254
T h e
K i n g ’ s B u s i n e s s
June 1932
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LIGHT BREAKS FORTH B y H. V IRG IN IA BLAKESLEE* Kenya Colony, East A frica
ne morning , when we were very busy with the dis pensary patients that had gathered in that little banana- leaf-covered hut, down the path leading to the hospital came four warriors. They were clad in castor oil and red paint. Their bodies and hair were sopped with castor oil ■and red paint. Two yards o f unbleached muslin wrapped around them was sopped with castor oil and red paint. They were carrying a stretcher on their shoulders. It was made from two poles, with cross sticks tied with strips of viney bark. On top of the cross sticks were banana leaves and on top of them—a raw heathen woman. They got as far as the dispensary door. When we went out to take the pa tient’s pulse and temperature, we saw that she bore every trace of having been sick for a long time.. We asked how long she had been sick. They did not know. We told them we were afraid it was too late to do anything for her, but that we would put her in the banana- leaf-thatched ward and do what we could for her. In about four days, the husband of that woman and his brother came to see her. They went into the women’s ward and looked at her, and the husband said to his brother, “ I don’t think she is going to get well, do you ?” “ No,” he said, “ I don’t think she is going to get well.” “Well,” said the husband, “ we have already lost a good
erty, so we could do nothing when they announced that they would take her. One took her by the right hand and one by the left, and they began to drag her out o f the house. As they were dragging her out, she clutched at the sides of the doorway, and she looked up into my face with those large, black, pleading eyes, for, sick and weak and semi conscious though she was, she knew she was being taken to the bushes. Out through that narrow doorway they dragged her, and her heels made a ziz-zag trail in the dust as they drag ged her down the pathway. Down the hill just back of the hospital they took her, and when they reached the foot of the hill, they dropped her under a clump o f bushes, and building a fire there, they sat down. That evening, we went to the clump of bushes with some nourishment and some medicine, in a last attempt to persuade those men to bring the woman back to the hospital. But their decision was made, and they would not be moved. In the darkness o f the early morning of the next day, I heard the African hyena as he came howling for food. I knew he was headed for that clump of bushes. And because I knew the hideous habits of that hated animal, I knew how he was craning his neck under that clump of bushes, and how he was snapping his teeth into the body o f that woman, and how he was
many sheep and goats because o f her. We have sacrificed them to make her well, and she is going to die anyway. I f she dies in this place, you know what will happen. We will have to bury her, and then we will be defiled. Then, too, she has never given birth to a child, and be cause o f that, I can go back to her father and ■demand all the forty or fifty sheep that I paid for her.” Legally, we have no right to interfere with a Irian’s personal pr'op- *Medical doctor and direc tor o f a girls’ school of. the Africa Inland Mission.
lifting her in his huge jaws and dragging her down, down, down to a place I knew about, where the side of the hill was filled with caves, and which was known a- mong the natives as “ the village of the hyenas.” I knew that, when he dropped her there, hy enas of all sizes came snarling and snapping from those caves, and one took a leg and ran in one direction, and one took an arm and ran in another direction. All that, my friends, is darkness! That is what it means to be born in a land where the name and the power
THREE HEATHEN WOMEN IN KENYA COLONY
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