Tales from the homestead 🏡- The unpaid barber

The unpaid barber.

When I was little, I had this thing that settled onto my bodacious Afro and decided that it was going to move in and create three crop circles. I remember having it for up to a year because the lotions provided by conventional medicine seemed not to work back then. It was excruciatingly itchy and created more than one patch of white scalp where hair was supposed to be. It was an inconvenience for outings, festivals and places you wished to look pretty at. Some people called it ringworm but the literal translation of the local name for it was The unpaid barber. The unworthy barber. It deserved that name. It’s handiwork was awful.

One evening as I was sitting down, a woman comes to visit. She takes one look at my unpaid barber  or ringworm head and yells at my grandmother, 

“How could you leave her hair like this?”she said, yelling at a grown grandmother as if she was a kid.

And that’s one cool thing about Africa, everyone has a mum and a dad or strict uncle you can report them to, including your parents.

I darted eyes between them both, wondering whether I missed something.

She says, “wait here!” With a finger in the air as if we would run away. I became even more wide eyed and intrigued as she walks out  of the yard into the bushes  and farms next to the house and I’m staring and wondering.

Grandma doesn’t say a word.

The woman comes back minutes later with her hands full of what I can only  describe as bunches of hairy leaves. A lot of them. Now the lady picks a twig from the nearby guava tree and uses it to scrape the surface of the round infection sites on my head, exposing the skin underneath. That guava twig smelled great by the way and because it was itchy, the scrape wasn’t bad either. She now scrubbed the hairy surfaces of a couple of leaves on the infected section of scalp  for a while till she used them all and I swear that was the end of that. It stopped itching immediately and died that very day. She was the only doctor who professionally treated it and with success and her only qualification was probably that she was a woman and someone’s parent. Now this might look like a happy story and it is but I met the doctor in me  years later at Loretto School years later and in hindsight, the doctor in me wants to identify that leaf and study it among others and document and protect it and teach the next generation about tropical herbalism like she taught me. The second picture is from Aju Mbaise club on Facebook.