A Birthday in the Jungle of Gabon : Remembering Albert Schweitzer

Scarlet hibiscus and yellow and purple trumpet flowers hung in a simple garland over the mildewed cross that marks the burial place of Albert Schweitzer.

“Today is his birthday,” Maria Lagendyk explained, looking back at the burial plot from the porch of the long, low, screened building that was his home, his office. The simple bed where he died in 1965, mosquito netting still in place, stood freshly made as if, at any moment, he might return, brush past the desk with its oil lamp and his gold-rimmed spectacles, to sit before the old upright piano in the next room and fill the equatorial air with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Three pirogues, hollowed-log canoes, lay at the muddy bank of the Ogooue, 100 yards from the gravestone. Swallows dipped in endless pursuit of insects. A flock of egrets fed at a clinic door. Antelopes, symbols of Schweitzer’s reverence for all life, munched kitchen scraps in a fenced area just beyond the building that was his home. The forest crowded the worn wood buildings with their patched corrugated metal roofs. Only the lunch bell broke the midday quiet.

Schweitzer was 90 when he died. He is buried near the riverbank next to his wife, Helene, who died eight years before him, at the age of 78. Theologian, philosopher, organist, musicologist, he took a degree in medicine at the age of 38, the better to serve the people in this place. She too gave up a career as a scholar, learning nursing to work beside him.

“We are having a celebration tonight,” Lagendyk said. A celebration of the 110th anniversary of his birth.

She knew him well. She came here from Holland 47 years ago with graduate training as a nurse specialist in anesthesia, intensive care, midwifery and pharmacology. Now, almost 80, she still moves gracefully along the rough paths that join the buildings of the old hospital near the riverbank and the new hospital on the hill above.

Some things have changed. A tangle of weeds covers the vegetable garden where Schweitzer struggled to duplicate, here almost on the Equator, the gardens of his birthplace in Alsace. “He grew tomatoes as big as this,” Lagendyk recalled, forming a giant fruit with her hands.

The new operating theater is air-conditioned. The controversial autocratic rule of that highly individualistic genius is now an institutionalized administration with support from foreign donors and the government of Gabon. His skepticism about the competence of Africans to be doctors has been replaced by an open door to Gabonais doctors, although few come. The sometimes-primitive medicine he practiced has been modernized, with special studies for Western medical students and a new research program coordinated with three European tropical medicine centers. And transport is by air or on roads, no longer on the river boats that first brought the Schweitzers here.

But each patient’s family still cooks individually for the sick one and provides bedside care. Old wards have been converted to care for the mentally ill and homeless aged, services rare in West Africa. And on beyond the main hospital facilities, a treatment center for lepers continues Schweitzer’s pioneering work.

Progress comes slowly, however. Life expectancy for those born in Gabon today, 72 years after Schweitzer came, is only 49 years. Life for those in the bush has hardly been touched by Gabon’s petroleum wealth.

Schweitzer won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 for what he taught of the brotherhood of nations, and that lesson goes on here, with doctors from a variety of European nations gathered at the luncheon table. But there was no African doctor at the table. “We try to get them here and sometimes they come,” a staff surgeon said. Most Gabonais doctors practice in the capital city, Libreville. Those who go into the bush go to state facilities, including a government hospital in Lambarene.

Lunch in the doctors’ mess was cut short to prepare for the evening birthday party. The old wood tables, arranged separately around the room, were painstakingly moved into a single long row, “the way it was when Schweitzer was here.” One staff member found the oil lamps that lighted the room before electric generators were installed. Another pushed an upright piano into position so that Bach, too, could be part of the celebration.