Stirring scenes in savage lands

by James Greenwood

“On reaching the spot we beheld an object of heartrending distress. It was a venerable looking old woman, a living skeleton, sitting with her head leaning on her knees. She appeared terrified at our presence, and especially at me. She tried to rise, but, trembling with weakness, sunk again to the earth. I addressed her by the name which sounds sweet in every clime, and charms even the savage ear, ‘My mother, fear not, we are friends and will do you no harm.’ I put several questions to her, but she appeared either speechless or afraid to open her lips. I again repeated ‘Pray mother who are you and how do you come to be in this situation?’ to which she replied ‘I am a woman, I have been here four days, my children have left me here to die.’ ‘Your children?’ I interrupted. ‘Yes,’ raising her hand to her shrivelled bosom, ‘my own children, three sons and two daughters. They are gone,’ pointing with her finger, ‘to yonder blue mountain, and have left me to die.’ ‘And pray why did they leave you?’ I enquired. Spreading out her hands she replied, ‘I am old, you see, and I am no longer able to serve them; when they kill game I am too feeble to help them carry home the flesh. I am not able to gather wood to make fire, and I cannot carry their children on my back as I used to do.’ This last sentence was more than I could bear, and though my tongue was cleaving to the roof of my mouth for want of water, this reply opened a fountain of tears. I remarked that I was surprised that she had escaped the lions which seemed to abound and to have approached very near the spot where she was. She took hold of the skin of her left arm with her fingers and raising it up as one would do a loose linen, she added, ‘I hear the lions, but there is nothing on me that they would eat; I have no flesh on me for them to scent.’ At this moment the waggon drew near which greatly alarmed her, for she supposed that it was an animal. Assuring her that it would do her no harm, I said that as I could not stay I would put her into the waggon and take her with me. At this remark she became convulsed with terror. Others addressed her, but all to no effect. She replied that if we took her and left her at another village they would do the same thing again. ‘It is our custom, I am nearly dead, I do not want to die again.’ The sun was now piercingly hot; the oxen were raging in the yoke and we ourselves nearly delirious. Finding it impossible to influence the woman to move without running the risk of her dying convulsed in our hands, we collected a quantity of fuel, gave her a good supply of dry meat, some tobacco, and a knife, with some other articles, telling her we should return in two days and stop the night, when she would be able to go with us; only she must keep up a good fire at night as the lions would smell the dried flesh if they did not scent her.”

Here is another case; the victim this time is a child, and her persecutors the Makalolo, likewise a South African tribe.

“The rich show kindness to the poor in expectation of services, and a poor person who has no relatives will seldom be supplied even with water in illness, and when dead will be dragged out to be devoured by the hyænas instead of being buried. Relatives alone will condescend to touch a dead body. It would be easy to enumerate instances of inhumanity which I have witnessed. An interesting looking girl came to my waggon one day in a state of nudity, and almost a skeleton. She was a captive from another tribe and had been neglected by the man who claimed her. Having supplied her wants I made enquiry for him, and found that he had been unsuccessful in raising a crop of corn and had no food to give her. I volunteered to take her, but he said he would allow me to feed her and make her fat, and then he would take her away. I protested against this heartlessness, and as he said he would not part with his child I was precluded from attending to her wants. In a day or two she was lost sight of; she had gone out a little way from the town and being too weak to return had been cruelly left to perish. Another day I saw a poor boy going to the water to drink, apparently in a starving condition. This case I brought before the chief in council and found that his emaciation was ascribed to disease and want combined. He was not one of the Makalolo, but a member of a subdued tribe. I showed them that any one professing to claim a child and refusing proper nutriment would be guilty of his death. Sekeletu decided that the owner of this boy should give up his alleged right rather than destroy the child. When I took him he was so far gone as to be in the cold stage of starvation, but was soon brought round by a little milk given three or four times a day. On leaving Linyanti I handed him over to the charge of Sekeletu, who feeds his servants very well.”

One’s only source of consolation is that among this and neighbouring tribes intellect is at so low a par that it is more than probable that they are mainly influenced by a horror of the sight of death, and not by motives of selfishness or wanton inhumanity. Moreover, if it were attempted to impart a knowledge of medicine to them, it is doubtful if in their profound obtuseness they would not inflict much more injury than work good on a patient that might come under their hands. One thing is certain, if the following instance furnished by the traveller Galton may be relied on, their arithmetical capabilities would have to be greatly cultivated and improved before they could be entrusted with the admeasurement of drugs; a drop more or less of which kills or cures.

“They have no way of distinguishing days, but reckon by the rainy season, the dry season, or the pignut season. When inquiries are made about how many days’ journey off a place may be, their ignorance of all numerical ideas is very annoying. In practice, whatever they may possess in their language, they certainly use no numeral greater than three. When they wish to express four, they take to their fingers which are to them as formidable instruments of calculation as a sliding rule is to an English schoolboy. They puzzle very much after five, because no spare hand remains to grasp and secure the fingers that are required for units. Yet they seldom lose oxen; the way in which they discover the loss of one is not by the number of the herd being diminished, but by the absence of a face they know. When bartering is going on each sheep must be paid for separately. Thus, suppose two sticks of tobacco to be the rate of exchange for one sheep, it would sorely puzzle a Damara to take two sheep and give him four sticks. I have done so and seen a man first put two of the sticks apart and take a sight over them at one of the sheep he was about to sell. Having satisfied himself that that one was honestly paid for, and finding to his surprise that exactly two sticks remained in hand to settle the account for the other sheep, he would be afflicted with doubts; the transaction seemed to come out too pat to be correct, and he would refer back to the first couple of sticks and then his mind got hazy and confused, and wandered from one sheep to the other, and he broke off the transaction until two sticks were put into his hand and one sheep driven away, and then the other two sticks given him and the second sheep driven away. When a Damara’s mind is bent upon number it is too much occupied to dwell upon quantity; thus, a heifer is brought from a man for ten sticks of tobacco; his large hands being both spread out upon the ground and a stick placed upon each finger, he gathers up the tobacco; the size of the mass pleases him and the bargain is struck. You then want to buy a second heifer: the same process is gone through, but half sticks instead of whole ones are put upon his fingers; the man is equally satisfied at the time, but occasionally finds it out and complains the next day. Once while I watched a Damara floundering hopelessly in a calculation on one side of me, I observed Dinah my spaniel equally embarrased on the other. She was overlooking half a dozen of her new born puppies which had been removed two or three times from her, and her anxiety was excessive as she tried to find out if they were all present or if any were still missing. She kept puzzling and running her eyes over them backwards and forwards but could not satisfy herself. She evidently had a vague notion of counting, but the figure was too large for her brain. Taking the two as they stood, dog and Damara, and comparison reflected no great honour on the man.”

The same gentleman had a very narrow escape of falling into the merciless hands of a Damara dentist.

“I had occasion to make inquiries for a professional gentleman, a dentist, as one of my teeth had ached so horribly that I could hardly endure it. He was employed at a distance, but I subsequently witnessed, though I did not myself undergo, the exercise of his skill. He brought a piece of the back sinew of a sheep, which forms a kind of catgut, and tied this round the unhappy tooth, and the spare end of the catgut was wound round a stout piece of stick, and this he rolled up tight to the tooth, and then pressed with all his force against the jaw till something gave way. I saw the wretched patient sitting for the rest of the day with his head between his knees and his hands against his temples.”

The Eboes and Kalabeese of Western Africa hold very curious notions respecting the administering of doctor’s drugs. When they bury their dead the sorrowing friends place a tube in the earth communicating with the body of the deceased, and down this tube they, in after times, pour palm wine and other liquids for the sustenance of the soul of the departed, and even medicines, which libations they imagine will produce the same effect upon the offerer as though absorbed by himself. Thus an Eboe will come to a surgeon, “Doctor, me sickee;” and when given the proper medicine, that official must watch the applicant take the dose on the spot, or he will administer it to the shade of his father, making the parental benefits to continue even after death; but strange to say, if given a bottle of rum he becomes suddenly oblivious of his father’s grave, and forgetting that the ashes of the departed may probably appreciate rum as much as palm wine and that the paternal clay may likewise require to be moistened, pours it down his own thorax with the most lively gestures expressive of satisfaction.

A person styled an Abiadiong, or sorcerer, is always consulted in cases of sickness, death, or capital crime, to find out the individual who has brought the malady on his neighbour. He is reputed to derive his knowledge by education, but is not the bearer of a diploma, save one in his title. The Abiadiong squats himself beside the sick man—repeats a number of incantations—tosses strings of beads he has in his hand as an appeal to the spirit he invokes—rubs the beads alternately on his own body and that of the sick man—cogitates and decides. Sometimes the decision is settled by a little copper Palarer beforehand; and, as the Eboe law gives to the possessor of its privileges an unlimited power in this respect, it may be imagined what scenes of blood the system creates and fosters. Alia-lok is the title which, in this country, is given to a doctor of medicine; but the Kalabeese have little faith in drugs, and surgical operations are generally performed by the soft sex. These are confined to two species of cupping—the dry and the bloody—and to enema administering. The dry cupping is effected with a pyreform-calabash upon the breasts of women, whose bodies are chalked over at the same time, to force them to maturity. Razors are used as scarificators in moist cupping the side and temples of persons labouring under, what they suppose to be, congestive diseases. Ulcers are usually dressed by a piece of leaf passed round the diseased part, and fastened by a bamboo stem. A poison bean, with a string through a hole bored in it, is frequently worn as a curative ju-ju round a sore leg—only a modification of the similia similibus curantur system. Perhaps it is to carry out a like idea that dogs are buried in the ground with their heads above the ground, where the poor creatures spend three or four days before nature conquers their power of life, for during this time they are allowed no food. These dogs are generally impounded so before the door of the sick man. When small-pox prevails in some places they dot their bodies over with spots of chalk, perhaps to make the demon of disease believe that they have previously been visited with a skin affection, and that his ground is already occupied.

It seems easy to set up as M.D. among the Indians of North America.