Namibia - The difficult Years. Helmut Lauschke
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patients’ files. Dr Witthuhn had a big heart and also big problems. It was part of his personality that he made big excursions when he was far away in his mind. He was a person, who was not simply to measure in the range of normal standard. He rejected the small-minded attitude of jealousy and malevolence, but was alert against people who were false and sly. He sat behind a small table in a small consulting room in ward 7 and examined the outpatients. A running ventilator stood on a chair opposite to him for some air circulation. It was a room of humbleness also in diagnostic terms as he sat back listening to the patient’s complaints and following the excursions in his mind. It was the case that he had to be touched for coming back to the world’s reality in this small consulting room with the smoothly running ventilator.
The health director sat in a flawless uniform of a colonel further and untouchable on the comfortable swivel chair behind his empty desk with the polished wooden plate in an air-conditioned office with the photo of the unyieldingly looking South African president in big format under glass on the wall. The director’s main concern were his teeth. His only work was to draw up decrees of what had to be done in the hospital and what not. So it was decreed and signed by this director that it was forbidden to treat Swapo-fighters and active Swapo-supporters. The Bantu-administration had no saying how the hospital had to be run. It was obvious that those white people remained indifferent about what was going on. They were not interested to look into the problems the hospital was confronted with.
It was the time when two officers of the SADF [South African Defence Force] occupied the chairs of the highest posts at the hospital administration. They controlled the medical work that had to be done under the most primitive conditions in using old and outdated facilities with the many missings. Nursing staff as patients and the population at large did not trust the military authority. The hospital got a strategic importance at the expense of being an open health institution for all the sick and injured people. Since the military had taken over the command in the hospital, the paramilitary Koevoet patrolled the hospital ground in nightly raids with their armoured Casspirs searching with floodlight for hidden PLAN-fighters up into each angle and corner.
The replacement of the civilian superintendent by the young major has not brought any improvement. The Sekretaris had not kept his promise given one year ago to send a clerk to look into the critical matters and to list up the most urgent points for repair and replacement. The conditions remained miserable under which the huge workload had to be solved. The old central sterilization unit broke down from time to time what caused long delays in performing the operations. The outdated operating table ready for the scrapyard was not replaced and the old and defective surgical instruments had still to be used. The overcrowded wards were old. Some toilets were clogged or otherwise not usable. The doors of the wards were battered and the door handles and locks were broken off. Panes were broken in many windows. New bedsteads of the basic standard did not exist. The old, torn and smelling foam rubber mattresses were not replaced.
The hose against the urine stench in the square was the single improvement after some battles of the former civilian superintendent with the stubbornly stuttering Sekretaris. This was possible after Dr Witthuhn had convinced the Sekretaris by describing the urine stench as smelling so bad that he pulled the skin on his nasal bridge and got hit by the strong feeling of revulsion.
What the new superintendent in his dashing uniform of a major did achieve, were a new ambulance and two small Ford-buggies with open loading spaces. The major who was proud of this achievement after his few weeks in office reserved one buggy for his ‘official’ and private purposes. The administration followed without any criticism the military command what did not result in a single move in improving the condition at the hospital. It virtually ignored the responsibility of making one substantially constructive input into the miserable situation. It was the heavily disappointing fact that the functional standard of the hospital was brought down by the white-run Bantu-administration.
If the whites themselves had a health problem they were served by plane to bring them to the specialist in Windhoek or South Africa where they claimed the high First World standard in medicine. These privileged people recognized the medical standard at Oshakati Hospital with the penetrating urine stench in the square and the primitive and defective ward facilities as obsolete. It was the hospital for blacks only. It was common practice that the whites used the quick and gratis transport by air for other things as well, when they had an appointment with the dentist or a medical doctor. Hairdressing and go shopping were included. Formal and informal communications with influential people in the floors of the central administration were of importance in the time of the increasing insecurity. One had to look forward to prepare the steps into the unknown future. What bothered white brains most it was the question how to maintain the high living standard when the apartheid system would collapse.
The morning meetings lasted longer by the bilingual jumps and countless repetitions of the new superintendent. The one black female colleague attended the meetings more often, but with a regular delay, who did not attend the meetings at the time of the civilian superintendent. She, who put the head in the civilian time through the open office door and back to make sure that the meeting was finished, took now part in the discussion in a more excited manner. She preferred her eloquence as the new superintendent did that the point to make got a smoke in the air. Dr Hutman had changed his cheeky and know-it-all behaviour, but kept covered with his intention to please the major. The outcome of the meetings remained poor and useless.
Dr Bernhard was a new colleague who was a specialist surgeon with a Swiss certificate. He had collected his experiences in traumatology on the hospital ship ‘Vietnam’ anchored in the harbour of former Saigon during the last year of the Vietnam war. Dr Bernhard came to Oshakati with his expertise and intention to help. He was a highly talented surgeon and took over the responsibility for orthopaedics, while I was kept responsible for general surgery. The new colleague was a relief from the huge burden. In the first year at Oshakati Hospital I did circa one thousand six hundred operations. I felt sorry that the friendly cooperation with Dr van der Merwe came to an end, who asked the major superintendent to be transferred to the department of surgery for the last months of his military service. The major promised to accept his request after new young doctors from South Africa has arrived for their military service in the north.
Dr Bernhard could not believe that Medical & Dental Council in Pretoria did refuse his recognition as a Swiss specialist. Like me he was put as a senior medical officer and both felt the degrading as a box round the ears. The administration promised to upgrade the position of both doctors after one year into the category of chief medical officers. A probationary period was compulsory, and that in a time when specialists with experiences were needed most. The arrogance of the Council in Pretoria got combined with the blindness of a stubborn-short-sighted administration. It was the discrimination at the first place and the clerks and other white stooges were at the hands of the Boers. This anachronism had exceeded Bernhard’s tolerance limit. In his second week he already decided to ignore this nonsense and prepared his return to Switzerland in the first year. He told that he is neither a donkey nor prepared that idiots can dance on his nose.
Dr Hutman remained covered. He visited the major in the superintendent’s office on a daily basis. The other army doctors did not trust him with personal matters. Van der Merwe told this in a conversation in his caravan one year ago in connection with the fourteen-year-old boy, who passed away on the operating table in the delayed craniotomy when Hutman had rejected my advice and assistance. There was a hearing in the director’s office when Hutman accused me of having caused the death of the comatose patient by disturbance during the operation. The hearing revealed that the accusations were false and insidiously calculated that the colonel director gave this lieutenant only a verbal warning, since Hutman was his extended ear. Now he had become the extension of the major’s ear as well.
This egocentric doctor was son of a wealthy family in Johannesburg. He had his personal career in mind, but not the needs of the black people to whom he showed an emotional abstinence. The careerist pleased his superiors who occupied a big part in his corrupt thinking. The specialists came twice per week from the military hospital in Ondangwa. They were flown up from the central military airbase ‘Waterkloof’ [water gap] north of Pretoria to the north and were replaced at the military hospital after two weeks. These specialists