The fetish folk of West Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

To the African child the jigger is the occasion of its worst suffering. I have seen children who could not walk, some with toes eaten away, and several with nearly the whole foot gone. For, to the African and to some white men, they are not irritating while boring beneath the skin, and afterwards they are very hard to see, especially in the black skin of the native. One may know nothing of their presence for several days, after which they are so hard to remove that the native child will bear the irritating itch that they first occasion rather than submit to the pain of removing them; and when the itch has become a painful sore, no child could remove them. Some African mothers watch their children’s feet closely but others neglect them cruelly. I am glad to say that those who allow their feet to get full of jiggers, or mothers who neglect the care of their children’s feet, are looked down upon, as lousy persons would be among us, though not to the same extent.

The jiggers are less troublesome in the wet season. But with the dry season their numbers increase rapidly, and towards the close of the season the soil and the sand are fairly alive with them. If possible, missionary boarding-schools ought to have vacation at this time; for the white missionary is sure to get them in the schoolroom; and the dormitories, which usually have only earthen floors, become so infested with them that even native children are often kept awake at night, and the amount of discipline necessary to make them keep their feet in order may demoralize the school. There are always children, large and small, who need no supervision, and are sufficiently self-respecting to keep their feet clean; but their task is made exceedingly difficult by the presence in the same dormitory of those who breed jiggers by thousands. As a rule, with but few exceptions, the children who keep their feet clean are those who have been in the school before and are known as mission-boys and mission-girls.

In my boys’ boarding-school of later years one would see a strange sight each day during the dry season. The whole school filed out at recess and sat down along either side of the path leading to the mission-house. A committee of boys examined the feet of the others and reported to me the name of every boy who had jiggers in his feet; while I stood with note-book in hand and wrote down their names. Then when the food was given out at noon these boys were left without food until their feet were pronounced clean. The larger boys were responsible for those of their own town or family who were too small to attend to their own feet. I once kept a boy more than a day without food until he removed his jiggers, and one hopeless boy I at last expelled from the school for the offense. For rigid insistence upon this discipline, I felt, lay close to moral instruction.

The white man of course suffers from jiggers, but not so much as the native, because of his shoes, his cleaner house, and because his feet are more sensitive, so that he becomes aware of them after several days at the most, when they can be removed without injury, if it is very carefully done. After one has been in Africa a length of time he will detect their presence as soon as they begin to burrow. Some white men have a native boy examine their feet every night or morning; for the boy has very sharp eyes, and he removes the jigger with surprising skill. It can be done with a pin; a needle is better and a pair of tweezers is still better. If the sac that is formed after several days be broken in the removal, it may cause a sore that will take some time to heal. Indeed, if one be greatly reduced in health and the blood in bad condition, it may not heal at all until he leaves the country on furlough. I have known men who for weeks were not able to wear a shoe because of jigger sores.

After I had been a few months in Africa, one day, while in bed with fever, I said to a friend that in allowing my feet to touch the floor beside the bed where natives had been standing, I must have caught the itch; for a most irritating itch had been troubling me for several days. My friend at once suggested jiggers as the cause. I answered with great assurance that it certainly was not jiggers, for I had watched my feet very closely, having determined from the first that I should get no jiggers—which of course was true, but I suppose I had been watching for creatures the size of potato-bugs crawling over my feet I at once called a native boy, however, wishing perhaps to assure my friend, and the boy found seven colonies of jiggers. It took my feet a long time to heal. But it never happened again.

The male jigger, as I have said, does not burrow in the flesh, but disports himself upon the surface and makes himself very numerous. He is one of the great variety of influences that keep the white man constantly scratching. The native scratches too, scratches most of the time, and often with both hands, but he does not get excited about it, nor attract so much attention. But the habit is disgusting in the white man, and after all it is a habit rather than a necessity. A minority exercise the strongest self-restraint, a larger number exercise restraint sometimes; many white men, however, exercise no restraint at all, but scratch continually, regardless of the occasion.

The sandfly, or midge, not known at the coast, but widely distributed in the interior, must be counted among the worst of African pests. They also are exceedingly small. They do their utmost to make life intolerable in the early morning hours after daylight, and again in the evening before dark. Some are more sensitive to them than others. When I was living in the interior, I bathed my hands and face in kerosene or turpentine each morning and evening as their hour approached and sometimes repeated it once or twice before they retired.

The mosquitoes are so bad, especially in the low places along the coast, that even the natives must sleep under mosquito nets.

In the song of our childhood we were impressed with the possibilities of such minutiæ—as little drops of water, little grains of sand and little moments of time, when these are multiplied by infinity. But infinity is the status of all insect life in Africa. In order to realize the pest of the mosquito in towns adjacent to mangrove swamps one must multiply the insect until it seems to compose about fifty per cent. of the atmosphere. Its music too is impressive.

Wherever possible the white man builds his house upon a well-cleared hill and so escapes them, sometimes almost entirely as at Baraka. But this is not always possible. Many missionaries have told of writing letters while sitting cross-legged on their beds with the mosquito-net drawn down around the bed.