Review: "Tales of Tanzania" by Hamish McGlashan

Tales of Tanzania by Hamish McGlashan
Published May 2015
★★★

McGlashan was a young doctor in 1960s Britain when he decided he wanted an adventure, and also less medical red tape—so off he went to Tanzania, where the salary was better and the opportunities broader (assuming you were White and British and male, of course).

It must have been a fascinating time in Tanzania, which only (with the exception of Zanzibar) gained independence in 1961. McGlashlan was, as he notes, the last of the breed (90); the British of course only trusted themselves to provide medical care, and so he was in Tanzania in the last years of Britain sending medical staff down on colonial business. It is worth noting, incidentally, that McGlashan readily acknowledges the racism inherent in his appointment; he says, among other things, that I was still underqualified and underexperienced for the role and there must have been many Asian doctors in the country who could have claimed precedence (90), had they been allowed or trusted to do so. (He says earlier that there were no African doctors in Tanzania in the 60s, which I assume is why he specifies qualified Asian doctors here; I'd be curious to know more about the state of medical education for Africans before and after independence.)

So by and large it's an engaging book. There's a certain amount of cowboy-ing, of course (common in memoirs discussing medical work in underresourced places...especially if those memoirs are written by men), and I imagine that practicing medicine in Tanzania now is a very different ballgame. The book could have used a final polish, as there's a certain amount of repetition (I didn't need a third mention of using rotting bananas to attract butterflies!), but if this is the sort of thing to interest you, it's not a bad addition to the subgenre.