In what amounted to the reception room in the area beyond the cooking fires where there were several large trees there were the leading men from two Masai Manyattas. They were not chiefs since a chief is a man who has taken money or a cheap medal from the British and is a bought man. These were simply the heads of their villages, which were separated by more than fifteen miles, and they both had lion trouble. I sat in the chair outside the tent with my Mzee stick and tried to make intelligent and dignified grunts when I understood or did not understand and Mwindi and Meina interpreted. None of us were Masai scholars but these were good serious men and the troubles were obviously legitimate. One man had four long grooves across a shoulder that looked as though they had been made by a hay rake and the other at some time had lost an eye and had an atrocious old wound that started a little above the line of his scalp and came down, over the lost eye, almost to the point of his jaw.
The Masai love to talk and to argue but neither of these men was a talker and I told them and those who had come with them and stood saying nothing that we would attend to the problems. To do this I had to speak to Mwindi who then spoke to Arap Meina who then spoke to our clients. I leaned on my Mzee stick which has a silver shilling pounded out and flattened into the head of it and grunted in the purest Masai which sounds a little like Marlene Dietrich when she is expressing sexual pleasure, understanding or affection. The sounds vary. But they are deep and have a rising inflection.
We all shook hands and then Mwindi who loved to announce the worst possible news said in English, “Bwana, there are two ladies with bubu.”
Bubu is any form of venereal disease but also includes yaws about which the authorities do not agree. Yaws certainly have a spirochete much like that of syphilis but opinion is divided as to how one acquires them. People are supposed to be able to acquire the old rale from a drinking glass or from sitting injudiciously on the seat of a public toilet or from kissing a stranger. In my limited experience I have never known anyone so unfortunate.
Yaws, by now, I knew almost as well as I knew my brother. That is to say that I had much contact with them without ever being able to appreciate them at their true worth.
The two Masai ladies were both quite beautiful and this reinforced me in my theory that, in Africa, the more beautiful you are the more yaws you got. Msembi loved the practice of medicine and produced all the yaws remedies without being prompted. I made a general cleaning and threw the result into the still live ashes of the fire. After that I painted the edge of the lesion with gentian violet for psychologic effect. Gentian violet has a wonderful effect on the morale of the patient and it inspires the physician and the spectators with its lovely purple color tingeing into gold. I made a practice, usually, of making a small dot with it on the forehead of the husband.
After this, to take no chances, I would sprinkle the lesion, sometimes having to hold my breath to work with it, with sulfathiazole and then smear it with Aureomycin, and apply a dressing. Always I would give oral penicillin and, if the yaws did not clear up, after the daily cure I would administer as massive doses of penicillin as we could afford. Afterwards I took the snuff out from under my armpit and put half of it behind the ear of each patient. Msembi loved this part of the treatment but I asked him to bring a bowl of water and the good truly blue Nekko two percent soap so that I might wash my hands after shaking hands with each patient. Their hands were always lovely and cold and once you take a Masai woman’s hand, even in the presence of her husband, she does not wish to give your hand up ever. This could be tribal or it could be personal to a yaws doctor. It was one of the few things I could not ask Ngui as we had no vocabulary to handle it. In return for the services performed a Masai might bring you a few mealies. But this would be exceptional.