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AFRICAN HISTORIES
AND MODERNITIES

Public Health at the

Border of Zimbabwe and
Mozambique, 1890–1940
African Experiences in
a Contested Space
Francis Dube
African Histories and Modernities

Series Editors
Toyin Falola
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX, USA

Matthew M. Heaton
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA, USA
This book series serves as a scholarly forum on African contributions to
and negotiations of diverse modernities over time and space, with a par-
ticular emphasis on historical developments. Specifically, it aims to refute
the hegemonic conception of a singular modernity, Western in origin,
spreading out to encompass the globe over the last several decades. Indeed,
rather than reinforcing conceptual boundaries or parameters, the series
instead looks to receive and respond to changing perspectives on an
important but inherently nebulous idea, deliberately creating a space in
which multiple modernities can interact, overlap, and conflict. While privi-
leging works that emphasize historical change over time, the series will
also feature scholarship that blurs the lines between the historical and the
contemporary, recognizing the ways in which our changing understand-
ings of modernity in the present have the capacity to affect the way we
think about African and global histories.

Editorial Board
Akintunde Akinyemi, Literature, University of Florida, Gainesville
Malami Buba, African Studies, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies,
Yongin, South Korea
Emmanuel Mbah, History, CUNY, College of Staten Island
Insa Nolte, History, University of Birmingham
Shadrack Wanjala Nasong’o, International Studies, Rhodes College
Samuel Oloruntoba, Political Science, TMALI, University of South Africa
Bridget Teboh, History, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14758
 Francis Dube

Public Health at the

Border of Zimbabwe
and Mozambique,
1890–1940
African Experiences in a Contested Space
Francis Dube
Department of History, Geography, and Museum Studies
Morgan State University
Baltimore, MD, USA

African Histories and Modernities

ISBN 978-3-030-47534-5    ISBN 978-3-030-47535-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47535-2

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To my family and friends
 Preface

Growing up on the Zimbabwean side of this border region, I was always

struck by the networks of interdependence that still pervade it. I wanted
to dig deeper into the history of the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border to
investigate how pivotal it has been in shaping the historical process in the
region. Many villagers still have families, across the border, and in many
cases, men have wives on both sides of the border. The border, in some
places, is just marked by a few strands of falling barbed wire fence. Villagers
cross it every day without even realizing it. Many villagers have fields on
both sides of the border and cross it for many reasons. Many villagers on
Mozambican side of the border region do not even have Mozambican
identification. They have more in common with Zimbabweans than other
Mozambicans. They use Zimbabwean currency and were severely affected
by the economic downturn in Zimbabwe, which resulted in hyperinflation
in the 1998–2008 decade. As the Zimbabwean government constantly
issued new banknotes (bearer checks) while disowning the older ones in
order to keep up with inflation, culminating in the adoption of the multi-
currency system in 2008, these Mozambican villagers often found their
bags of older Zimbabwean notes worthless. Unlike Zimbabweans, who
could quickly exchange the older notes for newer ones, these Mozambican
villagers found the wealth they had stored in this Zimbabwean currency
disappear. This is just one case of interdependence. There still are many
other networks of interdependence, including travel to hospitals, to find
healers, and for healers to find medicines and visit patients.
I am grateful to a number of people who helped make this project suc-
cessful. I want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable

vii
viii PREFACE

input. At the University of Iowa, special thanks go Professor James

L. Giblin and Professor Paul R. Greenough. Many thanks also go to my
colleagues at Morgan State University for their support and encouragement.
In Zimbabwe, many thanks to the faculty and students in the Economic
History and History Departments at the University of Zimbabwe, partic-
ularly. I also extend my gratitude to a number of research assistants in the
Economic History Department for helping in collecting oral histories.
Many thanks to the staff at the National Archives of Zimbabwe for their
invaluable assistance.
In Mozambique, I particularly want to thank Dr. Benigna Zimba of the
Department of History at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo
and the hard-working staff at the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique and
other governmental departments.
I also want to thank my family and friends who have always provided
moral and logistical support. My wife, Kate, and my daughters, Kundiso
and Rumbidzai, have always been supportive. I, however, take responsibil-
ity for any errors and omissions.
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

Part I Life and Health Before the Border  31

2 The Trans-border Landscape: Regional Mobility and

Health Before the Border 33

Part II Life and Health with the Border  47

3 The Imposition of the Border and the Creation of a Public

Health Problem 49

4 Colonial Border Restrictions and the African Response 69

Part III The Border and Public Health  81

5 The Political Ecology of Disease Control: The Border and

Sleeping Sickness 83

6 Cross-Border movements, Smallpox Epidemics, and Public

Health129

ix
x Contents

7 Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs), the Border, and

Public Health169

8 Borders and the Provision of Health Services for Rural

Africans205

9 Conclusion245

Index 249
 Abbreviations

ABCFM American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions

BSAC British South Africa Company
FRELIMO Frente de Libertação de Moçambique
GHI Government Health Inspector
NC Native Commissioner
NLV Native (African) Lay Vaccinator
RENAMO Resistência Nacional Moçambicana
WHO World Health Organization

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The 2014–2015 Ebola epidemic in West Africa highlighted the trans-­

border nature of epidemics, created in part by the movement of people
across borders, and the challenges posed by trans-border coordination of
surveillance. Yet this is by no means a new challenge. Portuguese and
British colonial governments in Southern Africa, for instance, also dealt
with the same public health challenges posed by a common border. The
border and the fear of diffusion of diseases it generated contributed to the
evolution and implementation of discriminatory public health programs
among the Shona people of the Mozambique (Portuguese East Africa)-
Zimbabwe (Rhodesia/Southern Rhodesia) border region where mobility
was the norm.1 In this region, mobility was the norm because of
environmental diversity and kinship connections, which prompted the
need for villagers to access resources that lay across the border and to visit
kin.2 For the colonial governments, cross-border movements of people,

1
The names Zimbabwe and Southern Rhodesia/Rhodesia are used interchangeably in this
book. The same applies to Mozambique and Portuguese East Africa. Other countries dis-
cussed in this book are Malawi (Nyasaland) and Zambia (Northern Rhodesia). The portion
of Mozambique under study, central Mozambique, was governed by the chartered
Mozambique Company for much of the period under analysis, from 1890 to 1942, while
Zimbabwe was under British South Africa Company rule from 1890 to 1923, when
Responsible Government took over.
2
The choice of fieldwork sites for this study reflects an attempt to include these different
environmental zones, including micro-environments, upland plateaus, lowlands, areas of

© The Author(s) 2020 1

F. Dube, Public Health at the Border of Zimbabwe and Mozambique,
1890–1940, African Histories and Modernities,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47535-2_1
2 F. DUBE

livestock, and wildlife heightened fears of disease diffusion, which affected

health and economic productivity. These administrations therefore imple-
mented invasive public health measures, including border controls, com-
pulsory quarantine, medical inspections or examinations, surveillance
measures, vaccinations, as well as colonial suppression of indigenous heal-
ing practices. Yet, for African villagers and migrants, the border crossing
was a crucial part of their livelihood. Africans therefore contested the colo-
nial governments’ public health policies on border restrictions and surveil-
lance. Public health at the border became an area of contestation because
of the discriminatory implementation of public health measures and the
particularly oppressive nature of settler colonialism, which conspired to
make life difficult for Africans. This ultimately contributed to low compli-
ance with invasive aspects of colonial public health and medicine. This
contestation of the border and public health by Shona villagers, town
dwellers, and migrants served as a powerful force in the constitution of
colonial power.3 Hence, by focusing on the contestation of public health
at the border, Public Health at the Border explores the utility of the border
as a theoretical, methodological, and interpretive construct for under-
standing colonial public health.
The Zimbabwe-Mozambique border was particularly significant for
health, given that cattle disease scares of the turn of the twentieth century,
such as East Coast Fever, among others, show how Rhodesians regarded
Portuguese East Africa as a reservoir of infection and regarded the

high and low rainfall, and various zones of flora and fauna. The area under focus in Zimbabwe
stretches from Pungwe River in the north, down to where the Save River crosses into
Mozambique. Its western edge is demarcated by the Odzi and Save Rivers in Zimbabwe and
it encloses the Mutare, Chimanimani, and Chipinge districts. In Mozambique, it roughly
encompasses the western portions of Manica, Sussundenga, and Mossurize districts. This
border region generally falls into areas inhabited by the eastern Shona people, with the
Manyika in the north and the Ndau in the south. The major urban centers are Mutare
(Umtali), Penhalonga (a gold mine), Chipinge (Melsetter/Chipinga), and Chimanimani
(originally a sub-district of Melsetter district) in Zimbabwe. The major towns on the
Mozambican side are Manica (Macequece/Masekesa/Massi-Kessi), Espungabera
(Spungabera) in Mossurize (Musirizwi Umselezwe/Umsilizi/Mossurise) district, and
Sussundenga. While this book focuses on the period from 1890 to 1940, it also includes
occasional references to the pre-1890 and post-1940 periods.
3
Eric Allina-Pisano, ‘Borderlands, Boundaries, and the Contours of Colonial Rule: African
Labor in Manica District, Mozambique, c. 1904–1908,’ International Journal of African
Historical Studies 36, 1 (2003), pp. 59–82.
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

Portuguese themselves as incompetent guardians of colonial health.4

Hence, this anti-Latin prejudice on the part of British in Zimbabwe was a
factor that made this particular border appear especially dangerous for
public health.
Apart from this colonial rivalry, this historical and cultural context also
demonstrates how the conjunction of a particular colonized society, a dis-
tinctive kind of colonialism and a particular territorial border, generated
reluctance to embrace public health. The border led to the disruption of
networks of interdependence, not only economic, but those of kinship in
particular. This adversely affected African health, given the fact that deci-
sions about therapy alternatives in many precolonial African societies were
made collectively by groups of kin.5 Some of these Africans in turn chal-
lenged colonial public health decisions on who or what could cross the
border and when to cross the border and under what circumstances. Thus,
certain colonial circumstances impeded the acceptance of therapeutic
alternatives that were in fact embraced by colonized people elsewhere.
Public health implies the duty of government to provide for the health
of its citizens, a situation which many believe has never been fully realized
in Africa.6 More specifically, public health is the science and art of disease
prevention, prolonging life, and fostering physical health and efficiency
through organized community efforts.7 Such efforts are generally preven-
tive in nature and they include sanitation, control of contagious infections,
hygiene education, early diagnosis and preventive treatment, and mainte-
nance of adequate living standards. Public health interventions require an

4
See, for example, Francis Dube, “‘In the Border Regions of the Territory of Rhodesia,
There is the Greatest Scourge …’: The Border and East Coast Fever Control in Central
Mozambique and Eastern Zimbabwe, 1901–1942,” Journal of Southern African Studies 41,
2 (2015): 219–235.
5
Steven Feierman and John M. Janzen, introduction to The Social Basis of Health and
Healing in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 18.
6
Ruth J. Prince, “Introduction: Situating Health and the Public in Africa,” in Making and
Unmaking of Public Health in Africa: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives, ed. Ruth
J. Prince and Rebecca Marsland (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014), 1–2. See also Milcah
Amolo Achola, “The Public Health Ordinance Policy of the Nairobi Municipal/City Council
1945–62,” in African Historians and African Voices: Essays presented of Professor Bothwell
Allan Ogot, ed. E. S. Atieno Odhiambo (Basel: P. Schlettwein Publishing, 2001), 115, and
Maryinez Lyons, “Public Health in Colonial Africa: The Belgian Congo,” in The History of
Public Health and the Modern State, ed. Dorothy Porter (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 357.
7
Michael H. Merson et al., International Public Health: Diseases, Programs, Systems, and
Policies (Gaithersburg: Aspen Publishers, 2001), xvii–xxx.
4 F. DUBE

understanding not only of epidemiology, nutrition, and antiseptic prac-

tices but also of social science. However, in colonial Zimbabwe and
Mozambique, one essential component of public health, education, was
largely absent. Many Shona people of the border region only remember
being forced to submit to public health measures without any clear expla-
nation of the purpose of such measures. In view of the fact that they were
more coercive than they were persuasive, colonial medical services did lit-
tle to stimulate changing idioms for comprehending suffering.8 This also
reflects the pitfalls of not implementing organic ideas and the overreliance
on health care policies developed in Europe and linked to the process of
capital accumulation and political domination.9 This oppressive nature of
colonial medicine extended all the way to the colonial apparatus involved
in the manufacture and application of drugs, for example, Lomidine, a
drug that the French forced on Africans in their territories, which was later
found to be ineffective in preventing trypanosomiasis.10
Public health interventions limited people’s freedoms of movement,
association, and choices of therapies and medical providers and included a
host of other dehumanizing effects which were not limited to colonial
subjects.11 Nevertheless, what made the colonial situation unique were
questions over the legitimacy of colonial authority and the discriminatory
nature of public health programs. In the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border
region, these also included colonial repression of indigenous healing prac-
tices and values which conveyed and reinforced underlying ideas about
health and healing. For Africans, therefore, the blatant refutation of these
values constituted “cultural disinheritance.”12 As a result, these indigenous
healing practices survived because Africans selectively absorbed and
adapted elements of Western biomedicine which appeared useful, just in

8
Jonathan Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Madness and Colonialism in
Southwest Nigeria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 116.
9
Jean-Germain Gros, Healthcare Policy in Africa: Institutions and Politics from Colonialism
to the Present (Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 40.
10
Guillaume Lachenal, The Lomidine Files: The Untold Story of a Medical Disaster in
Colonial Africa (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 5.
11
For instance, after his treatment in a hospital in Paris, France, in 1929 stricken with
pneumonia, George Orwell recounted how doctors and students performed procedures on
him without even talking to him. See George Orwell, “How the Poor Die,” http://orwell.
ru/library/articles/Poor_Die/english/e_pdie (8 August 2014).
12
George Oduor Ndege, Health, State, and Society in Kenya (Rochester: University of
Rochester Press, 2001), 1–2.
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

the same way Europeans internalized some elements of indigenous heal-

ing practices.13
Questions on the legitimacy of oppressive settler colonial governments,
replete with massive land dispossession, forced labor, excessive taxes, and
restrictions on movement, among other things, contributed to a lack of
trust in colonial institutions and consequently low or noncompliance with
public health among the Shona. In the recent past, noncompliance has
been used to refer to the measurement of sub-optimal uptake of medical
treatment due to a patient’s resistance, ignorance, or cultural beliefs, and
characteristics of the disease.14 However, Paul Farmer, looking at the fail-
ure of tuberculosis treatments in Haiti, has challenged placing the blame
on a patient’s beliefs and attitudes. He argues that what are at play are
often times “structural barriers” to treatment, such as lack of access to
medical care, medical infrastructure, and income.15 My usage of this term
acknowledges the failure of therapy as a result of both material barriers
and cultural factors, but goes beyond therapy intake to include all forms of

13
Tracy J. Luedke and Harry G. West, “Healing Divides: Therapeutic Border Work in
Southeast Africa,” in Borders and Healers: Brokering Therapeutic Resources in Southeast
Africa, ed. Tracy J. Luedke and Harry G. West (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
2006), 4. See also Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution. Volume
Two, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997), 364, Adam Mohr “Missionary Medicine and Akan Therapeutics: Illness,
Health and Healing in Southern Ghana’s Basel Mission, 1828–1918,” Journal of Religion in
Africa 39 (2009): 437, Francis Dube, “Medicine without Borders: the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions in central Mozambique and eastern Zimbabwe,
1893–1920s,” OFO: Journal of Transatlantic Studies 4, 2 (2014): 21–38, Webb, Jr. and
Tamara Giles-Vernick, “Introduction,” in Global Health in Africa: Historical Perspectives on
Disease, ed. James L. A. Webb, Jr. and Tamara Giles-Vernick (Athens: Ohio University Press,
2013), 4, Steven Feierman and John Janzen, ed., Health and Healing in Africa (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992), John Janzen, The Quest for Therapy: Medical Pluralism
in Lower Zaire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), Julie Livingston, Debility
and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005),
Cristiana Bastos, “Medical Hybridisms and Social Boundaries: Aspects of Portuguese
Colonialism in Africa and India in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Southern African
Studies 33, 4 (2007): 767, and Pier Larson, “‘Capacities and Modes of Thinking’: Intellectual
Engagements and Subaltern Hegemony in the Early History of Malagasy Christianity,”
American Historical Review 102, 4 (October 1997): 969–1002.
14
R. Menzies, I. Rocher, and B. Vissandjee, “Factors Associated with compliance in
Treatment of Tuberculosis,” Tuberculosis and Lung Disease 74 (1993): 36.
15
Paul Farmer, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1999), 225–227.
6 F. DUBE

“everyday resistance” or reluctance to accept biomedical practices, akin to

what James Scott has called “weapons of the weak.”16
Building upon Paul Farmer’s concept of structural inequality, Elisha
Renne has emphasized the fact that effective public health compliance
requires trust in government in her vivid comparison of polio eradication
efforts in Northern Nigeria and Northeastern Ghana. She notes that
Northern Nigerian parents’ lack of faith in national health institutions and
international public health organizations, inter-alia, contributes to low
compliance with public health.17 Yet this is not the case in Northeastern
Ghana, where there is confidence in government and high rates of compli-
ance and, as a result, fewer cases of polio than in Northern Nigeria. Renne
points out that Northern Nigerian parents question why there is a focus
on an apparently “minor” health problem because not many children get
paralyzed by polio and because the government did not take polio to be
an urgent health problem until the late 1950s and after independence.18
They also ask why the government focuses exclusively on polio eradication
while not providing basic primary health care for other diseases and why
health personnel is taken away from basic primary health care to work on
polio eradication initiatives. Northern Nigerian parents also question why
the government does not provide polio immunizations with primary
health care simultaneously instead of essentially placing the burden of
basic health care on individuals and their families.19
Moreover what is striking about Northern Nigeria and Northeastern
Ghana, as Renne points out, is that both are predominantly Muslim,
largely agricultural, with high retentions of forms of “traditional organiza-
tion,” and both are in former British colonies and employ local medical
practices, yet the responses to polio eradication initiatives could not have
been more different.20 In Ghana there was routine immunization and as a
result there were no wild poliovirus infections between 2004 and 2007.21

16
James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale University
Press: New Haven, CT, 1985).
17
Elisha P. Renne, The Politics of Polio in Northern Nigeria (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2010). On distrust of government in the era of Boko Haram, see Elisha
P. Renne, “Parallel Dilemmas: Polio Transmission and Political Violence in Northern
Nigeria,” Africa 84, 3 (2014): 466–486.
18
Renne, The Politics of Polio, 11, 24.
19
Ibid., 14.
20
Ibid., 87.
21
Ibid., 86.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

Renne adds that in Northeastern Ghana, although parents were aware of

rumors about polio vaccine and infertility, just like in Northern Nigeria,
these rumors were not widespread, and there was active participation of
the Muslim community in polio eradication initiatives, with the immuni-
zation dates announced in mosques and immunizations carried out in
Islamic schools. Renne concludes that the crucial distinguishing factor was
the Ghanaian government’s involvement in statewide primary health care
programs, particularly routine immunizations, and its provision of basic
health care infrastructure which bolstered public health cooperation with
and even faith in government polio eradication efforts.22
This same scenario played out during the 2014–2015 West African
Ebola Virus Disease pandemic which reinforced distrust of interventions
by governments which only paid lip service to the provision of primary
health care. The rumor that circulated in Sierra Leone that Ebola was not
real and that it was just a trick used by doctors to steal people’s blood was
just one of the manifestations of this mistrust.23 While some dismissed
these stories as ridiculous conspiracy theories, others blamed the rapid
spread of Ebola in West Africa on what they viewed as irrational beliefs and
perilous cultural practices.24 These include everything from the hunting
and butchering of game or the so-called bushmeat, funeral practices in
West African villages, to attributing Ebola sickness and mortality to
witchcraft.25

22
Ibid., 87–88.
23
Shaunagh Connaire, “Ebola Outbreak” transcript, PBS Frontline, July 2014, http://
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/health-science-technology/ebola-outbreak/tran-
script-67/ (24 December 2014). See also Jason Beaubien, “Rumor Patrol: No, A Snake In
A Bag Did Not Cause Ebola,” NPR, July 22, 2014, http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsand-
soda/2014/07/22/334022357/rumor-patrol-no-a-snake-in-a-bag-did-not-cause-ebola
(24 December 2014).
24
Mary Moran and Daniel Hoffman, “Ebola in Perspective,” Fieldsights – Hot Spots,
Cultural Anthropology Online, October 07, 2014, http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/585-
ebola-in-perspective (24 December 2014).
25
Mike McGovern, “Bushmeat and the Politics of Disgust,” Fieldsights – Hot Spots,
Cultural Anthropology Online, October 07, 2014, http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/588-
bushmeat-and-the-politics-of-disgust (24 December 2014), Paul Richards and Alfred
Mokuwa, “Village Funerals and the Spread of Ebola Virus Disease.” Fieldsights – Hot Spots,
Cultural Anthropology Online, October 07, 2014, http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/590-
village-funerals-and-the-spread-of-ebola-virus-disease (24 December 2014), and Catherine
E. Bolten, “Articulating the Invisible: Ebola Beyond Witchcraft in Sierra Leone,” Fieldsights –
Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology Online, October 07, 2014, http://www.culanth.org/
8 F. DUBE

The legitimacy of the colonial state was thus central in determining

African experiences with and responses to colonial public health.26 Gloria
Waite has shown that public health regulations existed in precolonial East-­
Central African societies and were not, therefore, newly introduced by
Europeans in the twentieth century.27 If public health encompasses all
activities taken to improve a population’s health, then rain-making and
identification of sorcerers in precolonial Africa as well as control of infec-
tious diseases, public sanitation works, and health education can be includ-
ed.28 Though contested, public health and control over healing in
precolonial Africa were also central in gaining, maintaining, and exercising
political power.29 Thus when epidemics such as smallpox and other cata-
strophic events occurred, African authorities prohibited people from
engaging in certain everyday activities, such as conjugal relationships as
well as house-to-house visitations.30 The contestation of public health

fieldsights/596-articulating-the-invisible-ebola-beyond-witchcraft-in-sierra-leone (24
December 2014).
26
See also Jonathan Sadowsky, “The long Shadow of Colonialism: Why We Study Medicine
in Africa,” in Medicine and Healing in Africa: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Paula
Viterbo and Kalala Ngalamulume (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010),
p. 211 and Jonathan Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam, 116.
27
Gloria Waite, “Public Health in Pre-colonial East-Central Africa,” in The Social Basis of
Health and Healing in Africa, ed. Steven Feierman and John M. Janzen (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992), 212–231.
28
Ibid. See also Rebecca Marsland, “Who Are the ‘Public’ in Public Health?: Debating
Crowds, Populations, and Publics in Tanzania,” in Making and Unmaking of Public Health
in Africa: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives, ed. Ruth J. Prince and Rebecca Marsland
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014), 75–95, Murray Last, “Understanding Health,” in
Culture and Global Change, ed. Tim Allen and Tracy Skelton, 72–86 (London: Routledge,
1999), Steven Feierman, “Colonizers, Scholars and the Creation of Invisible Histories,” in
Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, ed. Victoria
E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 182–216; and
Livingstone, Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana, 17.
29
Prince, “Introduction: Situating Health and the Public in Africa,” 16. See also Steven
Feierman, “On Socially Composed Knowledge: Reconstructing a Shambaa Royal Ritual,” in
In Search of A Nation: Histories of Authority and Dissidence in Tanzania, ed. James L. Giblin
and Gregory H. Maddox (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 14–32.
30
Ibid. The ruling elites included religious figures and chiefs who held power over land, its
fertility, and its vitality through their persons, their use of medicines, and their control over
ritual through their authority over healers and spirit mediums, rain-making, and witchcraft.
With this power, they could cleanse the land and persons of pollution but could also limit
growth and fertility. However, these elites could be deposed if they were unable or unwilling
to respond to misfortune, and healers were not always close to those in political power; they
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

policy at the border thus reflected the questioning of colonial authority

and contributed to reinforcing resistance to the most unpopular methods
of biomedicine, hospitalization, and laboratory tests. This is evident in
fears expressed in accounts of bodies disappearing in colonial hospitals
never to be seen again, accounts of “blood sucking” for unknown reasons,
and high death rates in hospitals contained in oral histories of colonial
Africa.31
The Zimbabwe-Mozambique border was productive in the evolution
and implementation of colonial public health policy. It was productive not
only in breeding the obvious obstructions and frustrations but also in
breeding desires and needs to cross it. The border produced opportunity
as well as prohibition. This border-centric analysis calls into question the
pervasive notion that cross-border movements pose health dangers, cen-
tral to European settlers’ claims of diffusion of disease, which influenced
the evolution of colonial public health policy. Contrary to these claims,
what largely affected disease ecologies were environmental and demo-
graphic changes engendered and perpetuated by colonialism, contributing
to a worsening disease environment within the colonies. In fact, for many
Africans, colonial restrictions on cross-border travel were harmful to
African health because in precolonial times travel was a way of maintaining
or regaining health, as in travel to see healers, obtain medicines and, espe-
cially in Shona society, travel to visit shrines of spirit mediums. As one
village elder recalled, villagers sometimes crossed the border to visit African
healers in Mozambique after being referred to them by Zimbabwean heal-
ers.32 As Markku Hokkanen has shown in his work on the medical history
of Malawi (Nyasaland), mobility, which was reflected in networks, was
central part of “the intertwined medical cultures that shared the search for
medicines in changing conditions.”33
Not only did travel aid patients, but healers as well. Tracey Luedke and
Harry West have convincingly argued in their edited volume exploring

could undermine such power or destabilize it. See also Feierman, “On Socially Composed
Knowledge: Reconstructing a Shambaa Royal Ritual,” 14–32.
31
These fears were not confined to Southern Africa. They were present in many African
societies. For East Africa, see Ndege, Health, State, and Society in Kenya, 6 and Luise White,
Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000), 89.
32
Interview, Vheremu, Zimbabwe, December 24, 2016.
33
Markku Hokkanen, Medicine, Mobility and the Empire: Nyasaland Networks, 1859–1960
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 2.
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Red
Vineyard
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
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Title: The Red Vineyard

Author: B. J. Murdoch

Release date: May 13, 2022 [eBook #68063]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: The Torch Press, 1923

Credits: Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file
was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RED

VINEYARD ***
 THE RED
VINEYARD
Rev. B. J. Murdoch
 THE RED VINEYARD
BY
REV. B. J. MURDOCH
LATE CHAPLAIN TO CANADIAN EXPEDITIONARY
FORCES

THE TORCH PRESS

CEDAR RAPIDS IOWA
1923
 Copyright 1923 by
Flora Warren Seymour

DONE BY
THE BOOKFELLOWS
AT
THE TORCH PRESS
CEDAR RAPIDS
IOWA
 THE RED VINEYARD
To the memory of all those men
With whom I walked up and down
The ways of The Red Vineyard;
But especially to the memory of those
Who stopped in the journey, and now
Rest softly in their little green bivouacs
In the shadow of the small white crosses,
This book is affectionately dedicated by their
Friend and Comrade

The Author
 CONTENTS
Chapter I—A Little Speculation 11
Chapter II—The Bishop Writes 13
Chapter III—A Little Adjusting 16
Chapter IV—The Portable Altar 19
Chapter V—In Training Camp 21
Chapter VI—Mass out of doors 24
Chapter VII—A Little Indignation 26
Chapter VIII—We Break Camp 28
Chapter IX—The Panel of Silk 32
Chapter X—Movement Orders 33
Chapter XI—The High Seas 35
Chapter XII—By Ireland 37
Chapter XIII—England 38
Chapter XIV—In Camp 39
Chapter XV—The Cenacle 41
Chapter XVI—The Battalion is Broken Up 44
Chapter XVII—The Little Spaniard 46
Chapter XVIII—The Garrison Church Hut 48
Chapter XIX—The New Sacrifice 50
Chapter XX—Through English Lanes 54
Chapter XXI—At Parkminster 56
Chapter XXII—Orders for France 60
Chapter XXIII—At No. 2 Canadian Infantry Base Depot 62
Chapter XXIV—The New Zealanders 65
Chapter XXV—The Workers 67
Chapter XXVI—Orders Again 69
Chapter XXVII—Hospitals and Trains 70
Chapter XXVIII—D I’s and S I’s 75
Chapter XXIX—Down The Hospital Aisle 77
Chapter XXX—The Two Brothers 80
Chapter XXXI—An Unexpected Turning 82
Chapter XXXII—Private Belair 86
Chapter XXXIII—A Little Nonsense 89
Chapter XXXIV—Transfusion 93
Chapter XXXV—The Ministering Angels 95
Chapter XXXVI—More Orders 97
Chapter XXXVII—Held for Orders 100
Chapter XXXVIII—The Front at Last 103
Chapter XXXIX—A Strafe and a Quartet 106
Chapter XL—The Valley of the Dead 110
Chapter XLI—New Friends 115
Chapter XLII—A Little Burlap Room 118
Chapter XLIII—Christmas at the Front 120
Chapter XLIV—Back to Rest 123
Chapter XLV—Bruay 129
Chapter XLVI—Fosse-Dix 132
Chapter XLVII—The Little Curé of Fosse-Dix 136
Chapter XLVIII—Into the Line 139
Chapter XLIX—Called Up 142
Chapter L—Bully Les Mines 144
Chapter LI—The One That Was Lost 146
Chapter LII—A Vague Unrest 151
Chapter LIII—The Great Offensive 153
Chapter LIV—Agnez-lez-Duisans 158
Chapter LV—The Refugees 162
Chapter LVI—Arras 164
Chapter LVII—Easter Sunday 166
Chapter LVIII—The Ronville Caves 168
Chapter LIX—The Banquet Hall 171
Chapter LX—The Sheehans 178
Chapter LXI—Ecoivres 181
Chapter LXII—Ecurie Wood 188
Chapter LXIII—The Different Dispensers 192
Chapter LXIV—Incapacitated 195
Chapter LXV—Anzin and Monchy Breton 197
Chapter LXVI—A New Sheep 200
Chapter LXVII—Notre Dame D’Ardennes 203
Chapter LXVIII—The Procession 207
Chapter LXIX—On Leave 211
Chapter LXX—St. Michael’s Club 212
Chapter LXXI—Parkminster Again 215
Chapter LXXII—Another Surprise 217
Chapter LXXIII—Back to the Battalion 219
Chapter LXXIV—No Man’s Land Again 222
Chapter LXXV—No Man’s Land 227
Chapter LXXVI—Cambligneul 229
Chapter LXXVII—A New Front 232
Chapter LXXVIII—Boves 237
Chapter LXXIX—The Battle of Amiens 242
Chapter LXXX—At the Wayside 244
Chapter LXXXI—In an Apple Orchard 246
Chapter LXXXII—A Strange Interruption 249
Chapter LXXXIII—Boves Again 252
Chapter LXXXIV—The Battle of Arras 258
Chapter LXXXV—Berneville Again 263
Chapter LXXXVI—Letters of Sympathy 266
Chapter LXXXVII—A Little Bit of Shamrock 269
Chapter LXXXVIII—Left Behind 277
Chapter LXXXIX—With the Fourteenth 280
Chapter XC—Telegraph Hill 282
Chapter XCI—Canal du Nord 283
Chapter XCII—The Most Terrible Day 287
Chapter XCIII—In Reserve 293
Chapter XCIV—Frequent Moves 295
Chapter XCV—Somaine 297
Chapter XCVI—The End Draws Near 300
Chapter XCVII—November Eleventh 303
Chapter XCVIII—Through Belgium 305
Chapter XCIX—Through the Rhineland 309
Chapter C—L’Envoi 312
THE RED VINEYARD
 Chapter I
A Little Speculation

“I’ll give you just three nights in the front line trench before your hair
will turn grey,” said a brown haired priest, looking at me with a
slightly aggressive air.
I remained quiet.
“You’ll not be very long in the army till you’ll wish yourself out of it
again,” was the not very encouraging assertion of a tall, thin priest
who suffered intermittently from dyspeptic troubles.
Still I did not speak.
Another priest, whose work was oftener among old tomes than
among men, said slowly and, as was his wont, somewhat seriously,
that it surprised him very much to note my eagerness to go to war.
He did not consider it in keeping with the dignity of the priest to be so
belligerently inclined. Did I not recall that I was an ambassador of the
meek and lowly Christ—the Prince of Peace?
Had I obeyed the first impulse, I think my reply would have been
colored with a little asperity; but as I was weighing my words, a
gentle white-haired old priest, stout and with red cheeks, said to me
as he smiled kindly; “Ah, Father, you are to be envied. Think of all
the good you will be able to do for our poor boys! Think of the souls
you will usher up to the gates of heaven!”
He shook his head slowly from side to side two or three times, and
the smile on his kind old face gave place to a look of longing as he
continued, somewhat regretfully: “Ah, if I were a younger man I’d be
with you, Father. All we older men can do now is to pray, and you
may rest assured I shall remember you often—you and your men.”
I looked at the old priest gratefully. “Thank you, Father,” I said, and I
thought of Moses of old, with arms outstretched.
None of the other priests spoke for a while, and I gazed into the fire
of dry hardwood that murmured and purred so comfortably in the
large open fire-place, built of small field stones. I was thinking
earnestly and when the conversation was again resumed I took no
part in it. In fact, I did not follow it at all, for I was wondering, among
other things, if my hair would really turn grey after a few nights in the
front line trenches. However, I did not worry; for I concluded it would
be wiser to wait until I should arrive at the trenches, where I might
have the evidence of my senses.
I gave but a passing thought to the words of the good priest who was
a little dyspeptic. He had never been in the Army, and where was his
reason for assuming that I should not like the life? Of course, I did
not mind what the old priest, whose work was so often among old
books, had said about my being an ambassador of the Prince of
Peace. I felt that this priest had got his ideas a little mixed. Not very
long before I had heard him vent his outraged feelings when the
French government had called the priests of France to fight for the
Colors. He had been horrified. So I surmised that he imagined I had
voluntarily offered my services as a combatant. I had not.
The conversation continued, but I heeded it not. I was busy
meditating on the words of the saintly old priest with the red cheeks.
How well he understood, I thought. And the flames of the fire shot in
and out among the wood, purring pleasantly the while.
 Chapter II
The Bishop Writes

Up to this time I did not have the Bishop’s consent. In fact, I cannot
remember having mentioned in his presence my desire to go to the
front with the soldiers as chaplain; but I had talked it over frequently
with priests, and it never occurred to me that the Bishop had not
heard of my wish, nor that he would not be in accord with it. But one
morning I received a letter from the Bishop telling me plainly and
firmly that he wished me to keep quiet, and not to talk so much about
going to the front until I should know whether or not I would be
permitted to go. He mentioned a recruiting meeting of a few nights
previous, at which I had offered my services as chaplain to the
battalion that was then being recruited in the diocese.
Perhaps I had been a little too outspoken at the meeting, but I had
considered myself quite justified in breaking silence, since it had
already come to pass that three ministers of different Protestant
denominations had offered themselves as chaplains to the battalion
which, though still in rather an embryonic state, gave promise of
being complete in a few months. I foresaw that it would be more than
half Catholic, as the population of the district from which it was being
recruited was three-fourths Catholic. So I offered myself generously,
not wishing to be outdone by the ministers, and then had sat down
feeling that I had done well.
The following morning, however, I was not quite so sure, for when I
read my words printed in the daily paper I felt just a little perturbed.
What would the Bishop think? I wondered. I had not long to wait
before I knew exactly what His Lordship thought. His letter told me
quite plainly.
I kept quiet. Keeping quiet, however, did not prevent me from
following with interest the activities of others. Almost every evening
recruiting meetings were held in different places throughout the
diocese, at which old men spoke and orchestras played, and
sometimes a young boy would step dance. But, most important of all,
many young men enlisted. They came in great numbers, the
Catholics far in the majority. Then, one morning early in the spring,
the paper announced that the battalion had been recruited to full
strength. The different companies would stay in the town till the
following June, when the battalion would go into camp to train as a
unit.
That evening a letter came from the officer in command, saying that
as eighty per cent of his men were Catholics he had decided to take
a Roman Catholic chaplain, and that he intended going to see the
Bishop that evening.
A few days later another letter came from the Bishop saying that he
had been asked for a Catholic chaplain, and as he remembered that
I had seemed very eager to go with the men, he was glad to say that
he was giving me permission to go. He had decided this, he added,
on the Feast of the Seven Dolors of Our Lady.
“The Seven Dolors,” I said to myself quietly, two or three times. Then
I fell to wishing that the Bishop had made his decision on some other
feast of Our Lady. I remember now, as I stood in the quiet little room
with the letter in my hand, recalling the words of the priest—that he
would not give me three nights in the front line trenches before my
hair would turn grey. But this thought did not bother me very long, for
I began to think of something else, and as I did the letter trembled a
little with the hand that held it. “Perhaps I am not coming back,” I
said to myself. Then I repeated: “The Feast of the Seven Dolors! The
Feast of the Seven Dolors!”
 Chapter III
A Little Adjusting

During the next seven or eight days from all sides I heard one
question asked by young and old: “When are you going to put on the
uniform, Father?” Little children to whom I had taught catechism
rushed around corners or panted up narrow streets of the little town
where I was stationed and smilingly asked me. Their fathers and
mothers, after saying good-morning, remarked pleasantly, as an
afterthought: “I suppose we’ll soon be seeing you in the khaki,
Father?” They seemed to anticipate real pleasure in seeing me
decked in full regimentals. But the more I had evidence of this
seemingly pleasant anticipation, the less inclined I felt to appear
publicly in my chaplain’s uniform. When the time came for a last
fitting at the tailor’s, I found other duties to claim my attention, until a
polite little note from the proprietor of the establishment informed me
that my presence was requested for a last fitting of my uniform.
Then one morning, when the spring birds that had returned were
singing merrily among the trees with not the slightest thought as to
their raiment, and when bursting buds were making the trees
beautiful in their eagerness to drape them with bright green robes, I
appeared on the public streets of the quiet little town clad in full
regimentals.
I had chosen an early hour for my public appearance, thinking that
my ordeal would not be so trying.
Since that morning I have had many exciting experiences, up and
down the ways of war; I have witnessed many impressive scenes,
beautiful, terrible, and horrible, but these events have by no means
obliterated from the tablets of my memory the events of that
morning. Nothing particular happened until I had descended the hill
and turned the first corner to the right in the direction of the town