But now for action! Whatever of the dreamer and laboratory
experimenter there was in him--and there was much--those creative
parts of David Bruce went to sleep, or evaporated out of him; he
became the surgeon of Ladysmith once more, and the rampageous
shooter of lions and killer of koodoos.... To wipe out the sleeping
sickness! That seemed the most brilliantly simple job now. Not that
there weren’t countless thousands of blacks with trypanosomes in
their blood, and all these folks must die, of course; not that there
weren’t buzzing billions of tsetses singing their hellish tune on the
Lake shore--but here was the point: _Those flies lived only on the
Lake shore!_ And if they had no more sleeping-sickness blood to suck,
then.... And Apolo Kagwa was absolute Tsar of all Uganda ... Apolo,
Bruce knew, trusted him, adored him....
Now to wipe sleeping sickness from the earth!
To conference with Bruce once more came Apolo and the Sekibobo and
the lesser chiefs. Bruce told them the simple logic of what was to be
done.
“Of course--that can be done,” said Apolo. He had seen the map.
He was convinced. He made a dignified wave of the hand to his
chiefs, and gave a few words of explanation. So Bruce and Mrs.
Bruce went back to England. Apolo gave his order, and then the
pitiful population of black men and their families streamed inland
out of the lake shore villages, away--not to return for years, or
ever--from those dear shady places where they and the long line of
their forefathers had fished and played and bargained and begot their
kind; canoes, loaded with mats and earthen pots and pickaninnies set
out (not to return) from the thickly peopled island--and the weird
outlandish beating of the tom-toms no longer boomed across the water.
“Not one of you,” commanded Apolo, “may live within fifteen miles
of the Lake shore--not one of you is to visit the Lake again. Then
the sleeping death will die out, for the fly Kivu lives only by the
water, and when you are gone she will no longer have a single sick
one from whom to suck the fatal poison. When all of our people who
are now sick have died, you may go back--and it will be safe to live
by the Lake shore for always.”
Without a word--it is incredible to us law-abiding folks--they obeyed
their potentate.
The country around Lake Victoria Nyanza grew, in the frantic way
tropical green things grow, back into the primordial jungle;
crocodiles snoozed on the banks where big villages had been.
Hippopotami waddled onto the shore and sniffed in the deserted
huts.... The tribes of the lake, inland, were happy, for no more of
them came down with that fatal drowsiness. So Bruce began to rid
Africa of sleeping sickness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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