172 UNDER THE AFRICAN SUN 



leave the upper part of the body uncovered. Girls as a rule 

 go uncovered ; they never wear the curious grass-ring seen in 

 Uganda. The native hoe is the ordinary pointed heart-shaped 

 piece of iron, tied on to a wooden handle which looks bent, but 

 is cut out of a solid block of wood. The women do nearly all 

 the field labour. A few of them occasionally wear ornaments of 

 beads. 



During my stay in Unyoro I never once suffered from "jiggers," 

 and the number of cases I had to treat among the natives was 

 comparatively small. But when I first arrived at Kampala in 

 1894 the jiggers were at their worst. The jigger is a tiny para- 

 site which burrows in preference under the toe-nails. It may 

 attack the finger-nails, and sometimes it may be found on other 

 parts of the body. In Nyassa-land one was removed from the 

 neck of a European, and in Kavirondo I saw a Swahili whose 

 body was covered all over with them. The missionaries in 

 Uganda told me, that many of the Waganda had succumbed to 

 this parasite, and that one chief lost eighty of his men. One of 

 the cases I was asked to see at Kampala was so bad that I offered 

 to amputate the foot, as the greater part of the ankle was rotten, 

 blood-vessels, nerves, muscle, bone, all one mass of corruption. 

 The patient refused amputation and died a week or two later 

 from exhaustion, owing to the incessant drain on the system. 



Since then cleanliness and early medical treatment have 

 effected a great change. I have removed as many as four 

 jiggers in one day from my feet, when I first lived at Port Alice. 

 Since I discontinued wearing slippers in Uganda, and paid 

 attention to using sound socks and sound boots, besides scrub- 

 bing my feet every morning and evening with soap and warm 

 water, I have enjoyed considerable immunity. During the last 

 thirty months I have been troubled only once by a jigger. It 

 was at Port Alice. I woke up in the night with a throbbing 

 sensation under a toe-nail, lit a candle, extracted the parasite, 

 and have been free ever since. That night I had neglected to 

 give the feet their usual evening scrub with soap and water. 



Cleanliness I believe goes a long way toward securing ex- 

 emption. Europeans are made aware of the presence of the 

 parasite by the throbbing sensation which it sets up locally, and a 

 tiny black spot on the white skin indicates its position, whence it 

 may be dislodged with the point of a needle. It lies between 

 the epidermis and the cutis vera, and when it has been removed 



