‘Gipsy Doctor9 Settles In Christchurch

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30741, 4 May 1965, Page 2

‘Gipsy Doctor 9 Settles In Christchurch

Her overland expedition to the Kalahari Desert in Central Africa to find a hidden city ended when Dr. Wendy (“Gipsy Doctor”) Carnegie was caught up in skirmishes in the Congo, lost everything and was lucky to escape with her life.

And on her lonely, off-the-beaten-track tour of nine months through West Africa, she also found plenty of adventure material to write about and to broadcast.

In Ghana, for instance, she heard about a band of native smugglers who operated from a bogland village near Halfassini and west of Accra. She decided to join them in one of their expeditions taking out contraband, liquor and other goods from the Ivory Coast by a series of inland lakes. “They did not want to take a woman with them, but money fixes everything,” she said at a meeting of the Soroptimist Club of Christchurch yesterday. Eventually she set out in a canoe, virtually a log with a hole in it, while it was paddled across a crocodileinfested lake-

It was pitch dark as she and the smuggler ploughed their way through rushes to meet another canoe. A parcel was handed over, then there was a shout as unexpected lights appeared. That was a night when a police launch was out. PADDLED TO SAFETY “I was given a paddle and told to use it. I had never paddled or rowed a boat in my life, but I did my best, wondering if I would be put in gaol if caught,” she said. Out of danger, everyone laughed.

“I asked what would have happened if the police had caught us. ‘They would have laughed too,’ I was told,” she recalled.

Hearing of an interesting primitive tribe in the north >f Ghana, Dr. Carnegie spent several months living with the Lobis.

“BALL-HEADS” *‘The women have heads like billiard balls and holes in their protrusive upper lips, which must be very awkward for eating,” she said. “The custom began because invading tribes from the north were stealing the Lobi women and their menfolk decided to make them ugly by disfiguring their lips, They certainly succeeded.” The Lobi people wore no clothes, merely covered themselves “fore and aft” with little bunches of grass. The World Health Organisation tried to persuade them to wear clothes at one stage, but the people refused. They said it was difficult enough to find water to keep them alive, let alone enough for washing clothes. FUNERAL CUSTOMS The Lobi tribe spent their whole existence trying to keep alive, looking for water. They were a very happy people with their own gods, which they constantly placated. When an ordinary person died the body was sat up on

a high chair. Girls went round fanning it for three days before the burial. But when a chief died he was hung in a sack from a tree for considerably longer, then taken to his grandmother’s village to be buried. “His grandmother is dug up when he is buried and her bones are made into a stew.

Then all the people have a very wonderful party,” she said.

Of Dr. Nkrumah, the President of Ghana, she said: “My impression is that he could be reverting to his primitive instincts in spite of his Western education. He has his feet bathed in animals’ blood and when he sat for a portrait some time ago he arrived with bells on his toes.”

Nkrumah was very much Influenced by the stars. An astrologer told him he must marry someone from Egypt. "He Immediately put a telephone call to Egypt, got hold of a girl and married her as soon as possible,” she said. TRAVEL STORIES No longer practising medicine, Dr. Carnegie recently married Mr Peter Rollings and came to live in Christchurch. She has already published a book on her three years in Tibet, “Gipsy Doctor.”

“I went to Tibet to explore the impact of modern medicine on primitive man," she said. “All I discovered was the impact of primitive travel on modern woman.”

Dr. Carnegie’s second book, “Gipsy Doctor in Africa,” is now with a London publisher.