Books: The Good Neighbor

THE MAN NEXT TO ME (175 pp.)—Anthony Barker—Harper ($3.50).

A missionary doctor, according to one Zulu schoolboy, “prays over you before he kills you.” It is a fair measure of Anthony Barker’s own humility that he concedes some truth to the schoolboy’s definition. As an Anglican medical missionary on a Zululand tribal preserve. Barker has indeed prayed for (and among) his charges. As a district surgeon battling impossible disease with often inadequate tools, he admits to times when a life may have been shortened by his fumbling instead of lengthened by his skill.

The Man Next to Me is British Dr. Barker’s journal of an African experience that is still going on. Written with self-effacing simplicity, the book bears little relation to the Big Game Hunter’s travelogue, or to the kind of man-with-a-cause book that lets the reader see clearly how noble the author is. Most of Barker’s record is painstakingly unspectacular: daily contacts with household crises, the long nights’ journeys into human understanding when a patient is saved by candlelit surgery, or when one more dark-skinned child is brought into a segregated world.

A Modest Improvement. Barker had been lured by Africa since his childhood donations to church missionary work. He met his wife Margaret at medical school, and they left for Zululand together in 1945. Their assignment was St. Augustine’s station, founded in the 1880s by an archdeacon who had earned local fame as a healer with one modest improvement on witch doctors’ methods: he routed out decayed teeth with pliers instead of a spear or rusty nail. The hospital was 40 miles from the nearest railway; when the Barkers took over, it was an iron-roofed bungalow compound inhabited by a poorly trained staff of nine, seven invalids, two cows and a fat pig.

To the Barkers’ surprise, patients were at first embarrassingly scarce. The Zulus aloofly decided to see what the doctor could do before entrusting him with their bodily ills. Community status came in time; with it came Barker’s discovery that the Zulu’s ritual way of thinking made medicine an exercise in etiquette as well as a practical science. No visit to a tribal chief, healthy or not, was complete without an injection or, at the least, the prescription of a placebo. On house calls, a patient remained untended, no matter how ill, until the end of a lengthy dialogue of familial greetings (“Are you all well at your place?” “Yes, we are well; we ask after your home and your people”) carried on by doctor and the chief of the household. Even in emergencies, no case could be admitted to the hospital without consultation with the family head; week after week Barker dispatched telegrams to the mines near Johannesburg, hoping to reach some far-off Zulu father before his child died of neglect.

A Mysterious Brew. Despite all his efforts, Barker found that serious ailments were often still taken first to a diviner, on the theory that no white doctor could solve the “illnesses of the people.” Barker has considerable respect for the sincerity of the witch doctors, who regard their vocation as divinely inspired—but very little for their knowledge. One of them tried to cure Barker’s hay fever with a mysterious, gagging brew that “tasted like a Scottish peat bog.” It didn’t work, Barker adds.

Barker writes of his African education, and of the shy, proud, solemn Zulus who taught him, with compassion, humor and a certain sense of shame. He is no revolutionary, but nonetheless shares, with Novelist Alan Paton and the crusading Anglican priest Trevor Huddleston, a searing hatred of apartheid and its works. Barker’s own hospital community was, and still is, racially integrated—not to satisfy any liberal belief, he says, but simply because it is natural: in so small a social organism, survival depends upon each man’s becoming a good neighbor to the man next to him. For his adopted homeland, Barker offers neither panacea nor prophecy, only a prayerful Christian hope that the missions’ work will not be rejected by black Africa.