Shimo la Mungu

“God's Hollow” at the edge of Tanzania's Makonde Plateau is right up there when it comes to natural beauty spots. Its clear, unpolluted air yields views of hundreds of miles to the next kopje. Miombo woods of exquisite horticultural beauty clothe the escarpment which is too steep to allow browsing herds or woodcutters. The air is cleaved by squadrons of sleek, needle tailed, amazingly aerobatic varieties of hirudines hawking myriad clouds of butterflies and other insects. Above majestic eagles soar and disport.

Fifteen years ago I was working for a voluntary organisation in a local government hospital, I slightly despised the “Bwana Kubwa” who occasionally passed by on various safaris. Once I found they had negligently discarded imported food into Shimo la Mungu. In their air conditioned vehicles they seemed out of touch.

I was reasonably competent in Kiswahili. It was by no means the first above knee plaster of paris that I had applied to a young boy suffering the occupational accident of falling from a mango tree. If I said something as simple as: “Rudi kama inauma” (come back if it hurts), the meaning should have come across. It was a typically busy day. There were crocodile bites and obstructed labours and cerebral malarias and all the glorious panoply of doctoring in the …