Idealism and apathy in a turbulent political period

In apartheid South Africa, the ruling white party created Bantustans, or ‘black homelands’, with the goal of migrating the entire black population out of their own homeland into these barren areas according to their assigned tribal definition. The Zulus would be sent to KwaZulu. The Xhosa would be sent to Transkei and Ciskei. And so on, with all these ‘homelands’ conveniently close enough to white South Africa to provide cheap labour when necessary. Between 1960 and 1980, about half the black population of South Africa was forcibly relocated to these areas.

The ‘homelands’ comprised 13% of the land area of South Africa, while the black population comprised 75%. Each ‘homeland’ was not necessarily contiguous: some consisted of a large number of scattered, widely dispersed pockets of land. They were poor, rural, and overpopulated.

With the collapse of the apartheid regime, these areas were incorporated back into South Africa and made into provinces, but their rural poverty lived on.

This is a long historical introduction, but it is necessary to understand the context of Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor. Set in the period after apartheid, it centers around a small rural hospital in an unnamed homeland. The town is deserted.

It was a town that had been conceived and planned on paper, by evil bureaucrats in a city far away.

The hospital has a small staff

For a long time now there had only been the seven of us: Tehogo and the kitchen staff, Dr Ngema, the Santanders and me.

The narrator is Frank, a young doctor, reeling from the collapse of his marriage, who has taken up a position in the hospital in the hope of becoming the director. This promotion has never come through, but Frank has never left. Now, seven years later, Laurence Waters, an eager-beaver who is ‘keen to get started’, has arrived. Most of the hospital rooms and living quarters are unfinished or unfurnished, so Laurence and Frank must share a room.

It wasn’t just that Laurence Waters and I were doctors: it was that we were two white men, and we belonged in a room together.

The contrast between them is clear: Laurence is the energetic do-gooder full of ideas about holding local clinics, who says whatever he thinks, while Frank is introverted, apathetic and resigned to the status quo. Initially condescending about Laurence’s naivety (“he won’t last”, thinks Frank in the opening sentence of the book), Frank grows to distrust Laurence after some incidents.

This is a slow, almost dreamy book, with a suppressed racial tension that becomes clearer through the course of the book, but always remains slightly out of focus. (I cannot tell if this is because of my own ignorance of the subtleties of South African racial politics, or is authorial intent). Frank cannot understand why Tehogo, the sullen, untrained nurse, is allowed so much leeway by Dr Ngema.

‘That young man’, she said, [..]’ has had a very hard life. A very difficult life. Much more difficult than yours. None of your chances, none of your advantages.’

Is Frank the ‘good doctor’ of the title? He has no idea ‘what it means to be a black person in this country.’ He too is complicit in the vast gap between the lives of the black and white South Africans: he pays for secret sex with the black woman who runs a tiny shop in a shack, he says nothing when his father’s maid crawls on hands and knees to clean the floor. There is also an unpleasant incident in his past, buried uneasily in his memory, where he cooperated with the torture of a supposed black informant.

And yet, Laurence is also not the innocent he seems at first, and his own ambitions and past are murky. What exactly is his relationship with his girlfriend, the black American woman that he almost seems to want to avoid when she visits? And what is her motivation for the work she does in Africa, and will it last? Every character has ambiguous moral motivations.

Many of these questions are not clearly answered, which may frustrate some readers. Yet, the novel captures a sense of the shifting racial realities, the simmering violence, the hauntingly empty ‘towns’ in the homelands, the apparently benevolent but condescending attitude towards the black populace, and it seems very appropriate that there is a lack of complete understanding. The prose is spare and precise, as with other South African writers like Coetzee and Gordimer.

A complex, thought-provoking read.