Paperwork enthusiast seeking new frontiers of paperwork. Former submariner, former Peace Corps Volunteer. Opinions, thoughts, and comments reflect no actual persons, living or in the Navy.
After leaving Livingstone, we drove back north to Lusaka, but on the way we took a little detour (it was a big detour) to see the Chirundu Fossil Forest. This was a spot I had been wanting to go to but I have no reason to ever go to this corner of the country (it’s on the Kariba road, a good chunk off the main road to Lusaka). So when I had the opportunity to manipulate my brother to dragging the whole family to the Chirundu Fossil Forest, I took it.
Little baby goats!
The place takes a bit of finding. It is right on the tarmac but is only marked by a small sign on the right side of the road as you are heading to Kariba. Like a lot of sites in Zambia, this site is pretty amazing to me because it is the ancient fossilized forest and people are just living there. Like, I saw people using some of the fossils to decorate their front yard. There were little goats playing on ancient logs. It was cute.
Once you find the marker you’re pretty free to wander around. I think there is nominally an entry fee but no one came to collect it, though a villager came to greet us. If you ask they’ll show you some of the bigger logs. You start to question which of the logs laying around are ancient and which are modern; the fossilized logs are so well preserved that you can see all the features of the tree rings. The logs all look like they just fell over maybe a month ago, not eons ago.
Since it was late in the day though and my dad and uncle didn’t really like driving at night, we looked around and hustled on out of there so we could make it back to Lusaka.
As part of the Livingstone portion of the Family Vacation, we decided to visit Chobe National Park to go on a safari. This was a whole-day experience and quite worth it. My dad did all the arrangements for the safari, and the safari vehicle picked us up at about 0730 to take us over to Chobe. Protip: bring your passports, as Chobe is over in Botswania. Another family we traveled with forgot their passports and were turned back to Zambia.
The safari came in two parts, with a boat safari in the morning and a driving safari in the afternoon. After getting over to Botswania and being served some coffee, we loaded up on the boat. Since there were 8 of us, the family got a boat to ourselves. Our tour guide was really awesome and very knowledgeable about the animals we were going to see on the Chobe River. Having been on a booze cruise on the Zambezi, I was a bit worried about how many animals we were actually going to see. I didn’t need to worry, but I was relieved when we spotted some velvet monkeys in a bush along the riverbank. We poked the boat over there for a closer look and some of the monkeys jumped on board.
A little further down the river is when we really started to spot all sorts of wildlife. Our guide spotted a tiny little kingfisher and we spent some time maneuvering the boat to get a good shot. Mom is a bird lover and was interested in getting a good picture, though not as interested as the guy in another boat with a much nicer camera. There were a lot of boats on the river but the animals didn’t seem to mind and it is not worth worrying about all the other tourists. The trick is just to enjoy the animals.
And enjoy we did! Just along the river we saw water buffalo, cranes, storks, hippos feeding in the daylight, crocodiles, riverbuck, kudu, impala, and lizards. The coolest part though was when some elephants decided to cross the river.
Watching the elephants swim across the river to get to some of the good river grass was pretty amazing to watch. We watched them as they approached the river, evaluated the merits of a swim, and then waded into the river, eventually sticking their trunks above the surface to snorkel. The seemed like they had a good time and were rewarded with grass.
We eventually docked and had lunch. In the afternoon we had a driving safari. On the driving safari, we saw a lot of the animals we had seen from the boat, but a major new addition were some giraffes. Elephants are cool, but giraffes are my favorite animals to see on a safari just because of how weird they look. I feel like elephants look about like you would expect an elephant to look, but the scale of giraffes throw you off. Especially when they run, they look like they are moving pretty slow but are in fact booking it, galloping off into the distance.
It was a long and pretty awesome day with some great tour guides and a lot of really cool animals. I know there are a lot of tourists there, but I highly recommend visiting Chobe if you have the chance.
Since I’m really a bit over a year into this whole Zambia thing, and it is summer vacation back in America, my family came to visit me and see what I do here. It was quite a little adventure.
The first major thing we did on the vacation was to go visit Livingstone. I suppose you can’t really come all the way to Zambia without visiting Livingstone. Plus, I figured Livingstone was probably a pretty good way to ease the family into the whole concept of Zambia. My family is actually a relatively experienced bunch of travelers, with my dad’s family having lived in several developing nations in his youth. Still, Zambia is an experience.
The vacation was with quite a group. The total list of people was both my parents, my brother, my grandma, my aunt and uncle, and my cousin Judy, and when you include me that is eight people rolling around Zambia. Later on, my girlfriend Lily joined us bringing the total to nine. To get all those people around we first rented a giant van, and then later two smaller 4x4s. The part I was most excited about when it came to this vacation was seeing people who hadn’t been to the country before interact with Zambia. Lemme tell ya, that involved a lot of complaining about roads.
But besides the roads the family really enjoyed Livingstone. One of the first things we did was see the falls of course. I had been before, but during low water, and while it wasn’t quite high water when we were there, there was a lot of water. They rented ponchos at the falls which mom took advantage of, but I depended on my safari jacket alone.
The most impressive traveler on the trip was my grandma, who I didn’t mention is 92. I was worried about her getting around but she had her walking shoes on and wound up doing everything we did on the vacation (well except for a Zambezi River “float,” but that was only because the seats on the raft didn’t have any backs; she enjoyed herself anyways).
One of the themes of this vacation was me dragging my family off to see things I normally wouldn’t be able to see, because they’re slightly off the beaten path and I don’t have a car here. The thing in Livingstone in this category was the Big Baobab Tree. This tree is apparently somewhere between 1000-2000 years old and the big attraction here is that it has stairs leading to a platform at the top. From the platform you can see the “smoke” from the falls and have a pretty good panorama of the surrounding areas. Worth a visit!
So this is one of the coolest pieces of appropriate technology I’ve seen in a while: a home-made diesel-powered high-speed corn husking machine. The guy who built it is rapidly becoming one of my favorite farmers. He lives up the valley from me and until recently I didn’t know how awesome his setup was. He came to my attention because he built some beehives and wanted me to take a look at them. He had heard I had been to the beekeeping workshop, but since I wasn’t around for a while he had gotten all the advice he needed from my counterpart. Development complete, let me tell ya. While we were there looking at the beehives, it turns out he had also just dug a fish pond. We went to go stock the fish pond today, and then he decided to show us his super awesome corn husker.
He took that beehive to the District Agricultural Show and won 80 kwatcha!
This dude is a pretty nifty engineer. He has a hand-cranked Chinese diesel engine that he can move around and hook up to a few different belt-driven machines on his property. The diesel is normally used for his hammer mill where he grinds up maize, but he also has a grinder for metal fabrication and who knows what else really. He also dug a pit that he can drive his car over to work on it (“costs 35 kwatcha in town,” he tells me) and the first time I met him he was working on a rifle.
The corn husker is not an exercise in subtlety. It is housed in an oil drum and has a feeder funnel welded onto the top of it. Going through the oil drum he has placed a very heavy-duty metal rod suspended on bearings that appear to be rescued from a car. The metal rod has spokes coming off of it, and below the spoked metal rod is a grating. As the corn cobs are fed in the top, they are simply beat mercilessly by the belt-driven spoked metal rod. The cobs flail around inside the husker, losing their kernels. The kernels drop through the metal grating while the corn husks get pushed towards the end by the additional corn cobs being dropped in the top. One person tends the corn husk discharge chute, keeping an appropriate back-pressure of corn husks and feeding not fully-husked, um, husks back in the top for another run-through.
The last thing the corn cob sees before being violently husked.
The whole thing was fantastic to watch and fantastically loud (hearing protection, alas, is not really a thing in this country, and least in the rural areas). The thing is certainly fast; most people do this by hand and the only other appropriate tech I’ve seen for this problem is a little metal die thing to make it easier to husk by hand. It is a four-person operation: one guy is tending the engine, another is feeding in corn cobs, the third is tending the corn husk discharge chute to keep the system operating well, and the fourth is shoveling corn kernels away from the kernel discharge chute. Cobs go in, cobs fly out the top, cobs spill out the end, kernels fall out in heaps. It’s pretty awesome.
I was really amazed to see what people can do when they have a problem they want to solve. The farmer there built it himself, and also appears to have come up with the idea himself. I asked if he had seen other people with something similar and he didn’t say he had. He’s not the first guy to invent a corn husker but he might be the first to build one out of car parts, an oil drum, and a Chinese diesel.
Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean by Abdul Sheriff (extremely illuminating)
So here is a story I only really recently dived into concerning the succession of Senior Chief Tafuna. If I haven’t mentioned the role of traditional leaders before, the traditional system of government is still very much in place. The Chiefs of Zambia are officially recognized by the government, and hold office in the House of Chiefs, which advises the government. In addition, Chiefs get a stipend from the government and act as an intermediary between the people in their chiefdoms and the government. In addition to those powers granted by the government, the Chiefs hold very real traditional power in their chiefdoms. People seek them out to settle disputes, Chiefs appoint village headmen which run the villages, Chiefs have a large role in land management and apportioning land use to different people, and command the respect of the people of Zambia. The power of Chiefs isn’t limited to the village; I have seen educated city-slickers get nervous in the presence of a Chief. And between the government stipend and the gifts people are required to bring to the Chief when visiting or asking him (or her!) to settle disputes, being a Chief can be a pretty lucrative gig.
This story begins in July of 2013, when the previous Senior Chief Tafuna died. As can be seen in the top diagram, Senior Chief Tafuna is the senior-most traditional leader among the Lungu people (I live in a Lungu village). Besides the fact that dying left the role of Senior Chief open, even the decision about where to bury the late Senior Chief caused contention, with one group objecting to burying him among the previous Senior Chiefs. Since he didn’t complete all of the traditional ceremonies when he was elected 45 years previously, they held he wasn’t really the Senior Chief.
Though the previous Senior Chief Tafuna died in July of 2013, it wasn’t until November of that year that the Lungu Royal Establishment elected a new Senior Chief Tafuna. I’ll note at this point that the names sometimes get confusing, because the name of the Chief is linked to the job, ie, although (in this case) Rafael Sikazwe Chipampe is elected, he is then known as Senior Chief Tafuna. The news articles from the election noted that there may have been some contention about who get elected Chief, but it was only the faintest of foreshadowing of what would happen next.
The first real grumbles of trouble came about a year later, when Chief Chitosi started to say that Rafael Chipampe (aka the elected Senior Chief Tafuna) was elected improperly. Without much detail, he complained that the Lungu chiefs did not follow the right channels in electing the new Senior Chief, and therefore Rafael Chipampe was not a legitimate Senior Chief. Meanwhile, the other Chiefs were saying to not entertain anyone other than Rafael Chipampe claiming to be Senior Chief Tafuna.
The crises became acute, however, when the government officially recognized Ben Mukupa Kaoma (aka Chief Mukupa) as the new Senior Chief Tafuna in 2016. This was contrary to the wishes of the Lungu Royal Establishment. Nonetheless, Chief Ben Mukupa Kaoma proceeded to Isoko (near Mpulungu) to assume the throne at the palace of Senior Chief Tafuna. This incensed Raphael Chipampe Sikazwe, the elected and acting Senior Chief Tafuna. This prompted Raphael Sikazwe to lead an angry mob which murdered Chief Ben Mukupa Kaoma.
This story interested me at first because of its own proximity on my life; when I first showed up to the village I had heard that our Chief was “in exile” but I didn’t really ask more questions than that. When I saw the story about “Senior Chief Tafuna sentenced to death” I took a closer look. Between the witchcraft stories and succession disputes over thrones, I am always vaguely amazed at the Game of Thrones sort of stuff that goes on around here. On the other hand, the number of people that died over this is very sad, but goes to show the influence that traditional leaders still have here in Zambia and the lengths people will go to in order to get these roles.
This past weekend I helped out at another volunteer’s HIV Football Tournament. This program was put on by Mel, and I attended to pick up any lessons I could about maybe running a similar event in my village. Overall it was a lot of fun and a lot of people got tested for HIV and learned about HIV prevention.
The event I attended was actually the culminating day of a series of football matches. It was the final match between the last two teams in the tournament. There were a total of six teams at the beginning of the tournament. Part of Mel’s rules to be able to play in the tournament is that you had to get tested for HIV. Although she plans to host a net ball tournament next year, she was focusing on men as her target demographic and football is a great way to get men interested in HIV. Throughout the course of the tournament, she also arranged to have testing available at the games, so she wound up getting 105 people tested, which is a pretty awesome accomplishment!
The arts group struts their stuff.
As the day of the finals dawned, we were a little worried because we found out morning of that the Chief’s daughter was getting married that same day. We were pretty worried that the wedding would depress turnout at the event, and towards the beginning of the event our fear seemed justified because the crowd was pretty small. Luckily though, Mel had arranged to have an arts group from Kasama come to perform at the event. Their main role was to put on a skit about HIV stigma and prevention, but they also did several dance performances. This was very useful for literally drumming up a crowd. As the arts group started to perform, people began to filter into the event from the surrounding areas and the local market, so before long there was a pretty large crowd.
Mel teaching about HIV & gender.
After the first dance we broke into two groups to teach about HIV. Putra and Thomas, the other two volunteers that came to help, took the younger part of the crowd and taught a GRS lesson about how ARVs work to protect the body from HIV. Mel and I took the older part of the crowd and talked about HIV and gender. The physical differences between men and women, along with the different cultural expectations between men and women affect their likelihood of getting the virus. Those topics aren’t really any different here in Zambia than the are back in the USA. One of the major points I talked about during the discussion is the fact that women with a lot of sexual partners are seen as promiscuous, while men with a lot of sexual partners are seen as manly. That means men can be a vector for HIV, as they spread it among their multiple partners. We try to emphasize that the best thing to do, if you choose to be sexually active, is to have one mutually faithful partner and to both get tested for STIs regularly.
After the lessons there was more dancing, and then lunch, and then we convened for the big event. Watching the football match was a lot of fun. There must have been hundreds of people watching. Not only was the football match probably the most interesting thing going on during a Saturday afternoon, but the stakes were pretty high because as part of the tournament Mel was offering prize money. The crowd was really into it. It was a little sad for us, because the team we were rooting for (the team one of Mel’s friends was playing on) lost 0-3, but the crowd brought a lot of energy. Whenever the other team scored the whole crowd would rush onto the field and run around before clearing out in about a minute to let the game continue. When the game was finally over the whole crowd paraded the winning team around the field and then back to Mel so she could award the prizes and thank everyone for coming.
After the game we filtered back to Mel’s place and cooked dinner. I had a really great time at the game and I think it was pretty awesome l how many people Mel got tested and taught about HIV. People had a lot of fun and I was glad to be part of it!
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (this one took a bit; it gets a little dry in the middle)
Since we’re halfway through our Peace Corps service, and to see more of Africa, my girlfriend and I took a vacation to Zanzibar. Going to Zanzibar is a pretty standard vacation for Peace Corps Zambia volunteers because there is a train that goes to Dar Es Salaam, and between there and Zanzibar it is an easy ferry ride.
Taking the train to Dar Es Salaam was pretty interesting. The only bad part about it was that it wound up being about 30 hours behind schedule by the time we got to Dar. But taking a train any distance was a new experience for the both of us, and the country we were traveling through is very pretty. We passed through mountains on the train, and then as we descended towards sea level things got more tropical. I spent a lot of time staring out the window, just checking out people’s gardens by the side of the track and taking in the big mountains and waterfalls you could see from the train. At one point the train passes through the Selous Game Reserve, and from the train we saw giraffe, wildebeest, and baboons, so that was really cool.
We arrived in Dar in the late afternoon and spent the night there so we could catch the ferry the next morning. Dar is a really impressive city coming from Zambia, and we ventured out to get some dinner after we had settled into the hotel. It was Ramadan when we were visiting, so after dark there was a lot of food and activity. The next morning we got on the ferry and that was a pretty smooth experience. The ferry ride takes about two hours to Zanzibar and I was having a grand ole’ time checking out all the dhows sailing around and just enjoying being on the ocean again. After arriving in Zanzibar we walked to our lodge and after settling in there we head out to explore Stone Town.
Stone Town is the big city on Zanzibar. I really enjoyed walking around there. It is a very old city, having been the main port of the major center of trade that was Zanzibar. It is comprised of a lot of narrow, winding alleyways filled with shops. Most of the shops were pretty touristy, but I still enjoyed taking in all the sights. One of the things I liked the best about it was the (I spent some time trying to avoid a cliché here to no avail) contrast between old and new in the harbor. You had these modern port facilities with a container ship unloading and a high-speed ferry docking and in between them dhows zooming around. When I woke up early in the morning and looked into the harbor there were guys paddling canoes in between a barge and a luxury yacht. There were also a whole lot of cats.
As for sights in Stone Town, the only real like sights sights we went to were the Sultan’s Palace Museum and the Slave Museum. The Palace Museum was pretty neat. It has a small but nice array of artifacts from Zanzibar’s heyday as a center for global trade under a sultanate. That same sultanate lasted until the ’60s when it was overthrown by the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar which still rules, which I only mention because that is an awesome name for a government. The museum also had some sweet carved chairs I was really jealous of. Oh, unrelated, but kinda nearby is the site of the old British consulate where Livingstone’s body passed through after he died near the Bangwelu Swamps.
The Slave Museum is on the current site of an Anglican church but on the former site of one of Zanzibar’s slave yards. Zanzibar’s major export back in the 1800s were slaves. The museum has a very informative display about Zanzibar’s role in the East Africa slave trade. They captured slaves pretty far into Africa, including where I live now here in Zambia. Part of the reason the London Missionary Society was in the area was to help halt the slave trade. Besides the displays, at the museum you can visit the dungeon/holding cell where they kept slaves while they were waiting to be sold, and a monument to the slaves that worked on Zanzibar or passed through the slave markets.
Slave memorial.
After two full days in Stone Town, we took a taxi over to the other side of the island to a lodge in Bweju. This was the beach portion of the vacation. The area over on the east side of the island is really popular for kite surfing, and we kinda did our math wrong because kite surfing weather isn’t really beach bumming weather. But still we were at a great lodge and we largely had the beach to ourselves.
I was interested in driving through the island to check out everyone’s gardens. Zanzibar is a lot more tropical than Zambia, but there were still a lot of similarities. I saw a lot of cassava being grown and even one field of maize. We passed through a large number of rice fields, and there were cows everywhere. What I was most excited about was my latest obsession, cocoyam (aka taro). Cocoyam was pretty popular on the island, and commonly intercropped with banana, which is pretty much the definition of tropical paradise. Besides these, Zanzibar had many different kinds of fruit trees (mango, coconut, banana, oranges, guava, breadfruit, star fruit, and so many more) and of course spices.
Man climbing a tree to get us a coconut. He also sang.
The big touristy thing we did while we were over in Bweju was go on a spice tour. Besides its history with slaves, Zanzibar is also famous for its spices. The spice trade was a major driver of the slave trade, with slaves being used to harvest labor-intensive spices like cloves. The spice tour we went on was at one of many small spice farms that specialize in these sorts of tours, and we saw a large variety of spices being grown. We saw vanilla, cloves, nutmeg, uh, and such a bewildering array of other spices I can’t remember them all. This experience was kind of peak touristy, but we were into it. We saw the spices, a man climbed up a tree to get us a coconut, we were fed a variety of tropical fruits, and had the opportunity to buy spices to woo our friends and families. They also made us sweet hats.
This past week I helped out with Camp GLOW. GLOW stands for Girls Leading Our World, and is a camp designed especially for girls. It is an amazing program and I am really glad I got to bring two girls to the camp.
The focus of Camp GLOW is on female empowerment and health. The camp serves to overcome two shortcomings faced by a lot of girls in these communities. First is the lack of opportunities for girls and the lack of empowerment for women. Women in a lot of cases are expected to fall into certain traditional roles, becoming wives and mothers at sometimes a very young age. The camp tries to teach girls that they can spend time focusing on themselves, finishing their education and deciding their own future before getting married and having kids if they so choose. The camp also teaches girls about health. Most girls (or people really) in Zambia don’t get a comprehensive health education, especially relating to topics like HIV and STIs. So the camp spends some time talking to girls about reproductive health, family planning methods, and ways to prevent HIV and STIs. A big focus there is teaching girls how to get what they want out of a relationship and negotiate things like condom use during sex. So overall it is a really great program.
A garden at the location we had Camp GLOW; I was excited about it because I was the only agriculture volunteer there and it was super nice. The lake is in the background.
We conducted the program at a fantastic location near Mpulungu on Lake Tanganyika. Another benefit of the camp is that the girls got to see the lake, and after sessions each day they would go swimming which they really enjoyed. Camp GLOW, like the other camps Peace Corps conducts, also gives the girls a chance to hang out with other kids from all over the province they normally wouldn’t meet, and for Camp GLOW gives the girls a chance to hang out with just other girls in an environment away from their parents or teachers.
The sessions were a mix of different things. For some of the sessions, we did activities from Grassroots Soccer. These activities use soccer-type games to teach a lesson. One of the games we played was “risk factors,” where cones represent different risk factors for getting HIV, like unprotected sex or mixing sex with alcohol. The girls dribble a ball around the cones and if they hit a cone, that is like doing one of those risk factors. At first, if the girls hit a cone they have to do a pushup, but as the activity progresses soon all the girls have to do pushups if one girl hits a cone. That drives home the effect that HIV has on the community.
Risk factors game.
We also did a variety of classroom sessions. The girls were very studious during all of these, and would copy notes from our flip charts after the sessions were over. They were all very excited to go home and teach their friends about the things they learned. There were also a variety of girls only sessions, where the male PCVs left to give the girls an all girl environment. From what I heard, these sessions were very interactive and gave the girls a chance to ask a lot of otherwise embarrassing questions they otherwise wouldn’t get a chance to ask or would be too scared to ask.
Girls copying notes all studious-like.
The camp also included a few different purely fun activities. On two nights we had bonfires and on one night we roasted marshmallows. I got to build the fires so I was pretty excited about that. The girls enjoyed the s’mores though let me tell ya if campers ever compare notes Americans will quickly get a reputation for being obsessed with s’mores. Not the worse national trait. The girls also had a lot of time to play netball and swim like I said before.
I made a really hot fire which actually isn’t great for marshmallows but I had fun and that’s what counts, right?
Overall it was a really fantastic week and the girls had a lot of fun and I think got a lot out of it. The camp is also supposed to be a lead-in to a weekly GLOW Club in each community, so I’ll see about starting one. At the very least, two girls from my community got to learn some stuff and hopefully they’ll teach their friends what they learned to really spread it around. One story I really liked is that one of the women that helped lead the course was a GLOW girl herself 10 years ago which inspired her to be part of an organization that helps teach more girls about health and HIV. There’s sustainable development for you.
The Ministry of Agriculture, as you might expect them to, hosts a lot of different sorts of events to promote agriculture and perform some extension work. Today I went to a Field Day hosted in a nearby village. The point of a Field Day is to let farmers see other farmer’s fields, see what is working and what isn’t, and spread around agricultural knowledge. This I am totally onboard with because there aren’t any better ways to improve these guys’ farming techniques than to show them another successful farmer in the flesh.
The village was about an hour walk away and my host dad and I rolled in around 0930 as everything was getting set up. There were a lot of people on motorcycles arriving, along with a variety of cars and Land Rovers in various states of repair, so the whole thing (to me) had a sort of Mad Max vibe but if Mad Max just wanted to throw a pretty okay dance party. Once we had a quorum we head out to the fields.
Farmer explaining the benefits of banana trees.
For the Field Day, they split this farmer’s place into different “stations.” At each station the farmer (and sometimes the sponsoring seed rep) talked about the type of crop they were growing and the sort of fertilization and weeding schedule they had used. They told us how long the crop we were seeing had been growing and what sort of profits they usually see from the crop. In my valley onion is a really popular and really profitable crop so a lot of farmers were interested in that. I was personally most impressed with a really nice banana orchard the farmer had set up by a furrow. Oh! I was also really impressed with the really nice concrete furrow with sweet little doors to direct the flow various places. That was really nice.
An intermission in the speeches brought out the dance team.
After the field presentations we went back to the soccer field where they had set up a tent and loudspeaker. At this point came the speeches. These were long. They were also in a mix of Mambwe and Bemba and spoken by native speakers for native speakers, so I didn’t get a whole lot out of them. One unfortunate habit of Zambian public gatherings is that people like to make sure every relevant party gets a chance to thank every other relevant party for their participation, which is totally nice and I’m not suggesting they shouldn’t do it or stop doing it, but it does make things take a while. The seed reps were also doing, as far as I could tell, seed giveaways so that is pretty cool. All I’m trying to say is that we were there for three hours and I hadn’t had lunch.
Luckily, the lunch problem was solved when we (the organizers and myself; my host dad was one of the organizers) went to the host farmer’s house and had a very nice lunch. They even had nshima made from orange maize, which we made sure to devour in a edible vote of support.
Bridge over the mighty Mwambezi on the way to the fish ponds.
The final activity of the day was to travel over to a nearby farmer’s ponds to check them out. He apparently had been doing fish farming before and was looking to get back into it, so was looking for pond renovation advice. His ponds were very nice and I only suggested a few little things, like adding screens to the inlets and making one shallow pond a bit deeper. My host dad actually did most of the talking which I was pretty proud of, seeing as I was a part in making him such a knowledgeable fish farmer. That sort of things really gives you high hopes for sustainability.
What with all my adventures largely centered around walking off into the bush, and my obvious interest in agricultural systems, I’ve started to notice a lot about land use. I’m not exactlybreakingnew intellectual territory here, but one thing to realize about the area is that there really isn’t any “virgin” land. Agriculture has been going on in this region for at least a millenia or two, and pretty much everywhere that can be farmed has been farmed at some point.
In Religious and Ethical Values in the Proverbs of the Mambwe People, Fr. Andrzej Halemba describes the cultivation system:
“In the forested areas… to enrich the soil with the requisitie potassium and phosphorus, the Mambwe people have for generations used a method of shift cultivation called citemele. This requires the soil to be improved with the ashes from burnt branches and trees. This allows fields to be utilised for the period of three to five years, whereafter the people set off in search of new richly forested land.”
So there is a general pattern to land use around here. The most amazing thing to me is how easily you can see the evidence of prior land use all over the place, mostly in the form of ridges. As I must have described by this point, most of the forest in this area is a short sort of scrub forest. There are few or no large, towering trees. From my readings on the Stevenson Road, this appears to always have been the case (though in that article they blamed termites). I don’t know if it is just the type of tree, but it seems to me like it could be from the cycle of land use.
Since it is a cycle, I’ll just start with cultivated land. After land has been cleared, ridges are formed and crops planted. The same fields are used for a period of years, and from the two growing seasons I’ve seen it looks like similar crops are planted in the same fields for multiple years (ignoring intercropping). Here is a cassava field:
After a while the field is left fallow. The below picture is of a field very recently left fallow. Turns out it is way hard to photograph ridges in a way that makes them super obvious in pictures, but in the below picture the grass is more or less growing on the ridges. That gap in the middle of the grass is the area between the ridges. From almost any distance away it just looks like a grassy field, but if you walk over the land it is obvious there are ridges there.
After the field is left fallow for a few years, the forest takes back over. Again in the below picture are some ridges, starting in the lower right corner and center of the picture and extending off into the distance. This stretch of forest isn’t exactly old growth but it is pretty well developed, and still there are ridges. Really the whole point of this blog post is me expressing how amazed I am that ridges stick around for so long, even as a forest grows over them.
The forest isn’t just useless to the people; beside letting the area regain some nutrients, the villagers use the forest to gather wood for cooking and building. The forest also provides a location for bees and other polinators to live, and although bushmeat isn’t a very large part of the diet in my village that is also a bonus. When it comes time to start the cycle again, they’ll clear a patch of forest. The trees are chopped down and then used to make charcoal. They then sell the charcoal or keep it for their own fuel use.
In the middle background there is a mound of charcoal burning (or I guess really wood being turned into charcoal).
The LIFE program has at least some focus on reducing climate change and reducing deforestation. These are noble goals (and I do see a lot of news articles about deforestation in Zambia), but on a small scale at least I think this method of land use is probably pretty efficient. Even with charcoal making/burning, these guys have a way smaller carbon footprint than almost anybody in the West.
Besides ridges, there are a few other indications of land use. Sometimes you run across old foundations of houses or other buildings. I am always amazed when archeologists dig up an ancient city that a whole city could become buried, but seeing how quickly things can get overgrown and buried it isn’t too much of a surprise:
As a final example, the below picture is of a furrow (this whol article I kept typing “furrow” when I meant “ridge” but hey now I’m onto furrows). It’s an old furrow my host dad plans to refurbish, and he has cut away the grass to get to it. Seeing this sort of stuff in the modern-day world really helps to put into perspective how easy it is to miss the signs of “advanced” civilizations when you’re talking about indigenous cultures. If you’re thinking about cultures like the indigenous peoples of the Americas, they might not have left large stone cities, but mastering irrigation and agriculture is pretty advanced (to be clear here, I’m not patronizing the villagers I live with, but trying to put the civilizations we only know about via archeology in context) and sometimes the only signs of it are going to be a very shallow ditch in the field. That’s something to think about.
Pat in the World 
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