MEMOIRS OF THE SOUTHERN JOURNEY

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Have A Good Laugh on this one..............

This trip takes us down to an unexpected region. It is unexpected coz there is no way of justifying what an eastern man would be doing in Southern Province - breaking all belief that the wise men went to the west, there I was plunging down that area to experience an actual rural life…most of all, to milk my own pint of milk-from an actual cow.

For starters I have to admit that as an easterner who believes in hunting, it would be a tough journey to go to where they keep food as pets. We hunt everything, starting with mice up to anything that has steak on it; regardless of how many legs it moves on. Anyway, enough about me, let’s talk about the southern province people.

We started off for our cultural hunt down South on Friday afternoon. Well, not exactly down South. We were gonna end up there eventually but this departure was for Lusaka. I know! These guys have nothing to hunt….just huge pets they continually milk. Imagine! Milking a pet! Anyway, moving along! So, the word hunt might seem inappropriate. However, it’s not a cow hunt, but a cultural hunt. Just repeat that after me to make sure.

As I was saying, we hit the road on the 1^st of July 2011 with my friend, Moono – who was also serving as my tour guide for the first part of the journey. Don’t get me wrong, we haven’t yet arrived, so we won’t count these chickens too early. It’s actually just the first hour and a half of the journey.

Place flowing with milk and honey

Just left Kapiri Mposhi and passed this area with so much honey on sale. Well, ok, the honey is in the containers so we’ll just cut the crap about the land flowing with it and proceed with the tale.  Either these guys have too many bees or the bees are super-sized. There is always honey for sale in too many containers. Now that possibility is almost unimaginable, especially that there is no import source. Please tell me people can also make honey. I am suspicious that either the bees or man is having some help on the inside.

Kulima Tower Bus Station

Now this station has been pimped up. Wow! If for the sake of development we could have elections every year, I can’t even begin to imagine what our nation would look like by now. But that is unrealistic coz elections alone are quite a toll on the budget coz of the cost of the whole event.

We spent a night in Kafue were we had about 12 of the twenty people for the trip.

The Everlasting Departure

Ever head of leaving but not disappearing or departing? We got up the next day, a Saturday morning, and prepared for departure. Parking was easy, having all the luggage together for parking was the tricky part. We had to make 4 stops particularly for picking up people and luggage and on the final stop which would be in Mazabuka, we would have a bus join us and finally split and sort people and luggage for the rest of the journey. At each stop we had to repack the luggage according to what the people picked up had brought in and finally to accommodate the extra stuff that we would buy to take to the village. It took us pretty much most of the day to get settled before we finally launched out for the final stretch with only 4 hours to reach destination from Mazabuka.

Munali hills

A road known for accidents… Well, the kind that involve trucks reversing coz of a slope. That is not the cool part about the road. There is a monument in dedication to Dr David Livingstone that is erected not long from Kafue. 

With many stoppages on our way we reached our destination beyond Namwala after 10pm and so begun the Southern experience.

The sweet Capital

Mazabuka is the dear home of Nakambala, source of the sugar that the whole country uses-disregarding the competitive brand names around. Yes, we were at the centre of the sweet and Vitamin-A fortified sugar. I was hoping someone would throw or even stone me with a packet of sugar as a form of welcome or recognition. Turns out that even here, plus or minus the transportation costs, which are not incurred to keep the sugar in the same town it is produced, the sugar is expensive. In other shops even more affordable expensive, except for the foreign shop which imports from here and sends us back the sugar as an export – Shoprite. Trust me, I can’t explain that possibility either but we have been beaten again at price setting by a buyer of our product.

Greetings

First of all, you need not be faint at heart for you may be quite unconscious by the time the greeting routine is done. For this reason, they make it a point to serve you some energy drink called “Chibwantu” to kind of give you a ‘Red Bull’ shakeup before they can  get started. Understand me on this one, these guys are hospitable and they want to know everything concerning you, your welfare and your travel. So they start, “mwabonwa, mwapona… Then progresses to the people you haven’t travelled with, how they are wherever you left them…… to the pets you keep (remember that pets are a full part of their lifestyle and so their welfare is as much a family issue).  This is pretty cool. But just imagine a family of eight greeting you and each one of them is going through this routine regardless of having heard your reply from the previous greeting. You need a commercial break, a lunch break and motivational talk telling you that “you can make it through” the greeting to finish the whole routine.

But that’s the good part; each person has been taught to be as concerned and caring for their guests as if they were their own. And so, it doesn’t matter that they have already been attended to by someone else, each need to attend to them coz they are as much their guests as they are their brother’s , cousin’s or parents’ guests.

The distance puzzle solved

I have often said; never trust a Tonga for directions, especially where distance estimations are concerned. I finally came face to face with the reason why. They have huge settlements(influenced by the need for their farm animals to have enough grazing land and the farmer’s need for a land to plough; name it.) And so, you find that their houses are about 3km apart each and that is what is called a neighbourhood or for a better word, a settlement. Amazingly, they know each neighbour by name even if the person is 12km away. So, when we say, our neighbour right across the street in this area, we are pretty much talking about 3km away – that’s about an hour walk. I guess that should give you a picture of why I grow suspicious each time any of these guys give me  assistance with directions. Distances, therefore, that seem short in these ends are miles of travel to someone else in another region where neighbours are back to back.

Visit of the frost Giants

Of course that would be a lame excuse for what happened to the trees of Southern Province. Truth is though that it has been extremely cold down that side. Possibly Southern Province is moving closer to the South Pole but we can’t verify that assertion yet. I wonder how many Tongas are in the Antarctic regions-just a thought. Anyway, point is, trees have become monuments. They neither die nor live. They are stuck in the state that the cold left them. It still does get cold in these regions. Just sad we didn’t have a thermometer to take measure of this nasty weather.

Milking the Cow

All my previous attempts to secure me a young lady that I could have some practice on before getting to actual cow breast proved futile so, guaranteed, I wasn’t gonna get it right the first attempt. Well, I didn’t. Not just for the first attempt but for the first 5 attempts. All I was getting at the end of each pull was my dry fingers popping off the cow’s breast and almost getting into the milk can as if I was supposed to be milking fingers. What a loser! My friends had also taken turns at it. Even those who were trying for the first time got some milk on their first attempts. When mine finally came out, it was only the size of a demonstration. Hey, don’t laugh at me! I will stop writing and we’ll see just where you will run to to get your copy of the memoirs of the Southern trip. Now that we have established who is in charge here, let me continue with the story.  I call it a demonstration size because the milk that was coming out was only equivalent in both amount and pressure to that of a leaking small hosepipe and you can imagine trying to fill a bucket with that.  

After our horrible attempts and meagre results, Mosta, the chief “milkiest” (I have to call him that for recognitions sake) came and got some crazy amounts of milk out of that cow. I think he is also milking those bees near Kapiri-Mposhi which I wrote of earlier. The guy was getting a milk-fall (waterfall made of milk) out of that cow. You could run your own energy turbines on that kind of flow and power a small town each time the guy is milking. Talk about moving from hydro-electric to lacto-electric. Just joking but thank you, Mosta.

The name contest

Introductions ought to be done with a careful request for only the first name. A quest for full names led to a discovery that one person could have an average of 15 names. My guess is that one parent could not in any way have managed to give a child so many names. I want to imagine something more interesting. Like there was a name giving contest. Apparently the people present are those to whom you can’t say no. So, they form a long queue and they each have to drop a  name as they pass by the child with a present. And so, the contest begins. It’s a good round and the names dropped are great and so, they are all adopted. And as is life, any great experience is worth repeating. Thus upon naming the child, each one goes to the back of the queue for round two. By the time the child comes out with the set of brand new names, you need to be on an Egyptian throne with 3 servants to fan you just so you can make through calling the child’s names without a drop of sweat.

Ok, on a more serious note, names are  a symbol of respect and continuity, especially to the person whom the child is named after. If the person be great, the benefit is mutual - as the named will also get to carry the pride laid before-hand by the name they carry. And so, the more the names, the more people are honoured.

The cookout

Well, it had been planned for as one(a cookout). Day before departure from the village, we went to visit the last born in the line of Dad’s family. It was the nearest neighbour village. Wait a minute, I think he was pretty much at the edge of the Haboombe settlement - somewhat within. The girls went ahead to get started with the cooking so that the rest of us would join them for the meal there. We would call this “lunch (2)” as it was to be taken after we had had lunch home. You know! Like a lunch sequel! Atleast it was not like a musical release. Coz you would have things like ‘lunch long-play’’(LP), ‘lunch extended-play’(EP), and talk about the whole ‘lunch discography’. Eish man! Disaster! Apparently there are no Single releases!

So, we made our way to the lunching house after finishing our initial lunch. We even took a longer route in hope that we will be able to press down the previous meal by the exercise. I do quite remember Nchimunya jumping up and down trying to push the food down so that there could be settlement base created for the lunch “sequel”. 

Well, we arrived and as the Tonga tradition goes, u cannot have a meal as a visitor without been taken through the appetizer treat. Well, I am vegetarian so, I just carried the appetizer over into the main meal and that’s how I was sorted and rescued from bursting open with fullness. I do remember the other guys pulling all sorts of tricks to avoid getting too full. They even deliberately went to the toilet in hope for a clear stomach, but eventually they bailed out and vanished into thin air without a bye… eluding us that they went in search of Cellular Network. Have you ever been so full you couldn’t climb a grain of sand? Hey, don’t look at this page with a puzzled look. I know what I saw. These guys went tripping over little rock boulders no bigger than a baby’s knuckle. Well, that is how that cookout went – escaped! Though Chris and Tina have a different story to tell.

The mobile subscriber you have dialled

Cellular network is at Zero bars. Not even a meagre emergency call. Now here is the surprising thing. Right in the centre of a kitchen, there was network pick up for MTN. Now you wonder, are humans the only beings that depend on food to function? Why would network be stronger at the centre of food? And so, we made the few calls that we could make from that place with thanksgiving to the cooks who brought us network by their tasty meals. Our phones, though, remained off for most of the days we were there.

MTN must have been speaking with a vision when they said everywhere you go. Coz it’s the most reliable cellular network provider these ends, despite requiring a visual motivation of food and a fragrance of a cooking before gaining coverage bars. Airtel was also available on hilltops in selected outskirts. Nobody wants to travel that far with a cell phone to make a call. You might as well reach the persons house and just tell them to their face what you have on your mind.

Rich heritage and Inheritance

I am not saying this because compared to where I come from these guys are rich, no! They really do have their legacy secured. I know it sounds too aloft a praise, especially coming from a guy whose culture only allows for parents to hand down a mouse trap upon decease. No, we don’t do that. Our offspring is quite capable of making their own mouse trap, even better. Worse still is when you compare with the Luapula and Northen Province tribes, whose parents just point to a nearby bush with a richer population of monkeys as a hunting area inheritance. Ok, now I am just being mean and taking this joke too far. Where was I with the Tonga people? Oh yes, their rich cultural heritage and inheritance.

I noticed that each household had, apart from a good herd of cattle, goats, chicken, a cat and dogs. I am well informed that a poor house should have, atleast a minimum of one of these. That way, a person with no cows at least must have a goat herd…and so on. That way, even there poor are secured and thus no beggars. This is particularly why it is a rich heritage.

Souvenirs

Choosing an appropriate thing to remind you of a place is quite tricky. Most people chose food. I do not know how they are going to have that food as reminders forever of that trip as memories disappear upon ingestion. I got the most unexpected and weird thing – a goat skin. I call it, “home-made leather” and this little article you are reading right now. Photos stand on top of the list for a lot of people. As long as they can look at a place and remember it, the sensation is enough as a souvenir.

The photo Session

I have previously seen photos of rural residents that really look it, so to speak. First-hand experience in the village showed me that these guys are a really cute bunch of folks and great to capture with the eye. Problem is that they are not really photo-genic. Hence the typical village look that you see on photos. Well, I was there to make sure there was less of that drawback to capturing actual appearances this time around. I am personally enjoying looking at the photos of these cool, hospitable and generous folks.

How the story ends.

These are the memoirs of the Southern Journey. I had a great time and thanks to all the good folks that made this journey worthwhile: Chris, Tina, Moono, Ellen and Katalausha Haboombes; Nchimunya (TG) Hachandi, Urane and …., Mwangala and Namukolo; Sibanga, Luwiza, Milimo, Mudenda (Rebecca). And of course I have to thank my lovely fiancé who gave me permission to take this trip by insisting that I take it.

July 2^nd to 6^th 2011

The End

Glad you enjoyed reading this “MEMOIRS OF THE SOUTHERN JOURNEY” by Zack Rowliv KM (Coach)

Find Rowliv at http://rowliv.blogspot.com , Rowliv@gmail.com; www.facebook.com/rowliv

and http://www.youtube.com/user/rowliv, call or text +260-977-260-742

© Zack Rowliv Kasalu (Family life and Youth Coach)

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