ABSTRACT
Within a few days of moving into Tabenken the author had established that there were children with kwashiorkor, that local people did recognise the illness as a problem and that there were traditional healers who specialised in its treatment. In addition he had two Limbum terms which seemed to be the vernacular equivalents of kwashiorkor: “bfaa” and “ngang”. What began to emerge from discussions, however, was that the Limbum words “ngang” and “bfaa” could not be treated as approximate equivalents of the biomedical term “kwashiorkor”. They had multiple meanings which were not covered by “kwashiorkor”. Fai is a traditional title, which people translate into English as ‘quarter-head’. Fai Nga Kontar was head of one of the quarters of Kieku, the part of the village in which the author stayed.
