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"A highly original study. This book links medical work with maternity work in the context of arguments about gender relations and about feminist perspectives on writing history."--Gillian Feeley-Harnik, author of "A Green Estate: Restoring Independence in Madagascar"

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A COLONIAL LEXICON

Duke University Press

Contents

Illustrations...............................viiAbbreviations...............................xiAcknowledgments.............................xiiiIntroduction................................11 Crocodiles and Wealth.....................272 Doctors and Airplanes.....................803 Dining and Surgery........................1174 Nurses and Bicycles.......................1595 Babies and Forceps........................1966 Colonial Maternities......................2377 Debris....................................281Departures..................................320Notes.......................................331Glossary....................................413Bibliography................................417Index.......................................447

Chapter One

Crocodiles had "for many months been taking steady toll of men, women, and children" on the Upper Congo River not far from Yakusu. Dr. C. C. Chesterman described the terror in the Yakusu Quarterly Notes (YQN) in October 1933: "Never in living memory have attacks been so frequent and escapes so few." The crocodile killings suggested "special interventions of Providence," he added. Some rumored that somebody had "engaged the brutes in his service" to seize the Lokele from their canoes. Others thought that "large sums of money have been collected and oered and accepted in order to buy o this malevolence." One day, the hospital's hunter, Lofoli, shot one of these crocodiles, and its skin was mounted at the hospital "as a trophy and a nine days wonder for the curious." Local Congolese nicknamed the crocodile Avion. There was a historical specificity to this moral metaphor comparing an airplane with a human-eating water creature. Chesterman sensed the significance of this connection: he teased that local people were "putting two and two together and making five as usual," pointing out that the "saurian supremacy" coincided with the first routine schedule of flights to the nearby city of Stanleyville.

The crocodile attacks continued, and Chesterman sought more trophies. The next time that the doctor went out on medical tour by boat along the Congo River, he added Lofoli to the party. They were about sixty miles downriver from Yakusu and opposite Yaokombo, a bms chapel and dispensary site, where a Yakusu-trained nurse called Likenyule worked, when Lofoli shot another crocodile. Yakusu's senior missionary woman, Edith Millman, reported the incident in a private letter: "A big, fierce man-eating crocodile has been picking o men, boys, women, and girls. Our hunter went down and shot it. Great rejoicing. Sixty miles away from us, but these people are our neighbors." The triumphant party was greeted by "surging, dancing crowds," echoed Chesterman. He had the dead creature towed to Yaokombo. The next day was Sunday, and one reward for Dr. Chesterman's new trophy was an extra-crowded, open-air service where he read the names of the twenty-two crocodile victims who had died: "No need to ring the Church bell. From up and down and across the river and from the forest towns they came to mock, and stayed to pray." That evening, there seemed to be little question about who owned the crocodile. The gun had been the doctor's, and he sold o the meat. The butchering, however, was not so simple. When some men gathered to cut up the meat, Chesterman observed: "The butcher band hesitated at the water's edge, itching to get at the meat, yet fearing the penalty, till an old wizened fellow stepped forward. 'I am nearly in the grave' he said. 'What matter if I get it?'" What was "it," this "penalty" to which Chesterman referred? It was fala. Yet the doctor did not write this Lokele word. He translated for his British readers instead: "there lurks the fear of a mutilating disease (tertiary yaws) from contact with the crocodile."

In 1934, the Yakusu mission was over forty years old, the Yakusu church about thirty years old, and the Yakusu medical school and hospital some ten. I begin amid mission history, therefore, with this complex bundle of transactions that Dr. Chesterman narrated as a baing, enchanting story about the meaning of crocodiles. Chesterman, like all Yakusu missionaries, would have read "Lest We Should Waddle," an early conversation between a Yakusu missionary and a man called Saili, which was prominently interposed in H. Sutton Smith's circa 1911 book, Yakusu, the Very Heart of Africa.

"What are they doing there?"

"Buying meat, white man."

"What meat, Saili?"

"Crocodile's meat."

"Where did they get it from?"

"Oh, the owner of the hut there caught it in the night up the Lindi."

"Oh, let me see the head, Saili?"

"No, you can't see that."

"Why not?"

"Because it is all covered up."

"Well, you can uncover it to show it to me."

"No, we daren't do that, for if its eye sees us we are afraid that our legs will get like the crocodile's, and we shall all waddle."

"Well, what will you do with it?"

"Oh, when all the flesh is sold the man who found it will call all his friends round and he will provide plantain and fish, and we shall have a feast."

"But what about the crocodile's head?"

"Oh, that is put in a big pot and boiled, and boiled; then it is ground into a powder, and when a man is caught stealing or doing anything of that kind, he has to take some of this medicine to prove by the result whether he is the culprit or not."

"And does nothing happen to those who eat the flesh?"

"No, because during the feast the man who found it goes round with a twig in his hand, and strikes with it the arms and legs of his friends so that they may not get bandy-legged."

This conversation suggests that a specific event with implications for wealth and knowledge-the killing of a crocodile-prompted a ritual of medicine making, feasting, and flagellation. It also explains the ambivalent character of crocodiles, menacing yet necessary for poison-ordeal medicines. The poison used in such judicial procedures would derive its capacity to discern and judge from its consecrated character, its very derivation in spirit substance. The substance, in this Lokele case, was pulverized crocodile head. The conversation might well be an early rendition of a libeli-associated feast, translated into innocent, cryptic language for one of Yakusu's first missionaries. Crocodiles were also important in libeli medicines; after being in the forest for a week, initiates would have a mixture of medicines called bote rubbed into incisions in their backs. Bote consisted of crocodile bones, along with several kinds of lizards, millipedes, and a snakelike creature called litutandiya, which means water spirit.

Nothing disturbed Yakusu's missionaries more than the supposed flagellation, sumptuous feasting, and deceit of libeli. A dramatic series of events in the life of a village and often a district, libeli lasted for three or four months as male youth learned a secret language, took special oaths, and became scarred with special medicines. Libeli was simultaneously a rite of male initiation, social reproduction, and healing, a rite of composition and recomposition of-perhaps even alienation from-wealth. Adolescent boys, their already initiated male guides-known in Lokele as "mothers"-and elders withdrew into a...