Review: "A Midwife in Africa" by Mona McAlpine

A Midwife in Africa by Mona McAlpine
Published October 2023 via Looderhorn Books
★★★

In 1969, McAlpine and her new husband set off for South Africa. It was meant to be a two-year stint—her husband had gotten a job in Johannesburg, and they figured they'd give it a go. And instead of two years, they stayed for thirty.

It's an interesting look at a turbulent time. McAlpine immediately set about finding herself a nursing job, and she ended up with much more diverse patients than I suspect your average nurse in Apartheid-era South Africa saw. (Though: Worth noting that although McAlpine was rightly appalled by Apartheid, enough so to consider bailing on the country altogether, they gave their car a deeply racist nickname that McAlpine repeats with no apparent realization that something is off.) There were also some hair-raising episodes, including a kidnapping and a (different) abandoned child, so it makes for a very lively read.

It's a fairly short book, and I would have liked more individual stories, but I appreciated that McAlpine keeps her focus on medical things—for example, there's a point when she took some time off to be a stay-at-home parent, and she neatly sums that up in a few lines and then gets back to the focus of the book. I'd be interested to read her earlier memoir about working in the remote wilds of Scotland earlier in her career; what a change it must have been to go from the Shetlands to Soweto!