Reflections on sunday: The business of blood-harvesting

India has always been an intriguing sub-continent. As a country, she belongs to the third world but is hot on the heels of China in joining the first world. Even then, she retains her population of ‘untouchables’, a caste who are practically second-class citizens. Her annual growth is currently bounding at 8.5 per cent, and she has her good share of world billionaires, but 300 million of her 1.1 billion citizens live on less than one dollar a day. However, her oddities go beyond her economic imbalances. For instance, you might recall the story, early this year, of a gang of doctors who were comfortably ‘harvesting’ kidneys from innocent job-seekers. Dr. Amit Kumar, an ordinarily rotund and benign man as most Indian men go, stole 6000 kidneys before his gang was busted! And that won’t sound like a lot of valuable, Indian kidneys stolen until you remember that each kidney was going for a cool $18,000 (Frw9.7m)! But, more…. In an obscure Indian home in Gorakhpur, Utar Pradesh state, Inspector-General of Police D.K. Chaudary discovered 17 people who had been so emptied of blood that they could hardly breathe. One of the victims, Ramesh Sahu, a jobless graduate of Patna University in Bihar state, lamented that he’d been promised $5 (Frw2,700) per day but was too weak to demand it. We ordinary mortals can think of milking our dairy cattle for a living; we can think of poultry farming, goat, pig or crop farming. Not an Indian business entrepreneur! The ‘farmer’ in this case was earning $1,250 (Frw675,000) from a daily ‘harvest’ of blood from 17 people who formed the human blood factory. Admittedly, in India innovative blood-sucking as a lucrative business is not confined to humans. There was the story in 2005 of rheus monkeys that inhabited the Gauhati Temple in northern India. Being revered as a symbol of the Hindu monkey god, these monkeys were lavishly fed and became so confident of the respect they commanded that they started pouncing on Indian children and audaciously sucking their blood as a dessert delicacy. We must admit, of course, that plasma for cash is not a reserve phenomenon of the Indian sub-continent. Remember a Dr. Peter Kataaha of the Ministry of Health in Uganda who, sometime back, was promising fire and brimstone to those who were involved in the illegal trade of blood? We also know that it is common and, bizarrely, legal practice for Mexicans to cross into Texas, USA, sell their blood and cross back into their country $70 (Frw38,000) richer, where their weekly earnings on farms are otherwise not higher than $56 (Frw30,000) a week. In my long and roaming years, of course, I wouldn’t have escaped the clawing hands of these blood-hounds. I recall the early 1960s in Bufumbira, south-western Uganda, when it was taboo to walk alone. This came about as a result of what had happened to our Uncle Mwumva. Uncle Mwumva was then a young man of good build, who was not at all averse to a nightly drink of a local sorghum brew known as “Umuramba”. After an outing, it was not unusual for him to come home ‘writing eight’ (‘kwandika umunani’), as a drunken stagger was expressed then, but when one evening he came practically on all fours, we knew that what had gone on that evening was more than an imbibing exercise. It took him four days to recover, and it was then that he explained that a gang of men had sucked a ‘pan-full’ of blood out of him. To measure, they had kicked him in the ribs and sneered: “Bugger, your alcohol contains little blood, we’ll suck it all!” And so it was that after a few days, my hour of reckoning came. Being a young herdsman then, I was coming home to deliver milk one rainy evening. Those of you who have ever been nomadic pastoralists know that you shift homes according to seasons. Bufumbira being overpopulated, this was not possible and only the cattle moved, while the homes were permanently in one place. That is why I used to deliver milk home every evening. While I was thus engaged in the line of duty that wet evening then, four burly men pounced on me but, on falling on the ground, I made sure to land on my back, while holding aloft my two ‘nkongoros’ (‘milk-containers’). As the ‘pathologist’ prepared to insert his syringe, I let out a maniacal laugh that took the men by surprise, which gave me time to put one of the milk-containers down. I removed the woven lid and splashed a little of the other container’s contents in the eyes of the ‘pathologist’. He let out a yelp, rubbing his eyes fiercely, as the others looked at him in surprise, and then turned to me in shocked readiness for attack. I could clearly make out their faces in the dark, and I splashed the remaining contents in their faces, one after the other, as I said, triumphantly: “Take that, bugger! And that, mugger! And that, sucker!” I’d prepared some pepper solution that I’d put in one container, which I always carried with the milk-container. As they say, “Fore-warned is fore-armed”! Contact: ingina2@yahoo.co.uk