There are some diseases found among African children that are not found among white children. Of these leprosy, the most dreadful, used long ago to afflict white children too. It is the terrible disease from which our tender-hearted Saviour freed some poor sufferers when He was on earth. Alas! one comes across it now and again among the black races of Africa.
I remember once meeting a leper. He was a bright lad and was attending a class for Bible instruction. Some of the joints of his fingers were gone at the time I saw him, but he had been a leper for some years then. He told me that his father had been a leper, and that he himself began to suffer from leprosy when he was a boy of some twelve years of age. The beginning was like this. One morning he awoke and felt his hands and arms sore as if they had been burned in spots here and there during the night. So he blamed the other boys who slept in the hut for playing tricks on him with a burning stick. But they all denied it. It was the beginning of the fatal disease.
The Africans have no treatment for the leper. He simply lives his life in the village so long as he looks after himself or can get anyone to care for him. But when his disease has gone on year after year, and he is no longer able to walk or do anything for himself, or has no friend to care for him, the people used to have, and still have in many places, a savage way of dealing with him. Back from the village a bit in the bush a little hut was built, and one day the leper was carried out, taken to the hut, shut into it with a supply of food, and left to his fate. Either he perished from hunger or was devoured by a wild beast, or was burned to death by a bush-fire. The natives firmly believe that such lepers are transformed into wild animals.
I once heard how a poor sufferer was otherwise dealt with. He had been ill for years with an ulcer on one of his legs. The sore had been neglected at first and then it got too bad for treatment. But as native doctors cannot cut off limbs as white doctors can, the poor fellow could now do nothing but lie about his village, and depend on his friends to help him. As he got worse and worse, and less able to help himself, his friends became fewer and fewer. At last he became such a source of trouble to the people that the men decided to put an end to it. Accordingly they went up the hillside near and dug a grave with a small niche to one side at the bottom. Then they returned to the village and carried off the helpless sufferer. He guessed at their intention and piteously implored them to desist. “Where are you going with me?” he said. “Do not leave me alone on the cold hillside.” But they were deaf to his appeals. When they reached the grave they quickly lowered the miserable wretch down, placed him in the niche at the side, shut him in with a mat, drove in a few stakes, filled up the grave, and left him.
Not long ago I passed through a village where some years ago I had made the acquaintance of the head man. He was then a hale and hearty old fellow, fond of his joke and his snuff-box. But now what a change. I found his people mostly gone and he himself but the wreck of what he had been. Everything round about had a neglected look. Some disease or other had laid him low and friends had gone. I found him sitting on a mat close to a fire. His poor skeleton legs were firmly bound at knees and ankles with cords made of bark. He had tried many doctors, he said, and had paid for much medicine, and now he had nothing to do but sit and wait for the end. He was too old to visit a white doctor; he was accustomed to the medicine of his own people and would not try that of strangers.
There is a great deal of suffering in African villages silently and patiently borne; and the white doctor can do a great deal to alleviate it. I can assure you children that your pennies put into the missionary box to help to support hospitals in heathen lands are not given in vain; and there is no part of missionary work that more deserves your help. Remember what our Lord said, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto Me.”
CHAPTER XIV
MAGIC MEDICINE
In the previous chapter we were talking about doctors and medicine. In this chapter we shall hear more about medicine, but of another kind. Medicine in Africa is of two kinds—one for the lawful purpose of healing the sick, the other for the unlawful purpose of bewitching people and doing other dark deeds. It is when we begin to look into all that surrounds this unlawful medicine that we meet “the heathen in his darkness.”