Real Life Scare by Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D. Emeritus Professor of Sociology

My family and I in 1959 lived at Chasela Primary School in the Luangwa Valley among the Bisa people in the Eastern Province of Zambia in Southern Africa. I was five years old. My father was a teacher during British colonialism in the then Northern Rhodesia. We lived in a small 3 room redbrick house with grass roofing. At the time the Luangwa Valley had numerous wild animals roaming night and day like Africa had been probably for thousands of years. Lions, zebras, large herds of buffaloes, impalas, hyenas, monkeys, leopards, birds, and elephants were everywhere night and day and around our house. Humans and deadly encounters with wild animals were as common as traffic accidents are today in our time.

Lion basking the morning sun in the Luangwa Valley Game Park

One day, my dad went on a business trip to Fort Jameson (now Chipata) riding his bike through sixty miles or ninety-six Kms. of dangerous desolate wilderness in the Luangwa Valley. At that time there were few people and villages. My mother asked me to leave my bedroom and instead to sleep in my dad’s bed next to my mother’s since we were by ourselves that night. It was  1900 hrs. 7:00 pm and the yellow paraffin lamp was dimly burning and flickering on mom’s small bedside table. My mom had just finished giving a bath to my seven-month-old baby sister, Ester. Ester was whining and fussing with mom bugging her.

 “Mama nipeni baseline!!” She whined. 

My baby sister wanted the “baseline” bottle to apply the Vaseline on herself again. My mom was saying “No! will you please go to sleep!” When all of a sudden:


“Graaaaaaaaargh!!!!!!” One lion roared with the deepest bellow literally five feet or two meters outside our rickety wooden bedroom door and window.


“Graaaaaaaaaaargh!!!!” The second lion roared in response. Our whole small three room red brick house shook and vibrated.


My mother hastily blew out the kerosene lamp. My little sister tried to dive under mom to hide. I froze. Deep fear hit the pit of my little stomach. I was so scared I could not move to hide under the covers. My little heart may have stopped and I could not breath. The plates, dishes, pots, and pans rattled on the kitchen shelves as some loudly crashed to the bare cement floor in the kitchen. Some rats fell with a thud from the grass roof. The two lions continued to roar in tandem.


There was loud commotion in the nearby Chibande large village of five hundred as playing children screamed and fled in terror. Mothers desperately yelled calling their children by name to “please run home!!!.” Most kids ran into the nearest house for cover for that night as there was no time to run to their parents’ house.


When I opened my eyes in the morning, it was very quiet and it was almost 9:00 hours.  This was very unusual as we always woke up early in the morning at 6:00 hours.

First, my mother said a brief prayer thanking God for having saved our lives that night. She then gingerly opened our small wooden bedroom window and carefully peeked outside to make sure the lions were not waiting anywhere outside. That’s when we came out of the house. The bedroom door that led to the outside just left of where the lions had roared was a small thin wooden door.  The lion could have effortlessly just put its paw on the small door, and it would have been inside our bedroom. Later that day, my mom told me that a few seconds prior to the lion’s first roar a few feet from our bedroom door, she had heard strange sounds. “Pomp!!” “Pomp!!!” Pomp!!!” We found out later on that those were sounds of the lions wagging their tails hitting both sides of their stomachs as they quietly approached our house under the mango trees. When we looked at the footmarks, the pride had been about ten to fifteen lions. I often wonder what scares children today compared to those older times.

The October Heat is Sweet

We have all watched those exciting colorful documentaries on TV of the Cheetah chasing the swift Thompson Gazelle at high speeds of 65 mph or 104 Km Per hour zigzagging through the Savannah plains in a cloud of dust. Once the Cheetah catches the prey, the deep voice of the announcer says: “This is the law of the jungle and nature in Africa”. Next you see images of very cracked hot dusty dry land which has had drought for six months with no rain which is normal for Savannah Zambia. You wouldn’t think this was normal  if you only saw the documentaries.  The elephants, impalas, zebras, wilder beasts, buffaloes are shown desperately looking for water as the small water holes have turned into thick dry mud.

These are the negative images that have dominated the media and TV screens about Zambia and Africa since the very early days of European contacts with Africa in the 1500s. The idea that we Zambians and Africans live in miserable drought for six months of the year is very attractive  to people who live the Northern hemisphere in Europe, North America, Northern Asia, China and Japan. After all it is generally not only cold here but we have both rain and cold dark freezing snow winters. Sometimes freezing rain and frozen ice and snow fall together.

This Western image of six months of misery  contrasted so much with my good life growing up in the village in Zambia that I voiced my opposition to these images of misery in a book I wrote titled “Tit bits for the Curious” that was published in Lusaka in 1989 by the now defunct Multimedia publications. The most difficult times in rural Zambia are the rainy season when there are dwindling supplies of food from the previous growing season, people work in the fields, it is cloudy and sometimes you have mswera which are slow drizzling rains that could go on day and night for a whole week. The dry season in contrast from May to November were known as chihanya among the Tumbuka which means “bright sunny days”.

 

This was the period when the harvesting was over. Men went hunting. Women molded clay pots, went to the river to bath and took their time scrubbing their feet and washing clothes at the river. People walked to distant villages to visit relatives sometimes travelled to Lusaka or line of rail to visit. Children like me went to dig mice and hunted small birds and animals to supplement meals. We walked bare feet during the hot October sun and caught cicadas. I had forgotten all of the Zambian seasons when I was away from the October heat in North America for more than 20 years and came back to visit in Zambia in October 2012.

I was worried about the heat. The first 2 nights at my uncle’s farm in Chainda in Lusaka,  I was sweating so much during the night I needed a fan. But my body quickly adjusted. I walked in the sun wearing my t-shirts and thin cotton shorty sleeved shirts. My taste of October heat increased each day until I went to visit the Mpika Village of Hope Orphanage run by Ms. Jeny Musakanya. I walked to the market and supermarket every day in Mpika. We drove to the orphanage farms and walked in the bush in the hot October heat and I could hear the sounds of the childhood sounds of the Cicadas.

Children from the Mpika Village of Hope Orphanage run by Ms. Jeny Musakanya attending the Independence celebrations.

Children from the Mpika Village of Hope Orphanage run by Ms. Jeny Musakanya attending the Independence celebrations.

During the 24th October Independence Day in Mpika, I wandered to the nearby football field where the celebrations were being held. There were thousands of people especially children. Frozen drinks and snacks of all sorts were being sold. Some people were sitting under the shades of trees. That’s when it occurred to me; I had forgotten that if you grew up in Zambia the seething October heat is actually sweet. It feels great to see and smell the seething heat and yet  sitting  under a tree there is always a mild cool breeze. It’s even better if you are sipping an ice cold drink or just talking with friends and relatives; what the Tumbuka philosophically call kufwasa; which is sitting quietly contemplating and just taking your time enjoying the moment in whatever you are doing.

Do You Love to Walk?

village roadI love to walk. I yearn to walk. I would like to walk to the store, to work, to the Post Office, and grocery store especially in the summer in North America. But I can’t because the places where I live and work here have been built for driving. I feel so frustrated. There are no sidewalks and no other people walking. During any time of day or night it’s so devoid of people outside, you would think no people lived in the neighborhood.

That’s why I was so excited when I went home to the Capital City of Lusaka in Zambia in Southern Africa this past summer. Besides doing other important things, I was going to walk; just to put one foot in front of the other not for two or three city blocks, but for miles. I had not done this in over two years since my last visit home. I couldn’t wait.

The opportunity came a day after I arrived in Zambia. I lived at my retired uncle’s farm thirty miles on the outskirts of the sprawling City of Lusaka. My nephew was driving as we returned to the farm from an errand. As we turned right at the huge water tank into the road that takes us to our farmhouse, I suddenly motioned to my nephew to stop the pick up truck so I could walk the rest of the way. My young nephew was so stunned he just about had a cardiac arrest.

“You mean you are going to walk from here?” my nephew asked in disbelief.

“Yes,” I replied as I slammed the car door shut.

“But this is a good nine to ten miles! America has made you nuts.” My nephew shook his head as he slowly drove away.

I took a big breath and felt the mild fresh breeze. It was a sunny afternoon with a clear blue sky. I immediately joined the throngs of hundreds of other people walking on the dirt footpaths about fifty yards away from the cars and trucks on the busy main Great East Road highway. All kinds of people were walking. Women with babies on their backs, school girls and boys carrying their school bags returning from school, a young seven year old girl carrying a packet of sugar in one hand and collard greens in another from the market, people talked and walked in pairs and in groups, people chewed sugar cane as they walked. On occasion, a lone dog trotted by.

The main Great East Road that leads into the city was being remodeled and repaved. At the huge traffic circle or round-about, many men workers were digging, and some were driving the Shimizu Corporation road construction equipment. I saw a Japanese man saying and gesturing something loudly to the group of about twenty Zambian men sitting in the back of a pick up truck. The men scrambled out of the truck and walked away in different directions. I slowed my walk. A Japanese woman wearing a business suit was saying something loudly to the Japanese man. Animated words were exchanged. Such are the things you see when you walk. I shrugged my shoulders and walked on as a panorama of pleasant thoughts and reflections slowly continued to percolate in my head.

It felt so good to see large swarms of birds noisily fly by. I hummed a boyhood song as I walked on the path with many other people free of worries about time, schedules, or watching out for or dodging cars.

After a while, I broke out into a mild pleasant sweat that signals that one is alive. On occasion, many of the walkers that were headed in the opposite direction would not just make eye contact but would say: “Zikomo” which is the Capital City Nyanja language lingua franca word for: “Hello”. As tourists, Western visitors, American Presidents and other groups of high ranking American official entourage tour African countries, I wonder if they will ever experience any walks like the one I was having. If they did they would probably like it so much they would never come back from Zambia or let alone Africa. That would be another of Africa’s great contributions to the modern Western world.

Walking is such a gratifying experience that I had to include it in my romance and adventure novel The Bridge that was published in 2005. Walking in a calm relaxed environment is probably one of the best and ultimate ways to experience the deeper magnificence of kufwasa.

Zumbwe Wild Cat and Human Greed

Why is it that Martha Stewart, Bill Gates, Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey and other rich moguls want more billions upon billions of dollars? Why is it that we consume more and more oil polluting the environment, gorge ourselves on too much food until we become obese, build more and larger houses until logging deplete trees, we want so much sex with so many partners that teachers have sex with young boys or girls and pornography is wide spread? Perhaps the most well known example of these human excesses is a former President Bill Clinton’s sex scandal. Beyond what we need, why do we humans have this insatiable desire for what ever we find good? Religious experts, biologists, economists, sociologists have different explanations for this human proclivity. But the answer might lie in a small wild animal that lives around my home village in Zambia in Southern Africa.

When a male domestic cat becomes wild it turns into what the Tumbuka people of Southern Africa call a Zumbwe. It becomes sneaky, nocturnal, lives totally in the wild and only hunts for food at night. One of the most despicable acts the Zumbwe will engage in is if it sneaks its way into a chicken coop at night. The Zumbwe is so stealthy that the chickens don’t even have a chance to raise commotion. The Zumbwe will kill one chicken and eat may be half of it. But then tragically, it will proceed to kill the rest of the twenty or more chickens in the coop. When the owner of the chickens wakes up in the morning, what appalls them is not that one chicken was killed and half eaten, but the other nineteen lifeless chickens. People often will say the Zumbwe wild cat killed the rest of the chickens because of what the Tumbuka call kaso or it’s as if the wild cat killed just because the chickens are delicious food and were alive.

We humans behave the same way; just like the Zumbwe wild cat, once we have met our basic needs for sex, shelter, food, money, power, material possessions, glamour,  we will pursue more often in a selfish and destructive way, for no other reason, besides because we can have more.

When we are in this Zumbwe mode, we engage in behaviors that destroy or threaten the physical environment, creatures, and others in our physical and social environment. We then want more money when we have enough, we want bigger houses when we already own a home, we want bigger cars so we can use more gasoline, we want to buy more shares on the stock market, we want more sexual titillation even when we have enough. The list can go on. When we look at why we do these things, the bottom line answer is that, like the Zumbwe wild cat, because we can. Even the former American President has now repeatedly said he engaged in the sex scandal just because he could; this the ultimate excess of having power.

As decent human beings we could do such tremendous good for ourselves and people around us if, unlike the Zumbwe wild cat, we did not destroy life. But instead we can become the Zumbwe or wild cat of good deeds. Indeed if we did one good or kind deed, and then paused and then performed such kind deeds for the next hundred people in our immediate neighborhood here, in the next village, town, and city and everywhere on the globe, wouldn’t the world be such a better place? Why don’t you become the next Zumbwe wild cat and “kill” the next twenty people with kind deeds?

The Beauty of the Natural World

The natural world in all the tropical areas of the world has some of the most fascinating animals, plants, insects, and the large variety of creatures both large and small. Savannah Zambia in Southern Africa is different in that during the dry hot season, the grass turns brown and the earth turns brown and dusty. Most of the plants and small creatures go into hibernation, plant seeds become dormant, and many creatures simply hide.  All of this changes when the first rains fall in November. Suddenly there is an explosion of life as grass germinates, trees grow green leaves, all kinds of creatures and plants come to life. It is one of the most beautiful times of the year. When I visited the village in December 2011, I took many tours of nature. My two small nephews in the village tagged along some of the times as I went around in the bushes around the village to admire the many plants and insects that crawled around. The insects have been given the Tumbuka name and the generic English name.

 

chidodo Chidodo chobilibila – unknown

kaciwaiaKaciwala kadoko – Small Grasshopper

insectsUnknown

plantUnknown

Nat6ChenjeziDragonflyChenjezi – Dragon Fly

Gulugufe butterflyBulaula or Gulugufe – Butterfly

ChiwalaGrasshopperChiwala chamabanga Many Colored Grasshopper

Mango branchMango zakupya na zibisi – Ripe and unripe mangoes

ChibabviChibabvi – unknown

green bananasNthoci zibisi – Green bananas

young boysMy Young Nephews