THE only boards I could name prior to leaving for Africa were the British Boxing Board of Control and the Schools Education Board. Both were concerned with leather, the former as in matters pertaining to professional pugilists’ boxing gloves, the latter to the thick strips of cattle hide known in the trade as a ‘Lochgelly’ and distributed to schools for disciplining unruly pupils.

Not being a committee man or a very good team player, these gatherings of the great and the good were avoided for years. Arriving at a Catholic mission hospital in Swaziland as its medical superintendent, I found there was no choice, joining my fellow board members once a month.

The nuns being Dutch, an agenda was circulated a few days beforehand and freshly baked biscuits were awaiting on the boardroom table. The chairman was a ramrod-straight ex-British army captain who ran a successful sugar-bagging business and was, I think, a Freemason.

Mr Pato, a dapper headmaster and big wheel in the local Assembly of God church, always ate most of the buttery Dutch delights. Another Swazi represented the archbishop. The Dutch matron and I completed the number but in truth it was the ex-officio minute-taker, Sister Laetitia, who was the mover and shaker. I’m not a Catholic but have developed a healthy respect for middle-aged nuns whose financial competence and rigour would outperform Wall Street and Tokyo in the medium and long-term stakes.

It was an enthusiastic Welsh woman who inveigled me onto the next board. Steph Wyer, a nurse dealing with terminally ill patients in Britain, had found there were no hospice facilities in Swaziland. She persuaded the Rotary club to donate a second-hand bright yellow caravan and that was the start of Hospice at Home. The board was small – Steph (generating vigour and empathy), Gcebile (an experienced nurse and the first woman in Swaziland to publicly state she had HIV/Aids), and Pryder (an elderly angel who had donated part of her land to the hospice and had political nous) – but even then, if legal or other advisers were invited, we had to stand outside the caravan.

Just before the millennium, a group of us working in the remote mountain village of Piggs Peak – Swazis, Ugandan, American, Sudanese, South African – started a school from scratch. It is still going strong. As a registered company in Swaziland, we had to have a board. The first few years were difficult but fun. Parents forcefully demanded places on the board “or else”.

When they realised what they had let themselves in for – the board met at night after work; members were not paid; they would be expected to help at weekends repairing classroom roofs or erecting a wall round the small sports field – their aggressive bravado cooled.

The board I most enjoyed being on was that of a landscape gardening company called Garden Buddies. Responsibilities were unexpected and highly educational. As the financial director, I found myself negotiating deliveries of six-metre palm trees on flatbed trucks between South Africa and a major contract landscaping the international trade fair’s new grounds in the Swazi town of Manzini.

Under the chairman’s guidance, I learned how many fresh grass sods will cover a parade ground and how it can be treated to withstand soldiers’ boots during parades, 100 different stalls at funfairs excreting and discharging noxious liquids, or 1,000 over-nourished women swaying hips and stamping bare feet during hours of traditional dancing.

A few years ago, the Buddies board was able to repulse a takeover of a major contract. A budding entrepreneur had estimated that hectares of untamed bush around the new airport’s terminal and cargo buildings could be prepared by letting a herd of cows and goats browse for a fortnight, then finish the job using four relatives with handheld brush-cutters. As for flower beds, trees for shade, and large pots of strikingly-coloured indigenous shrubs to set off the new buildings and welcome travellers, there was no need for those, he felt.

“I want to give them an unspoiled experience, getting off the plane and being in Africa.”

Surprisingly, the proposed "natural landscaping" with brush-cutters was only a little less in total than our own tender price – but then he likely did not have a board to guide him.

Dr David Vost studied medicine at Glasgow University and is currently working at a hospital in Swaziland. He and his family live on a small farm in Northern Uganda near the Albert Nile. davidvostsz@gmail.com