1 A LINGUIST'S FIELD NOTES INTRODUCTION ... - Llacan - CNRS

near her place. There was no-one there. A secretary asked us to wait. All the medical
personnel had gone out. We waited half an hour for them to return; then we gave up.
Fred then recommended a doctor whose clinic was opposite his shop. The doctor
studied in Germany and had many white patients. We set off for the doctor’s clinic.
Since distances are long in Ibadan and the roads are sometimes crowded by
incomprehensible traffic jams, it was fortunate that the clinic was not far away.
On our arrival at the clinic, we met a secretary who asked us to wait while she went
to call the doctor. The young doctor calmly examined the wound and prescribed
antibiotics to prevent an infection, of the 15cm wound after stitching it. He took
Sunday into a room, closed the door, stitched up the deep wound and gave Sunday a
penicillin injection. The whole procedure lasted more than an hour. Sunday did not say
a word during the whole episode. He came out of the room looking very pale and
sweating profusely, having probably suffered quite a lot without flinching. He told us
later that because the operation took a long time, the initial anaesthesia lost its efficacy
bit by bit. He returned to the clinic regularly for the next two weeks to take his
penicillin injections and to have the bandage changed. His wound healed very well,
and the whole incident is now no more than an unpleasant memory of his first few
weeks at Ibadan.
Our work continued until Christmas. I went back to Paris, Sunday to Gyara, each of
us to see his family. On my return, I waited for Sunday in vain. After some days I
received a letter in which he informed me that he had broken his collarbone while
driving a motorbike in the narrow roads of the hills in his village. He had gone to the
next village, to a bone-setter who took care of fractures. The sick go to stay with him in
his residence until their limbs have returned to their normal form. He practised a
treatment consisting of vigorous and repeated manipulations aimed at reducing the
fractures in the first instance. This was then followed by massages with chicken grease
and tight bandages. The chickens that produced the grease were bought by the patient
and, once the grease was extracted, the rest of the chicken was eaten by the family of
the bone-setter and by the patient.
Sunday came back at the end of two months, his arm held in place by a sling made
of bands of cloth of uncertain colour, impregnated with stale grease, and from which
38