Lost history · 2019-2024
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Bitten by a viper at one in the morning, a mother killed it with a stick, rescued her children and her paralysed husband, and rode through the night with the dead snake in a bag. In the hills of Kaltungo there is a hospital built for nights like hers.
It had begun to rain at about one in the morning. A woman named Antu, who lives in the town of Gombe, stepped out of her room to bring in her children's school uniforms, which she had spread outside to dry. She was standing in the doorway of the living room, one foot in and one foot out, when she felt something like a rope pull tight around the leg that was inside. Then came a sharp prick.
When she lifted the leg it felt heavy. She brought it down hard on the floor and something dropped off it with a thud. She ran for a torch, shone it, and saw a snake. Her children were asleep in that same living room, and the snake was right in front of them. As she told the journalist Sabiqah Bello of HumAngle, it was either she killed it or it killed her.
There was no one to help. Her husband lay in the bedroom, half his body paralysed by a stroke. So Antu tucked the torch into her headscarf to free her hands, pulled a stick from a broken drawer and hit the snake. It wrapped itself round the stick. She slammed it on the floor, again and again, until it fell loose, and then she crushed its head.
She ran outside to shout for help, but the rain swallowed her voice. Her leg was bleeding. She thought fast. She carried her husband out of the house, then brought the children out one at a time. A weak fence stood between her house and the neighbours'. She kicked it down and sent her eldest daughter through to knock on their door. When it opened, she handed over her husband and children and told the neighbour she was going for treatment.
The neighbour's daughter went with her to a clinic nearby. The clinic could not handle it and sent her to the General Hospital. The driver who offered to take her there told her to bring the snake, so she went back, picked it up and put it in a black plastic bag. At the General Hospital they looked at the snake and said it was a viper, an old one, and that this was beyond them. They had to get to Kaltungo, at once.
So they drove through Gombe State in the dark. It was three in the morning, and at every military checkpoint soldiers wanted to know why anyone was on the road at such an hour. A snakebite, the passengers explained, and the soldiers asked for proof. The proof was the bag. By now the dead snake inside was stinking so badly that people in the car were vomiting. Each time the bag was shown, the soldiers waved them on quickly, holding their noses and wishing them luck. In the back seat, Antu was slipping out of consciousness. The pain was so bad, she said, she wished she could separate her leg from the rest of her body.
Why Kaltungo? Kaltungo is a local government area of Gombe, a country of rolling hills and scattered trees. That hilly land suits snakes, and snakebites are common there. The most common kind is the viper, and for decades people and vipers have lived side by side. Because of this, the Snakebite Treatment Hospital and Research Centre was set up in Kaltungo.
Its numbers are startling. From 2019 to 2023 the hospital recorded 13,306 snakebite cases. Half of the patients were men, 22 per cent were women and 28 per cent were children. Yet only 1.5 per cent died. Men are bitten most, HumAngle explains, because most of them farm, but people are bitten at home, in the market, even at school. Across Nigeria, a former health minister of state, Olorunnimbe Mamora, has said about 2,000 people die each year from snakebites and around 1,700 more lose a limb. Gombe has the most cases, followed by Plateau, Adamawa, Bauchi and Borno.
Gombe's health commissioner, Dr Habu Dahiru, said the antivenom is given free, with the state as main supplier and support from the North East Development Commission. In the past the state worked with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, sending snake samples abroad for research, training and antivenom. That programme ran into trouble and ended. The state now wants to grow the hospital and make antivenom at home.
There was once another plan. The emir, the Mai Kaltungo, declared war on the snakes and offered money for every one brought to the palace. Farmers went hunting. It was stopped when researchers warned that killing the snakes would hurt the making of antivenom.
The next thing Antu remembers is the sting of the antivenom needle. It felt, she said, as if snakes were writhing inside her leg and trying to snap it. She screamed for help. The doctors told her the feeling meant the medicine was fighting the poison.
She stayed a week. The principal medical officer, Dr Nicolas Hamman, said most patients leave after about five days, and those who arrive within a day or two of being bitten usually do well. The deaths, he said, mostly come from people who arrive late, after going from one traditional healer to another and taking their mixtures. By then the venom has spread through the whole body.
The day after Antu arrived, a group of foreign researchers visiting the hospital examined the snake she had brought. They asked to see her. They told her the chances of surviving such a bite were slim, and yet there she was, alive and talking. They even interviewed her.
Going home was not the end. Whenever the leg hurt, she phoned the doctors, and they told her what to do and that it was part of healing. Her skin broke out in rashes and peeled. In time the doctors took the snake's fangs out of her leg. It was three months before she was back to her normal life.
Four years on, on cold harmattan nights, the leg still aches, and the rainy night comes back to her. She thanks God she lived. She came out of it stronger, she says.
