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Tailored for Primitives. Despite such squalor, Schweitzer's institution has a good medical record, and the city's Europeans generally choose it over the new government hospital. Few hospitals anywhere can offer such a dedicated staff, or one that lives as austerely. Each of the doctors and nurses occupies a single room equipped with iron bed, enamel wash basin and kerosene lamp; meals usually consist of fried bananas and other fruit. The old man stubbornly refuses to go modern. Says he: "Circumstances command that the hospital be primitive in keeping with the primitive state of the people." He believes that Africans enjoy discomfort, and that they are often afraid of a gleaming white modern hospital, but not of one that reminds them of their villages—a concept less valid today than 20 years ago.
His African critics take Schweitzer's insistence on primitiveness as an insult, or a needless prolongation of "the white man's burden." Symbolically, they point out, he and his staff still wear pith helmets. The concept that the Dark Continent can make more progress through independence is, to Schweitzer, folly. Told that the Peace Corps is building primary schools all over Gabon, and that the little country has 14 medical students training in France, Dr. Schweitzer merely chuckles and says of the blacks: "You cannot change their mentality." Among his six doctors and 17 nurses, there is not one African, nor is he training any. Says an upper-class African in Lambaréné: "I'd rather die unattended than be humiliated at Dr. Schweitzer's hospital."
According to the Sun. Bushy white hair aflare, drooping mustache aquiver, cotton strips wound around his arms to absorb the sweat, he is a little deaf but alert as a lion. He is still planning additions to the hospital and is working on Volume III of The Philosophy of Civilization. A few weeks ago, he announced that he would make no more rest visits to Europe, which his disciples take to mean that Schweitzer wants to die at Lambaréné, where his wife was buried six years ago.
In the jungle, the doctor has built a private world for himself which he refuses to alter. Even his time is his own; the hospital clocks do not run on G.M.T., like all the rest of the country, but are set according to the sun.
As far back as World War I, Schweitzer expressed his dislike for the modern world outside: "In a thousand different ways mankind has been persuaded to give up its natural relations with reality and to seek its welfare in the magic formulas of some kind of economic and social witchcraft." Schweitzer has made his own reality; he lives in the Africa of 1913, hardly knowing or caring that a continent and a century have passed him by.