For those who don’t know, guinea worm is a parasite which lives in contaminated water, and has long been a scourge of West African nations, a parasite which invades and infests its hosts via the digestive tract, and eventually migrates to extremities like the lower leg, blistering and bursting painfully before the worm gradually emerges–just as painfully–from the human body, inch-by-inch, over the course of weeks. Female worms contained within the host (that is, still within the infected human), continue to produce eggs, and continue the cycle, literally ad nauseam.
Yes, it’s ugly. But the awareness–and the avoidance–of such things, along with that of other nasties like onchocerciasis (river blindness, caused by the filaria worm) and schistosomiasis (bilharzia/blood flukes) was a real concern for my parents during my childhood, which was spent mostly in Northern Nigeria. I was brought up to be careful of such things. As I still am, and as any sane person would be.
A recent post on “X” by someone calling himself “Anish Moonka” has announced the following:
A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page.
…
Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades.
I’m grateful to a fellow member on Ricochet for alerting me to “Anish Moonka’s” reflections. Because they triggered a memory for me. And herewith, I produce, verbatim, a paragraph from my father’s memoir as a British West African Colonial Officer, recorded in 1948 or so (emphasis mine):
I had fetched up at Libate [a small town on the Niger River, in the N’gasaki District of the Yauri Emirate] by way of a leisurely progress through the mainly clapped-out gold workings along the Malendo River in Bin Yauri District–now all abandoned (except for the claim of one miner named Robinson) but during the War a much favoured and even subsidised activity of some importance by virtue of its product. There was still a little “private enterprise” on the part of a few unlicensed diggers, but this was clearly of small or no account—indeed, one of the reasons I was there at all was to confirm this fact. As for the rest, I was thereafter gently to move at ten to fifteen miles a day for about three more weeks from hamlet to village and village to hamlet until I got to “the bottom” (which was Libate) showing the Flag, representing the King’s Peace, hearing complaints and encouraging simple “development” projects like straining any water intended for drinking through a square of cheap grey baft–which would stop the spread of guinea worm in its tracks and could be put into effect entirely by local initiative–but taking with me also (as always) an “Emir’s Representative”, for the Doctrine of Indirect Rule was paramount and scrupulously observed. In Yauri, my “Emir’s Rep” had for a long time been a Shamaki (Master of the Horse). He always accompanied me now, representing the Emir and Council as the “Native Authority” and we got on well together.
The “baft” Dad refers to here is simply a square of cheap, undyed, cotton or linen. Which the British Colonal Service provided to all villagers who might use such a thing, in order to improve their lives and eliminate the guinea worm.
Eighty years ago. When Nigeria was still a colony of the British Empire.
Dad’s efforts, and that of the British Colonial Service, efforts which employed hundreds of District Officers like Dad to walk the “walk from village to village for decades” in order to improve the lives of the people therein, didn’t merit front page news coverage then either. And–things being what they are these days–I doubt they’ll receive any credit for being almost half a century ahead of their time. They were British, after all.
Still, Dad, I remember. And on behalf of all those Nigerian villagers who neither died nor experienced excruciating pain as a result of your efforts to combat the spread of guinea worm, back in the ’40s, ’50’s, ’60s, and ’70s, thank you.
