling insects the Moon moth caterpillars eat the sap-rich leaves. The larvae of a smaller moth eat and live inside the seeds of Tamboti, giving it a “jumping bean” reputation and many creatures of the bush eat the leaves and fruit. Often the Tamboti seeds resist digestion and are spread far and wide to grow new copses. The question hangs there, what function does the toxic sap fulfil? Are the toxins just enough to protect against digestion, or are there other more subtle enemies than rhinos and buck?

Our Moon moth clung to the metal gauze of the cage, sometimes her wings fluttered, but for her the cage did not exist. On the warm night air her female pheromones sent out an exactly coded call to any male Moon moth, even if it was kilometres away. As the full moon rose from the long grass of the racecourse he came out of the dark, his feathery antennae sensing her up the wind. Even as the moth flies the nearest Tamboti trees were possibly 10 or even 20 kilometres away in the Valley of a Thousand Hills. Many moths will be lured to lights at night, but we had not had a Moon moth at our house until there was a female to send out the call, the male was no random visitor. Euphorbiaceae were named by King Juba II after his Greek physician Euphorbus who recognised the laxative properties of Euphorbias. King Juba married the daughter of Cleopatra and Anthony. Cleopatra reputedly had to hide rolled up in a rug in order to get close enough to make her charms known. Coco Chanel rejected four perfumes before she hit on number five to do the enticing at close range, ladies The Moth of the Moon has you beaten!

Even if you can attract your mate over many kilometres you both must survive to meet, mate, find your ancestral food-plant and lay your eggs. Many insect larvae absorb toxins from their food-plants or synthesise their own in order to repel predators, do the Moon moths gain from the toxic Tamboti? Some Euphorbias contain a terpene ester, resiniferatoxin, reported to be more than 10 000 times as irritating as the capsaicin, from chili-peppers, which we use in pepper-sprays. E. B. Ford the ecological geneticist who worked most of his life in Oxford is reputed to have eaten samples of the insects he studied in order to test for protective toxins. This may have been partly to demonstrate commitment to his students, but it could have been dangerous. I doubt that this would be conclusive until the prime predators can be identified and tested. Butterfly tails may distract birds from making a fatal strike, I have often seen a worn old Papilio or Charaxe, its tails nipped off, happily laying eggs. Argema mimosa flies at night and bats are likely its main enemy, could the huge tails deceive the acoustic senses of a bat? Might the twist at the end of the tail have any devious acoustic effect? Even if you are toxic to predators you also need a clear signal so that everyone knows the danger, by day a visual pattern will work, perhaps an acoustic signal is not far fetched for the night? Both sexes have the long tails so it seems unlikely that they result from a sexual preference gone to extremes like a peacock.

Under a low-power microscope I could watch the severed antenna of a false codling moth connected to fine metal probes which in turn led to an oscilloscope. The feathery antenna, resting in a perspex chamber, was smaller than that of a great Moon moth, but the principle was the same. We puffed tiny bursts of air into the chamber, loaded with possible pheromone chemicals and watched to see if the scope picked up an electrical reaction. What we were doing at that time was at the lower range of what might work. John, the gas-chromatograph expert, had laboriously collected fractions from extracts of female moths, working from hints and guesses I had synthesised possible candidates for pheromones, nothing worked anything like as well as a real female moth. A few years later we would have used a coupled GC-mass-spectrometer with a massive computer library of mass-spectra for comparison. It is now known that many moths use two or more different pheromones in specific ratios, after all in the real world a moth must find its way through the jumble of all the messages floating on the air. Mostly this game of hunt the moth happens at night, and for at least one moth it has been shown that exposing the antennae to light blocks the sensory signal due to the pheromone, possibly even the laboratory light affected our chances. I should not really have been doing this work, my own studies of alkaloids were stalled and I gave in to the lure of the moth.

Today much is known about the detailed structure and function of moth antennae. The pheromones must be absorbed, detected, their ratios measured, and then they must be rapidly destroyed! To be any use the moth must find out quickly if it is getting closer to the target or not. Like the colour pixels on a computer screen the antennae must “fire” and then rapidly be reset so that they can make a new measurement. Suitable pheromone molecules must be reasonably stable in the open air, sufficiently different to be distinguished, yet have a built in chemical “weak point” to allow rapid removal when their job is done.

I was driving along the high ground towards Durban, somewhere near Harrison Flats a road plunged down to the left to the Valley of a Thousand Hills, here I would find the Tamboti trees. The moths had mated and now we must feed the young caterpillars, I must have driven 80 km at least once a week. Every stage would be photographed until the large green caterpillars spun their own silver cocoons. Just as the moths call to each other in the night does life have a scent unmeasured that calls us to watch and wonder?

The Far When (“breek en bou”)

Far away and long ago a huge blue star fell on its own sword, collapsed and for a few days lit up the unknowing universe. How far away was it? The star did not know or care. For us we can say it was far away from a Therapsid lying in a certain warm muddy pool in what would be South Africa’s Karoo. But the Earth, the Therapsid, the pool and the Karoo did not even exist yet, first many huge stars had to collapse and in their dying fires build the chemical elements needed to make an Earth and a muddy pool. As the builders advertisements say in South Africa, “breek en bou”. Why do some stars collapse? Stars don’t know, they just do what they have to do. When did it explode? Maybe 12 billion years ago, but long before the muddy pool anyway

A boy swam in the concrete water tank next to the rusting windmill which regularly slurped water into the tank in spite of arthritic groans. Excess water slopped over the edge of the tank making a muddy pool in the Karoo soil. This was a different pool, but maybe all muddy pools are nearly the same? Like a mosquito the pipe from the windmill drilled down through the layered skin of the Karoo to where the water was, next to the ancient muddy pool where the fossilized bones of the Therapsid lay, at one with the Earth. When did the Therapsid first lie by the pool, not knowing that its DNA was edging towards a mammalian way of life? Perhaps 260 million years before the sting of the windmill tickled it in its long sleep.

As he dried in the shade of a twisted old perske boom the boy flicked pebbles at lizards which came to catch the ants, which in turn came to drink the water which had recently seeped round the Therapsid. In the heat-haze where his fathers flock of sheep grazed on Karoo bossies the boy saw a truck stop. A man got out among the bossies but what he did could not be seen. What was there to do if you were not a sheep eating bossies and scenting your flesh with the marinade of ancient time? A pair of swallows came to the pool for beak fulls of mud for the nest they were building under the eaves of the farmhouse. The swallows came every year to the farmhouse with two old palm trees growing in front of the door. All the farmhouses had two palm trees, did the swallows recognize these two trees?

In a cloud of dust the truck took a turn and drove straight towards the windmill and stopped by the sheep-dip. Any boy alone in the Karoo, who had only lizards to watch, would have to go and investigate. The man set up an apparatus on legs, splayed like a giraffe drinking, he peered at the apparatus and consulted a clip-board then he moved the apparatus until he was satisfied. After hammering in a pole the man attached a label and the job was done. Any boy worth his salt had to ask what this was all about and the man was friendly.

There were going to be many radio telescopes here in the Karoo arranged like a strange herd of animals with their heads always gazing up at the sky. Each telescope would compare notes with the others as they watched the far when. The long dead fossils in the Beaufort series would get new eyes and ears, called the Square Kilometre Array or SKA. If we were quick we might even watch the huge blue star fall on its sword 12 billion years ago. For as long as descendants of the exploding stars might know the answers to Where and When. That is until we and our strange telescope herd join the Therapsids and make one more layer in the old Karoo.

Even though he lived on a lonely sheep farm in the Karoo the boy knew all about radio telescopes, but he still had one more question. “When the telescopes have told us all about the stars, will the swallows still come?”

For Tim who questioned the stars.

In hope of the SKA

The most interesting butterfly in the world

The bus passed my grandfather’s shop, Medical Hall near the top of Church St and stopped at the Victorian railway station where Gandhi was infamously thrown off a train because he wanted to travel first class. Next the rattling, diesel fuming, municipal bus zig-zagged downhill to Mayor’s Walk. I could have said exactly where we were at every turn with my eyes shut because my grandfather lived at the far end of Mayor’s Walk, but this trip was different, my father and I were going to collect “The most interesting butterfly in the world”

The terminus of the route was at Stott Rd, where we gathered up our butterfly nets and a collection of bottles and walked up the road to the property of old Mr Clarence. My father had taught his son, Desmond “fatty” Clarence, who by then was a professor of physics at Natal University and later rose to be vice-chancellor. Mr Clarence insisted that before we hunted butterflies we must first have tea and rock-cakes on the stoep. This was no hardship, Mrs Clarence was an expert at making rock-cakes, crisp and raisin-sweet. The Clarence property was an estate from older times, when city councils and town planners did not yet tell you how big your property must be. With relish Mr Clarence told us the story of the time when his bees went berserk and stung the neighbours chickens to death. Chickens must have been taken seriously then because the matter went to court. The gruesome death of the chickens was described and Mr Clarence thought his was a lost cause, then his wily lawyer asked one question. “Did the bees have Clarence written on their backsides?”

Tea over we got down to business in the citrus orchard, our prey was Papilio dardanus, whether caterpillar, pupa, or butterfly. Dardanus had a choice of indigenous food-plants in the bush, all the leaves were spotted with clear oily glands, typical of Rutaceae, but they thrived in the citrus orchards around Pietermaritzburg. In 1920 E B Poulton, the British entomologist, described dardanus as “The most interesting butterfly in the world”. Even today, ninety years later, the species is still of interest and researchers now bring to bear on it the big guns of modern genetics.

Innocent of intent, dardanus uses a battery of evolutionary tricks in order to survive. Male dardanus are handsome cream and black swallowtails, but the females come in about twelve different patterns, they practice Batesian mimicry. Each female type gains some protection from predation by birds by resembling another “model” species. The models have evolved their own protection by tasting bad in bird terms. We were collecting South African dardanus to send to Clarke and Sheppard at Liverpool university to use for genetic research into polymorphism.

Besides dardanus the citrus was also food for Papilio demodocus and Papilio nireusso finding eggs was little use unless you saw a female in the act of laying. If you could catch a laying female so much the better! Caterpillars were the main target, my search technique was to stand back a little from the tree and and scan with the sensitive spot of the eye, you can actually examine leaf by leaf. Having completed the scan I would move a little to one side and repeat the process from a new angle. Large caterpillars spun a pad of silk on the leaves to anchor themselves, if you hunted close to a silky leaf you might find a hidden green leaf-like pupa slung by a thread.

Why did just the females do the Batesian trick and why so many forms? Some people have suggested that females have to fly slowly as they hunt for food-plants and lay eggs, exposing themselves to attack. Copying a distasteful model is a neat trick, but if you overdo it you undermine the essential basis of the model’s bad taste image, everyone loses. At some point birds might learn that the model and the copy are at least worth a try. By having a wide range of models dardanus avoids overdoing the trick. Dardanus occurs from South Africa northwards across Africa to Ethiopia and also in the Comores and Madagascar and in any one region up to six variants may be present.

The young caterpillars of dardanus, demodocus and nireus all protected them selves with a black and white pattern that resembled a bird dropping, while the bigger caterpillars were green and tried to blend in with the foliage. If disturbed the big caterpillars would wave their wriggly osmeterium which gave off a strong citrus-like odour that had an aldehyde tinge to it, probably transmogrified citrus oils from their food. Presumably the Rutaceae gain some protection from being eaten by filling their glands with terpenes, but the Papilios have overcome the barrier and turned it to their advantage. In the bush a kilometre away a wide range of Papilios can be found eating various indigenous Rutaceae but they have not made the jump to citrus.

The orchard had many varieties of citrus that never reached our rather staid markets, to this day I love to crush a leaf to interrogate its oils. Over the centuries man has selected and hybridised citrus to such an extent that the true origins are hard to de-cypher.

How did dardanus evolve the polymorphic trick? Batesian mimicry “makes sense” and is known in other species, but 12 or more models! Was the trick evolved once and then somehow repeated with variations, or did each new model need a whole new development ? The distasteful models must have developed first before being copied so what did female dardanus look like to start with? In a few places the females do resemble the males. One of the models must have been first whatever the sequence, which one? Do the models ever shift their wing patterns away from their mimics under pressure to avoid loss of their distasteful image? The questions are endless, but in Science good questions are sometimes more important than the answers.

When we had searched the whole orchard we returned to the house to thank Mr Clarence. As we passed the chicken run I had to wonder, why did the bees not kill these chickens, did they have Clarence written on their backsides? Before leaving there was more tea and rock-cakes and we were given a bag of huge avocado pears.

Back home the project carried on, the larvae were fed and watched in the cage on the stoep until they pupated. When caterpillars are kept in numbers close together and not isolated as on a tree there is a greater risk of infections running through the whole group, it takes care. At pupation the caterpillar slings a loop of silk around the body and anchors its rear to a stick or leaf. This is an acrobatic feat with no chance of practice, it is written in a molecular memory of what works, get it wrong and you die. We gave the pupae a day to harden then packed them between layers of cotton-wool in metal cigarette boxes which were then air-mailed to Clarke and Sheppard in Liverpool. Today we take airmail for granted but then the mail-ships still plied between South Africa and the UK. Ships would have been too slow, but air-mail with its special blue sticker did the job well.

The genetic breeding studies of Papilio dardanus by Clarke and Sheppard in the Fifties and Sixties are now described as “seminal”, but the work still goes on using tools not dreamt of then. My father as a Quaker may have had worries about the evolutionary implications of the work but I was growing away from unsupported belief and did not choose to push the issue. For me it was enough to give a little help in studying “The most interesting butterfly in the world”. My father may have been one of many religious people lured on by questions and curiosity which would ultimately challenge belief.

In the end the Clarence estate was sold and cut up into “planner-sized” plots and named Orange Grove. Perhaps even now some citrus trees remain and the dardanus still evade the birds and lay their eggs? Since then the general poor quality of rock-cakes has been a repeated disappointment in my life.

Somebody else’s rhino

The rhino in Namibia could easily be dismissed as “somebody else’s rhino”. People might feel it is more important to save our own South African rhino. We could not be more wrong, as, like our own children, every rhino is a unique individual, carrying into the future its own part of an ancient message. Each may in future add its own tiny part to what it means to be a rhino or human being. People and rhinos are not cars off a production line, where quality is judged by uniformity. If we want our own rhino in South Africa to stay safe then every rhino anywhere is important. Even if South Africa could breed rhino by the thousand genetic uniformity could leave them always at risk.

If Glenstantia Primary School manages to adopt a rhino, we must accept that it is not safe, only safer. Even if the worst came to the worst, and a poacher kills our rhino, the effort would not be wasted. We not only need to save rhino – we need to learn HOW to save rhino! Also, our children will learn the rewards and difficulties of changing the world around them.

Schools get many requests to support charitable causes, and the Headmaster understandably cannot allow every request. We have permission to collect from Std 2DG only. If we can show commitment and make a worthwhile start we can approach the school as a whole.

Large animals such as the rhino, the elephant and the whale are also symbols of our endangered world and their endangered habitats. Some people fear that even the human race may die out, but this I doubt. Instead I fear that the human race may survive, but forget what it is that made us human. If our great symbols fall prey to the high velocity rifle and the chainsaw, while we turn away, how will we explain this loss to our grandchildren? I never want to have to explain what a rhino WAS!

REMEMBER THE RHINO.

This was written in 1989 for a fund-raising campaign run in schools, since then not much has changed, we seem to breed rhinos better, but poachers take a higher toll. A worrying trend is that poachers are not just poor people who pick up an AK-47 in order to scratch a living, farmers and even vets are drawn into the deadly trade

Africa Sang

Steam hissed in the pipes coiled in the dark outside the hospital ward. Surely if the steam ever stopped the great animal of a hospital would be dead. Its methylated breath would cease and the last trolley would wait for the breakfast that would never come.

An old man, his face grey, eyes sunken, was rolled into the cubicle opposite mine. Our whole ward of 22 people immediately knew of his pain as if it were our own. We did not blame him, for the pain was all he could know in his shrunken world. Alzheimer’s or some other dementia had taken his mind, but if it had not the pain soon would. Each of us had answered “the questions” before we could have our operations, so must he!

Are you allergic to anything? Oh dear, dear!

Are you allergic to anything? Eina, eina!

The old man was bilingual in his suffering and pain was all he cared about. There was no hope of filling in the form, all the staff could do was prepare him for the operation that might end his pain. How had he reached the hospital with no one to to fill in his forms? We are born into this world without having to fill in a form, surely we can leave it with absolution from forms?

There was a terrible blockage in his bowels and a colostomy was urgently needed. A portable x-ray machine was wheeled in, this would spare him more rumbling journeys down long corridors, always accompanied by the portable pain. Even so every little movement was a punishment. He called upon his father to spare him, was this penance for some never forgiven transgression of childhood? What do we parents do to our children that in their last days they get no comfort from our memory, only the threat of punishment?

After the x-ray there had to be connections for the ECG monitor, then a catheter had to be inserted. All he could understand about these necessary preparations was the pain. Nurses tried in vain to comfort and encourage the old man, but they could not reach his mind absorbed by pain. The complaints became desperately urgent. Life and Death met and consulted behind the blue curtains, they reached agreement, there was peace. The staff no longer spoke, each did with speed all that could be done, but the decision was final, we all knew it. On the nurse’s desk is a selection of blank forms, one is for the case of “ An extreme adverse event”. I suppose death qualifies as an extreme adverse event, but for the old man life must have seemed very adverse. At least he would not have to fill in that form.

For a while the ward was quiet, our own discomforts and needs seemed trivial. In the dark at the far end of the ward a black man began to sing softly. He had to be black, we whities can also sing but we are more self conscious about it. I do not know what he sang, there was no loud defiance of death or blaming of unfair life. Instead it was as if Africa sang a lullaby to calm Her children. If Africa was where man first lived then it is here that we first died, and here that we first sang. It was right that Africa sang.

(2003)