African Stupidity

     Even first aid has changed since I was a boy. I can remember when mouth-to-mouth resuscitation came in. Before that, artificial respiration involving folding and pumping of the arms was all in vogue. As for snake bite, the practice was to bind a tourniquet really tightly around the upper part of the limb, make an X-shaped incision a quarter of an inch deep over the bite itself, then suck out the venom. Snake venom can easily be swallowed without harm, but it could still enter through a cut or sore in the mouth. Also, if you were alone, it helped if you were a contortionist. Just the same, you must remember that antivenene was not readily available at the time, so the method probably did save a lot of lives. You can read about my uncle's adventure with this sort of procedure here. But what has this got to do with Africa and stupidity?
      For this we shall refer to an anecdote by our old friend, John Boyes, who was busy hunting elephants in the Lado Enclave, probably in the years 1910-12. At one point he was staying in a village on the banks of the Nile inhabited by members of the Madi tribe. When a certain old man was bitten on the thigh, Boyes performed the above procedure on him, then cauterized the wound and treated it with potassium permanganate, after which he gave him a big glass of strong whiskey. The old man then began haranguing the onlookers. It turned out he was making his living will. When Boyes told him he was not dying, he refused to believe him. He must be dying , because the whole world appeared to be spinning around, and he was seeing double! And no, he didn't die.
     This, of course, was not stupidity, just inexperience. But what happened later was another matter. Boyes hired half a dozen men from the same village and, as a precaution, taught them how to treat snakebite. As it turned out, the knowledge came in handy. He used to send them out in advance for a couple of days at a time to search out elephants, during one of which one of the men was bitten, and the others fixed him up. So far, so good. Let us now quote the narrator's own words:

When I met him three or four days afterwards he seemed to be practically cured, and I was so impressed with their prompt action, which is rather out of the ordinary for a Native, that I gave all of them presents of cloth, and left the patient in their care at one of the their tribal villages until I should return that way. I came back about a month afterwards, and on going to the village where the man had been left, I found the Natives still more pleased with themselves than they had been on my previous visit. They suggested that they deserved more presents, and invited me to come and see the sick man. But what was my surprise and horror when I found my old follower a hopeless cripple, with his leg cut clean off above the knee! The Natives thought they had done a fine piece of scientific surgery, and only required a little more encouragement from me in the shape of presents and appreciation to cut him up into little bits.

     Another time, he made an expedition buying donkeys in the Karamoja country. The donkeys, of course, then became beasts of burden, being loaded with two sacks of flour, each weighing about 60 pounds [27 kg], one sack on each side for balance. Ask yourself: if you were going to consume the flour piecemeal, how would you ensure the sacks remained balanced? The obvious solution would be to take equal amounts from each sack - a solution so simple, it never occurred to him to tell them so. That was, unless he discovered they were balancing them by adding stones to the lighter one. I suppose he found out when he noticed that the packs weren't getting any smaller. Sometimes there would be a full 60 lb. on one side, and on the other side, 10 lb of flour and 50 lb of stones. Poor blooming donkeys!
     To be fair, you can't judge an entire race on two examples. However, I've been to Africa, and there are certain things which only happen there.

Reference: John Boyes (1927), The Company of Adventurers.