Jungle Doctor's Enemies

(A brief account of Missionary Paul White's work in Tanganyika, East Africa)

CHAPTER I

A BLIND BOY

THE African lad stumbled and nearly fell, clutching as I he did so at the cornstalks growing on each side of the winding path. He steadied himself for a moment and then groped his way uncertainly forward. Closing the hospital’s hyena-proof gate I came across to him.

“Nhawule wayiko?” (What’s up, old chap?)

For a moment he stood silent and then in a voice thick from crying, he said, “Bwana, my companions will not let me help push the car, because I am Mubofu, the blind one, and…” His voice failed him.

He turned away and walked back the way he had come.

There was something unspeakably pathetic about the droop of his shoulders and his hands held vaguely in front of him.

I had caught a glimpse of his face and it had borne the stamp of tragedy—two empty eye-sockets telling the story of the hopelessness of native medicine. As I came level with him the blind boy said, “Bwana, I can push, even though I live in Utitu” (the land of darkness).

“But supposing you tripped over as the car gathers speed?” I asked.

“Kah, Bwana, I am no stranger to falling. I have no fear of a bruise or two. Will you not allow me to help?”

The path along which we were walking swerved sharply to pass round the trunk of a huge baobab tree. I watched with amazement how the lad unerringly followed the centre of the track.

Into view came a lively scene. The hospital dispenser, Samson, was cranking a twenty-year-old car with con­siderable vigor. His efforts were encouraged by a group of small boys dressed in a minimum. They waved their knobbed sticks in the air and danced up and down and chanted.

“Na vilungo gwe—na vilungo” (Go to it with strength). Seeing me, Samson straightened up and wiped his brow. “Hongo, Bwana, the battery is sleeping.”

I grinned. “The row these Wadodo (little people) are making is enough to wake even it, surely.”

“Kah, Bwana, our car is not called ‘Sukuma’” (Swahili for push) “for nothing.”

“Bwana, we’ll push,” said the small boys, rushing forward.

“Viswanu” (right), I laughed, “but you must wait for a moment till I’m ready.”

Changing from Chigogo, the language of the Central Plains of Tanganyika, to English, I said, “Samson, I’ve a good mind to take that little blind chap with us to Dodoma. I think it would be a real red-letter day in his life to go on safari with us. You can bring him back later on when I’ve caught the train.”

The dispenser nodded, “We can be his eyes for him today and tell him all we see along the road and in the town.”

Mubofu was crouching down in the shade of the mud-brick shed that was “Sukuma’s” home. On the wall above him were three colorful lizards, busily hunting flies. As I walked over to him he got to his feet.

“Bwana, you’ll let me help push?”

“Kah,” I said, “how did you know it was I coming towards you?”

“Hongo,” said the little lad, his whole face lighting up—his smile somehow accentuating the tragedy of those ghastly hollows where his eyes should have been. “Kah, Bwana, I heard your shoes in the sand and I know no African who walks like you do.”

I whistled. “What ears you’ve got!”

“Bwana, my ears have to be my eyes as well these days “—he put his hand on my sleeve—” Bwana, Bwana, will you let me push?”

“No, Mubofu,” I replied, “I will not allow you to push.”

All the joy left his face. Before he could speak I said, “But I wondered if perhaps you would care to come on safari with Samson and myself today. We are going to Dodoma.”

“Kah,” said the small boy, “in the car, in ‘Sukuma’?”

“Heya” (Yes), I said.

“Yoh, Bwana, it has been my strong wish for many days to travel in a car. Kah!”

He proceeded to do a little dance, which set the lizards clambering up the trunk of the baobab tree. I collected my luggage and said good-byes.

As we walked back to the car I said to Samson, “Who is this blind lad, and what is his story?”

His people are dead, Bwana. He sleeps in the tribal house of his relations in a village which is of the Washenziskenzi (the most heathen of the heathen). I have heard it said that they feed him because they think he will die before long anyhow, and it is better not to upset the spirits of the ancestors unnecessarily.”

Twenty yards or so away was the subject of our con­versation, eagerly standing beside the car.

I placed him on the front seat between Samson and myself. Letting off the handbrake I called out, “Haya wadodo sukuma” (Come on, come children, push).

Slowly we moved forward under twenty-boy power. The old machine slowly gained speed as we rolled down the stony track from the hospital. I let in the clutch. “Sukuma” backfired noisily; shrieking, the small black folk scampered away. Then the engine started arid I was on the first lap of a holiday that was to take me to the far side of Lake Victoria Nyanza, the very centre of Africa.

I drove carefully down a crazily-cut track running through a dry riverbed.

“Bwana,” said the blind boy. “It’s on the hill beyond the fourth river that I live. Do I not know this part of the road very well indeed?”

“Truly,” said Samson, “he travels this road as well as anybody, Bwana, his feet seem to know every rock and rut.”

“It was here, Bwana, at Chibaya, that I was born. Bwana, it was here that I lost my eyes.”

“Oh,” I said, “how did it happen?”

The blind boy held up four fingers. “It was four years ago, Bwana, when serenyenyi came into our village.”

I looked at Samson questioningly. He framed with his lips the word “measles.” I nodded silently.

“Hongo,” continued the lad, “those were days of sorrow, Bwana, first my nose and then my eyes ran, ehh, how I coughed. My wandugu (relations) would not let me sleep. They beat tins and shouted and shook me; ‘you must not die,’ they said. Then, Bwana, my eyes became very sore because of the glare and the flies, and they put me inside the house, but the smoke of the cooking fires made my eyes worse still.”

He sat up suddenly and pointed with his chin towards a group of huts. “There, Bwana, is my house. There, Bwana, is where it all happened.”

“Kah,” said Samson, “how do you know we’ve come to your house?”

“Kumbe,” explained the boy, “is my nose not awake? Shall I not know the smell of my own village?”

There was silence for a while and then he said, “Bwana, there was pain, fiery pain in my eyes, for did I not have maciligala (eye ulcers) but Bwana, there was no one to take me to the hospital then. There was no C.M.S. hospital, nor had you come from your own country.”

Something was moving in the jungle beside the road.

Suddenly Samson shouted, “Look, Bwana, mpala.”

A buck the size of a Shetland pony sprang up from a thorn-bush thicket and bounded away in great leaps.

“What was it, Bwana?” asked Mubofu, his hand on my shoulder.

“A beautiful buck,” I replied. “See, there behind it is another.”

As the words went past my lips I tried to stop them slipping out, but the boy’s face was aglow. “I can see it, Bwana, in my mind. Yoh, how they jump.”

The road wound in and out through thorn country, and as I drove I thought about measles, and how world­wide epidemics often occurred every five years, and it would seem that another was due very shortly if the wretched disease came up to schedule.

“Samson,” I said, as we crossed a dry riverbed, which in the wet season could be a muddy torrent, “we must be prepared for another measles epidemic and not let this sort of thing happen again, now we’ve got our hospital going.”

“Kah, Bwana,” said Samson, “they don’t only go blind when measles come; hundreds and hundreds of children die. Behold, in our own country it is truly the disease of trouble and death and sorrow, especially for children.”

I looked at the pitiful little face beside me, and thought of the torment that small boy must have suffered. He, however, was not thinking of measles, and was tense with excitement. Each mile of that journey had its own particular interest to him. He amazed me as time and again he described what he had passed. His senses seemed unusually quick. He sat there as alert as a terrier as “Sukuma” spluttered and skidded along the Cape-to-Cairo Road.

We were climbing now, going up a steep hill on which cactus flourished. Immediately beneath us was a patch of dark-green mango trees growing round the sandy river-bed, amongst them the white buildings of the C.M.S. Boys’ School. We turned off the road and drove through a peanut garden, past a carpentry work­shop where African lads were busy making tables. I stopped the car under a great Kikuyu tree and lifted Mubofu to the ground, and taking an African shilling from my pocket, beckoned to Samson. As he ran round the car I examined the lion on the back of the coin; handing it to him, I said, “Samson, buy posho (food) for yourself and young Mubofu. In an hour we shall drive to the railway station.”

“Ndio, Bwana—yes, sir,” said Samson, unconsciously using Swahili, the language spoken in the towns.

I had heard from my friend, the Principal of this great African School, that a measles epidemic had actually started, but as yet it was away up in the north in the Sudan and Abyssinia. There was no news of it being in Tanganyika.

The stationmaster, a tall Indian, informed me that the train was ten hours late, and then, since he knew my profession, he told me of a severe epidemic in his home town, Karachi; to me it sounded suspiciously like measles.

Samson was pumping up “Sukuma’s” tires; as I came through the station gate he looked up inquiringly.

“The train is ten hours late,” I told them.

Mubofu laughed: “Hongo, Bwana, that is very good, behold, you will have time to tell me many things about Dodoma and describe what you see with your eyes so that I may see it in my mind.”

CHAPTER II

 MUBOFU

SAMSON, you go into the shop of Ahmed Rhemtulla, load up with rice, soap and the cement that we require for the new well. Take Mubofu with you and when I have finished my arrangements here at the station I will come over and collect him and show him some of the town.

The dispenser stood at attention and said, “Ndio, Bwana.” Then he climbed in behind the wheel and drove off I watched “Sukuma” moving down the road with Mubofu’s head sticking out, his ears attuned to every sound that the town could provide. I could guess that Samson was telling him all about the post office, and the great granite fort that had been built in the days when Tanganyika was German East Africa. It took me some quarter of an hour to fix up sundry and various arrange­ments with the stationmaster. I then crossed the railway line, walking on the steel sleepers, and made my way past the public well, which was thronged with water carriers who paid one cent (and there are one hundred cents in a shilling) for each kerosene tin full of water which they received.

Arriving at the Indian shop I found Mubofu sitting on a box in a corner while Samson helped load bag after bag of rice.

“Kah, Bwana,” said the small boy, as I came across to him and put my hand on his shoulder. “Kah, has not this place a rich smell?” He wrinkled up his nose expressively.

An old Indian woman was cutting up a huge lump of sticky brown sugar.

“Ukusaka kujeza sukari?” (Would you like to taste some sugar?) I asked.

He nodded his head vigorously, so I handed over a five-cent piece and received a great lump of sugar as big as my closed fist. To my disgust there was, a huge cockroach em­balmed in it.

“Kah, Muhofu, heh, there’s a dudu in it.” The small boy was not perturbed.

“Bwana,” said he, “would you mind pulling it out then?”

As we walked through the town he became stickier and stickier, and merely nodded his head instead of ask­ing the usual string of questions. I tried to describe to him the tinsmith making some kerosene tins into all manner of things. Then I told him about the Indian shoemaker, whose toes were nearly as useful as his fingers. Coming towards us down the center of the road, dressed in the gayest colors, with brilliant turbans, were a number of Somalilanders. Out of their way scuttled several mangy dogs and a group of athletic chickens; behind us a horn blared. I grabbed Mubofu and was just in time to swing him out of the path of a ramshackle lorry driven by an Arab. It was greatly overloaded with Africans and a varied cargo which included a depressed-looking goat. Mubofu was licking his fingers. The sugar had disappeared at an amazing rate.

“Kah, Bwana,” said he, “I know where we are now. -Is not this near the marketplace? Behold, I can smell the skins of cows. Yah, and there is the smell of butter.”

“My friend,” I said, “you know it is not the custom of Europeans to eat butter like that.” I looked distastefully at a gourd full of bright, semi-fluid material, which my nose classified as a near relative to rather nimble varieties of cheese.

“Heh, Bwana,” said the small boy, “it is very hot.”

“Well,” I said, “come and sit in the shade. Behold, in front of us now is the great Kanisa” (the Cathedral).

Mubofu sat on the top step, facing away from the door which opened widely behind him. He carefully wiped his hands on the very ancient rag which was his only clothing. For a time he sat listening, and wrinkling up his nose, trying to gain every impression that he could, then in a rather awed voice he said, “Bwana, tell me what this great Kanisa looks like.”

We turned and looked inside. It was very quiet and within the building our voices echoed. “Behold,” I said, “there is not a flat roof like the ordinary houses of the people, but there is a dome, shaped like the top of your head, and the walls are very high. Why, if six men stood one on top of each other’s shoulders they could barely touch the roof.”

“Heeh,” said the small boy, “it must reach almost to the clouds, Bwana.”

“In the middle of the building, Mubofu, there are many stools, enough for six hundred people, then beyond all this is the place where they sing and preach.”

Mubofu nodded as each part was described. I looked through the wide-open door. “Over there, Mubofu,” I gently moved his chin until it was in line with a thornbush hedge over the railway track, “over there, Mubofu, is a place where many soldiers are buried, those who fought to free Tanganyika from the Germans. A little bit to the north of that is the path that the Arabs used when they drove slaves to the coast to sell them.

The blind boy was very serious when he listened to this part of the story.

I was watching three lizards walking up the wall, fly stalking, when my small companion asked suddenly:

“Bwana, can people see in Heaven?”

For a moment the question caught me unprepared.

“Can they, Bwana?”

“Why, yes, Mubofu, they can, for doesn’t it say in God’s Word, ‘they shall see His face’?”

“Bwana, read it to me.” He held out his hand and I lead him through the cathedral to the reading desk, where there was a New Testament in Chigogo. I turned over the pages.

“Bwana, can’t you feel that God is here?”

I nodded, forgetting that he could not see me.

“Truly,” I replied, “and God is always near those of His own family. They may talk to Him at any time, and He talks to them by the words of His book. These are God’s Words about Heaven; they were written by a man called John who was one of Jesus’ own friends when he went about healing the people who were blind and sick, before the days when wicked men crucified Him. Here is the page, these are the words, Mubofu, ‘God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, the first things are passed away.’ That’s what it says about Heaven.”

“Bwana,” said he, “read it again please.”

I did so. In a very small voice he said, “Heek, Bwana, if only I could go to Heaven! But then I’m only little and Bwana, I’m blind and I’m useless. I can do so little.”

“Mubofu,” I said, “listen. It isn’t what you do that matters a bit. It’s what the Lord Jesus did. He died so that you might go to Heaven, to do what you cannot do, no matter how hard you try. He paid the price for your freedom.”

I sang softly the words:

“There was no other good enough

To pay the price of Sin;

He only could unlock the gate

Of heaven and let us in.”

Mubofu nodded. “I see, Bwana, He paid the wulipicizo” (the freedom price).

“Yes, it’s exactly that, Mubofu. Why, in this very place years ago there were slaves, but no one to buy their freedom. For us there is hope, because Jesus—God’s only son—died to buy us back from a different sort of slavery.”

Again Mubofu nodded. “Bwana, are you sure it means me, too?”

“It must, because Jesus said ‘Him that cometh to me will in no wise—under no circumstances—be cast out.”

“But, Bwana, what must I do? What can I say to Him since I greatly want to be one of His tribe?”

“All you have to do if you want to start on the road to Heaven is to ask the Lord Jesus to be your Bwana, your Lord. Then He comes into your life and with Him comes everlasting life and out goes sin and its fruits; there is no place for them in the house of your life when the Son of God is there. Is He not offering you this gift of life for ever, and light (not for your eyes now), but for your soul?”

The sun was well down towards the horizon, and as the light streamed in through a narrow window, from where I stood behind the small boy I could see his face lighted up. I couldn’t see the horror of his empty eyes, but I could see all the beauty of his smile. It seemed to me that the small African boy was very right when he said that God was very close there. For a while we stood in silence, and then he said, “Bwana, will you talk to God?”

So together in the African language we spoke to the Almighty, and then very quietly we turned and walked down the passage between the three-legged stools towards the great door at the back of the Cathedral. I was just about to put my foot on the top step when I looked down. My foot stopped in mid-air. I grasped Mubofu by the shoulder. “Keep absolutely still,” I ordered. “Stay exactly where you are; don’t move your head.” With­out a word the small boy obeyed. I reached for one of the three-legged stools; picked it up, and threw it with every bit of force that I could muster. Crash! It hit the steps. I led the small boy back into the Cathedral and looked through the doorway. There, wriggling, but with its back broken was the body of a cobra.

“What was it, Bwana?” asked Mubofu.

“Nzoka (a snake),” I replied. “If you had gone one step farther, Mubofu, perhaps you would now be in Heaven.”

‘‘Kah,” said the small boy, “Bwana, per­haps the Lord Jesus has some work for me to do, blind as I am.”

This two chapter booklet has been republished in tract form for distribution on the mission field.

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