Namibia - The difficult Years. Helmut Lauschke
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officers were lecturers and professors at the medical schools in South Africa. In their two-weeks-service they had to ensure the surgical care of the combat troops.
Why these specialists still visited Oshakati Hospital was not fully understood, since the two civilian specialists, though downgraded to senior medical officers, worked in general and orthopaedic surgery. The army personnel got surgical treatment at the military hospital on the airbase in Ondangwa. It was thought that their visits had not only to do with medical support, but with the reconnaissance by searching for PLAN-fighters as well when they did the surgical ward rounds. This kind of intelligence service was easy for them by reading the history and evaluating the injury, since all the doors were open for the military authority which controlled the activities in the hospital. On the other hand it was true that Swapo enjoyed the broad support from the black population.
There was no illusion that any improvement in the working conditions would not come as long as the military and the whites ruled the regulations and mistrusted the hospital as an institution for hiding the enemies and Swapo-sympathizers. It was against the oath on the South African president and white apartheid flag to treat the enemy, whereas impartial and equal treatment was compulsory according to the Hippocratic oath. The gravity of the political schizophrenia became even more visible in the miserable conditions with the defective facilities. The many promises for repair and replacement from the white-run Bantu-administration and its stuttering Boer on top remained empty. It was an old and widespread political advice to keep up the white opportunism. The white stooges kept quiet when medical ethics became tortured and crippled. I thought of the psychological impact that should come on the young doctors after graduation from university with the ethical oath when they had become second lieutenants in the SADF and had to take the other oath on the South African president and the white apartheid flag. They stuck in the schizophrenic gap as they treat one patient and had to refuse treatment on the other patient. It was the excess after having lost reasonableness and humanity which caused the deep-going conflict between medical practice with medical ethics and its opposite by following the military order in regard to the political absurdity in the arrogant apartheid system.
The non-recognition of the specialist certificates of the two civilian surgeons and the languishing and depraved condition of the hospital were of great concern. The question was when would the hospital collapse due to the miserable conditions caused by mismanagement and white-political short-sightedness. The political formulas were implemented and administratively followed in an opportunistic and corrupt way against the majority what was the black population. Not much of nous was needed to understand the political baseness. The facts were visible and terrible enough without further proof of devastation. It was the time of the tensile tests in the conscience of each doctor and health worker, and this in the time when the big upheaval stood before the door.
In this difficult time Hutman kept himself camouflaged to play his insidious games against the civilian doctors, who worked hard and round the clock. His ambitions were selfish and traitorous without any sympathy for the black people. If there was an award for false denouncing of people, Hutman deserved it with the devil’s star for outstanding achievements as the opposite of bravery before he left for his family to Johannesburg. He was the only example compared with the other army doctors, who ruthlessly used the elbows and intrigue for his career. Since the privileged status had been taken away from him, Hutman put all his effort into the intention to harming me, who was responsible for the surgical department.
There were annoying word battles that I had to stand against Hutman who provoked the battles by arrogance and refusal to listen for reason. All the battles could be avoided, if basic education and respect against an older colleague were exercised and the rules of civilized thinking and speaking were practised. The first battle of this kind was in superintendent’s office when Dr Witthuhn called and confronted me with Dr Hutman. The superintendent sat behind piles of patients’ files on his desk and Hutman sat accompanied by two young army doctors on one of the upholstered chairs on the window front under the rattling air conditioners. One young army doctor sat right and the other young army doctor sat left of Dr Hutman.
What was the point? Hutman accused me of not seeing the patients regularly in the intensive care unit, since there were no notes made on some days. The superintendent looked through the files and could not deny the accusation. He asked me, if that is true. I told that I have seen the patients every day, but in the early morning and had made notes in the files only, if something important has occurred in the patient’s condition. A reason of having done this was the time pressure, since I tried to see the patients in the other wards as well without delaying the operations.
The truth came out and Hutman’ face became pale. Instead of searching the files for missing notes I have seen the patients before the early shift of nurses has started. The superintendent has asked Hutman how he saw his responsibility when he camouflaged as a doctor to destroy what others have built with great effort to help the people, who are in need for medical treatment. And in the critical situation of war, only a few doctors were available. The superintendent understood the point. He said to Hutman, who turned his head to the companions on the right and on the left, that he should look after his patients and stop intriguing against me. After this ugly confrontation I called Hutman an insidious trapper and lieutenant of the devil following Carl Zuckmayer’s “The Devil’s General”.
The other battle was the disciplinary hearing that the director in colonel’s uniform held in his office when I had to defend myself against the false accusations of Hutman in connection with the death of a comatose fourteen-year-old boy on the operating table. This army doctor delayed the operation of putting burrholes for brain decompression from a haemorrhage. Instead of this he drank tea and chatted with some young army doctors in the theatre tea room. Also his operative performance was far from skilful and professional. At the end of the long hearing followed by the civilian superintendent, the director gave Dr Hutman a verbal warning, though he had deserved a strong written one which never came.
However, the lieutenant of the devil did not give up and continued his role as schemer of a low and corrupt character camouflaged as medical doctor. The devil sat on his neck and rode his bad character in a furious gallop. He was not interested in the damage he did by his traps and lies. His dark eyes remained restless. The immoderate arrogance expressed the psychological abnormality in a sense of a magnified ego in the mirror of an obsessional neurosis which was incalculable and unpredictable. The ego of Hutman and his restless agitation had stirred up the mistrust of the military against the civilian and had certainly contributed that Dr Witthuhn was removed from the superintendent’s chair and replaced by an eloquent but meaningless major-superintendent. The obsessed personality of Hutman was the main reason that the team spirit emphatically propagated by the dedicated chief matron had become a stillbirth.
The working climate became even more tense with the major on the superintendent’s chair and the dark machinations of the neurotic lieutenant of the devil as an extended military ear. The contra-productive activities inside the hospital gave the mirror image of a neurotic strategy combined with nervously shaking military and paramilitary activities in an exhausted apartheid system outside the hospital as well. The conditions were miserable and the medical facilities were defective. The wards were overcrowded and some funnel-shaped zinc toilets did not work or were clogged. The water pressure was weak and the old water pipes were rusty and furred up. There were hours and days that the hospital was without water when the pipes outside the hospital were broken and the repair took longer than told. Was the water pressure high, the water squirted through the holes of rusty water pipes. If not the water, the power was cut off with a negative impact on the operative work in the theatres, the central sterilization unit and the work at large. Excrements as diarrhoeal or piled were lying in the children’s ward and outside the wards marking the unhygienic state of emergency.
I criticized the indifferent behaviour of the people in charge, whether they were civilians or people in uniform who have neglected or ignored the problems of the toilet conditions and of the lacking hygiene in and around the wards. It was the academic status that these people did not put their noses over the badly smelling toilets or have looked into the filled-up funnels. But hygiene in general and in a hospital especially starts with the toilet conditions. If a doctor kept the hands clean by washing them after