Snakebite in Rhodesia

A recent programme on the BBC about snakebites in India reminded me of this little booklet, which we bought when we lived in Rhodesia in the late 1960s. It seemed a sensible investment since the extensive lands of the school where we worked, Bernard Mizeki College, was home to a large variety of snakes some of which came in to the college grounds and in to our garden.

While some were harmless many were poisonous. The booklet didn't go in for many diagrams and included no photographs, but we had another book which helped us identify the snakes, which is a vital part of managing snakebite.

The puff adder was the snake which most commonly bit people since it hunts in darkness, is very lazy so doesn't move out of the way, and has a habit of lying on game trails along which people walk, usually without a torch. However, since an antidote for the bite was relatively easily obtained locally - the school kept some in the medical centre - we didn't worry too much about it.

In fact we didn't really worry about snakes on our walks until we had our Alsatian, Marx, who might have tried to attack a snake. Gill recalls an occasion when she was out walking the dog miles from the school buildings and saw a very large snake: fortunately, Marx didn't.

During our three years at the school the snake we encountered most often was the boomslang. Being a tree snake we usually knew if one was in the garden because the birds found it and harassed it until it left.

However, one pair took up residence in the roof of out house and we frequently saw one or other either in the creeper over the veranda, above where Gill is sitting in this picture, or in the bougainvillea hedge. Our cats told us if there was one over the veranda. I remember coming home one day to find Gill reading on the veranda with Nhata, our female cat, sitting beside her looking up into the creeper - in which was stretched out one of our resident boomslangs.

As the booklet pointed out, we didn't need to worry too much about a boomslang since it was almost unheard of for them to bite anyone, to the extent that, for decades, they were thought to be non-poisonous. However....

 ....on reading the section on the boomslang's poison we were a little more concerned: we'd have been dead before the antiserum arrived from Johannesburg. So, with great sadness and reluctance....

....I hunted down the two snakes and shot them.

This is the male. He was about five foot long and beautiful. Given the same decision today, I would have happily gone on living with him as my upstairs lodger.