THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY II (2)

Blog number 349 **** 30 November 2009

In a very interesting book by Elizabeth Thomas called, "The Old Way" about the pygmies of central Africa, and where the three tales about the effect the rising and setting sun has on animals that I wrote about three or four Blogs ago entitled, "Father, Sun and Holy Ghost", she tells of the use these people had with poisoned arrows, which I will try to summarize here.

In this Blog.

Now.

They poisoned the arrow heads on the shafts of the head, not the tip - for protection against getting accidentally poisoned by being stuck with the sharp point. The arrow heads were not as we commonly know them - like the American Indian arrow heads, but more like darts, commonly made from porcupine quills.The poison is made from the grub of a beetle that lives on the Baobab tree The grub buries itself in the dirt by the tree and is dug out by the pygmies. They pound on the body of the grub until it is mush, then remove the head and smear the innards onto the arrow head and Viola! Poisoned arrow.

One drop of the poison will kill a full grown man.

When they are done with making the arrowhead poisonous, they burn the leavings, being very careful to stand away from the smoke made by the fire.

Elizabeth says that she was standing downwind from such a burning with a tiny scratch on her hand, preferring to stand in smoke because of its warmth. Almost immediately the wound started hurting so much that she got a little worried, so she told someone about it. He smelled the wound (evidently flesh infected with the poison has a definite smell) and immediately started sucking on it. She said that she started feeling the effects up to her elbow and wondered how much farther it would have gone if left alone. She said she must have gotten only two or three molecules of the stuff from standing in the smoke from the fire.

Kinda makes one wonder how they found out that the innards of a grub was poisonous when injected into the flesh. Probably a pretty interesting story back of that.

By the way, they get their knowledge of the environment from experience and also much of it from what the older ones tell them. If you ask a question about something and they don't know the answer, they will say, "I don't know. The old ones didn't tell us that."

I guess the old ones didn't tell them how they come to be making poison from grubs, more's the pity.