Fresh Air Fiend (20 page)

All the way to Lukulu, we saw people in the distance crossing the sandy floodplain using ox-drawn sleds, with heavy wooden wishbone-shaped runners skidding along the sand. And sometimes—speaking of appropriate technology—a dugout canoe was pulled across the sand by a pair of oxen.

Some of these conveyances were piled high with vegetables or firewood, to sell at the market, but several held very solemn-looking people.

"
Adwala,
" one of the ox drivers said to me, of the passenger. He's sick.

They were on their way to see the only doctor for many miles around, Peter Clabbers, who runs Lukulu Hospital. I made a point of seeing him myself when I got to the town, which was small but sprawling on a bluff that overlooks the river: a Catholic mission, several schools, a busy market, and an even busier hospital.

"I see one new HIV patient almost every day," Dr. Clabbers told me as we walked through the clean but spartan wards of Lukulu Hospital. Dr. Clabbers, from Holland, has been at the hospital, one of the best on the upper Zambezi, for three years. He told me that AIDS and HIV cases were continuing to climb ("I used to see two or three a week"), and that tuberculosis, cholera, and meningitis patients were also numerous. There were some violent injuries, too.

"I see the victims of land mines occasionally," Dr. Clabbers said. The border of Angola was less than eighty miles away, and for almost twenty years the
UNITA
forces of Jonas Savimbi had been waging a guerrilla war in these outlying provinces against the elected Angola government. Upriver, near where the Zambezi looped through Angola from its boggy origin in Zambia, life was still disrupted by the effects of the war. Many live explosives lay scattered near villages and in the bush.

"And now and then I see some young boy who's blown his hand off after finding a grenade and playing with it," the doctor added.

Leprosy—Hansen's disease—has been largely cured, though there are still some lepers in Lukulu, both outpatients and residents in the local leprosarium. I met a man in his sixties, Moses, who was severely afflicted—he had lost most of his extremities—but he was good-humored.

He said, "My problem was that I spent fifty-three years in a village being treated by a local doctor." That was a euphemism for a witch doctor.

As he was a Lunda, I asked him whether it was true, as people said, that the Lunda ate rats. "They do, but I don't," Moses said.

The Lukulu market was bustling, and like many riverside markets on this part of the Zambezi, its bright colors were an effect of the used clothes lying in enormous piles, draped on racks, or flapping like pennants on long lines. In Zambia the clothes are generally known as
salaula
(secondhand), because they originated as charitable donations in the United States and Europe. They are sold cheaply in bales and sorted by clothes vendors—racks of old blue jeans, heaps of T-shirts, dresses, skirts, and shorts. They are still serviceable and are so inexpensive their existence has just about destroyed the indigenous Zambian textile industry.

At the fish market, Julius Nkwita was selling small piles of dried fish, about 60 cents a handful. Sometimes he swapped his fish for cups of flour or an item of clothing. He might have been one of those men in the dugouts I had seen on the river earlier that morning, paddling to the market.

Julius had five children, ranging in age from three to fourteen. His wife and four of his children were in his home village, some distance from the river, while he stayed in his seasonal fishing camp—just a reed hut—with his oldest son, fishing intensively.

"I camp on the riverbank," he said. "I catch fish, dry it at my camp, and when I have enough I come here by the river to sell it."

I was curious to know whether he had made his own dugout canoe. No, he said, he had bought it, "for two cows." A cow in these parts was used as payment for big-ticket items like canoes, sleds, and brides. A twelve-man canoe, a seventeen-footer, might cost three cows.

Julius sold bottle fish and large bream, tiger fish, and the catfish known as barbel, smoke-dried like kippers. Fishing remains the primary occupation for men on the upper Zambezi. In the course of traveling much of the river's length, I was to see not just nets and fishing tackle, but an almost unimaginable variety of fish traps—all sizes, from the smallest, which resemble narrow lampshades, to the largest, five feet long, shaped like large bulging baskets and strong enough to hold the angriest fish. The women use the river to water their gardens, and because there is always water in the Zambezi, it is possible for gardens to flourish year-round.

"Oh, yes, we have many hippos," Julius told me. He said that hippos gobbled the gardens. Out canoeing, he was occasionally attacked by a hippo.

"What do you do if a hippo goes after you?"

"Swim away from the canoe," he said, explaining that the hippo concentrates on the canoe rather than the people in it. The animal single-mindedly tips over or destroys the boat when it feels its territory or its attack zone has been entered by something alien.

Down by the river, at a Lukulu landing, people were being ferried to and from the far bank in canoes. Some boys were swimming, and the river's muddy darkness made it seem ominous.

"Aren't you worried about crocodiles?"

They laughed and said, "It is not deep here!"

That did not reassure me, yet within a few weeks I found myself looking for midstream sandbanks where I could swim—if my brief, urgent thrashing could be called swimming. Crocodiles tend to ignore canoes but do attack humans—people bathing, doing laundry, washing dishes—in the river. The very shallow spots and sandbanks are generally free of crocodiles—and hippos, too—though it is rare to see anyone swimming in the Zambezi.

After spending a few days around Lukulu and at the fishing camp at Ngulwana, I set off with Petrus Ziwa in a four-wheel-drive vehicle over the Luena Flats.

"My mother was from Malawi," Petrus said, explaining why he, a Zambian, spoke Chichewa so well. At sixty-two, he had far exceeded the average life span of a Zambian male, which was a mere thirty-six. A Jehovah's Witness, hoping for my eventual conversion, he tried to hasten the process by quoting Scripture. He had an abiding fear of snakes; even on the hottest nights he slept with his face covered, usually wrapped in a towel.

"Egyptian cobras and black mambas," he said. "They are strong, Daddy."

This "Daddy" was interesting. The term of respect in Chichewa is
Bambo,
Father, but Petrus always translated this "Daddy," as in, "The battery is dead, Daddy" or "It is too hot, Daddy" or "Please give me your watch, Daddy."

 

In this season, the hot, beautiful floodplain was a broad expanse of sand scattered with clumps of fine golden grass. We headed south along the sand, using a compass. Our destination today was Mongu and the Litunga's royal compound on the Zambezi canals at Lealui. At Mbanga, a small collection of buildings and mango trees in the middle of the plain, I asked a man how far it was to Mongu.

"By foot, it is ten hours," he said. "By vehicle, I don't know."

There was no bus because there was no road. We passed wishbone sleds—one with a load of cassava, another carrying an elderly granny, the last with a sick person, all of them pulled by plodding oxen in the hot sun.

"Going to Mongu," they said. Mongu was a real town on a real road, with a post office, a hospital, and a market. But still, it took a whole day to get there from here on foot.

Everything was measured differently, in the currency of cows or the distance of foot-hours. The separate notion of time and distance was pleasant, and its simplicity was strangely relaxing, modifying my sense of urgency. Here, among people for whom not much had changed in many generations, whose expectations were modest, I was happiest taking one day at a time, as they did, and feeling lucky to be so near the life-giving river, a source of food and water.

"A roller, Daddy." Petrus was pointing upward.

It was a racquet-tailed roller, tumbling across the sky toward the Zambezi floodplain to impress a possible mate as we traveled slowly through the deep sand, in places higher than our hubcaps. Other birds with bright plumage, white-fronted and carmine bee-eaters, flew past us. I had seen their colonies on the vertical sides of the Zambezi banks upriver. By midmorning, as the day grew hotter, we seemed to be the only thing moving on the sand, though of course hawks hovered, and vultures, too. The big game, lions and elephants and buffalo, were on the far side of the river, ranging across the Liuwa Plain, where the dark line of trees at the western horizon marked the course of the Zambezi.

"This is all the Litunga's land," a herdsman named Vincent Libanga told me along the way. He said he walked sixteen miles to the river to buy bream or dried
ndombe,
catfish.

Vincent spoke of the Litunga with great respect, yet he had never seen his king. The Litunga kept to himself, did not circulate even in Mongu, his nearest town, which we reached in the late morning. It was an unprepossessing place: its roads had potholes and its shops contained little merchandise; but it was also an administrative center, with schools and fuel depots, and so it was a hub of activity. Within minutes of arriving I was offered a leopard skin by a whispering poacher, or perhaps I might be interested in buying some ivory? I said no, and before I could register my disapproval, the young fellow slipped away.

The center of Mongu was high enough for one to see, across five miles of marsh, the royal settlement of Lealui.

"How will we get down that terrible road?" I asked, looking ahead at the viaduct of crumbly mud.

"We will go through the marsh instead, Daddy."

It was stickier, and it was slow, but the route worked. In contrast to Mongu, Lealui was a peaceful, shady place of twittering birds on a low-level plain crisscrossed by canals. The royal compound, dating from about 1866, is near the river, which is central to the Litunga's rule and his rituals, the most elaborate being the annual royal progress, called the Kuomboka, from his summer to his winter quarters. At the end of the rains, when the river is in flood, the royal barge and the attendant canoes are paddled with great ceremony from one palace to the other, Lealui to Limalunga, through the system of canals.

The palace buildings of the Litunga were large and solid, some with tin roofs, others thatched, all of them stately in spite of their plainness. They were surrounded by a tall reed enclosure, like a stockade, with pointed stakes. The gateway was not guarded, but out of respect no one ventured near it. In the leafy center of the settlement, behind the royal storehouses and the council house, the king's subjects and petitioners were dozing under the trees. Some people had obviously been there for quite a while and had set up makeshift camps, where they were cooking, tending goats, and looking after children.

Virtually the whole of the Western Province, an area the size of New York State, once belonged to the Litunga; to his half-million subjects today, it still does. As a consequence, this province of the Republic of Zambia pays for its monarchist sentiments by being neglected by the central government in Lusaka. The roads are poor or nonexistent, the schools are substandard, and many of the hospitals are run by foreign doctors. The result of this neglect is an air of independence and self-sufficiency, and of course underdevelopment. It looked and felt to me precisely like the rural Africa I had first seen more than thirty years ago.

I was eager to see this reputedly urbane king. He had been one of Zambia's ambassadors before the sudden death of his father, the late Litunga, in 1987 and his subsequent coronation. The Zambezi is a long river, and this man rules a third of it, and there are no other kings on its banks. It seemed to me no small thing to be the king of the Zambezi.

"You must first introduce yourself to the Ngambela," the court historian, Jonathan Mashewani, told me. "Court historian" was an informal title. He was a young man in his mid-twenties with a tattered notebook under his arm, hoping somehow to win a scholarship to study abroad.

He showed me to a small compound where a tall man introduced himself. "I am Maxwell Mutitwa, the Litunga's prime minister." His title, Ngambela, was translated as "the king's chief councilor," and it was his task to interview me to determine whether I had a worthy motive in visiting the king.

He was big and fleshy and heavy-faced, with the easy manner and the soulfulness of a blues singer. His house was poor, just a mud hut with religious mottoes tacked to the wall.

"I am the Litunga's spokesman," the Ngambela said. "He is like a baby. I have to speak for him." He lamented the opportunism of elected politicians and assured me that a monarchy with a chiefly system was the ideal form of government.

"A monarchy is a family, you see," he said. "People love their chiefs more than they do their president. Because it is in their blood—the same blood. We are all related. We are one people."

A chief was not a despot, he said; a chief was controlled by the people.

"Give me an example," I said.

"Chiefs have to listen. If a chief makes a mistake, he will be told so by the people. But if a commoner comes to power, it is very hard to convince him that he is wrong when he makes a mistake." He gestured to the door of his hut. "Look out there in my compound."

I looked out the side door and saw about fifty people.

"All of them want to speak to me." He laughed. "They want to see the Litunga, they need help, they need advice. I am their prisoner!"

The Ngambela approved my visit but said that I also had to be presented to the Kuta, which was the council of chiefs.

"If this is going to take time," I said, "I will have to make camp."

"You must ask the Kuta for permission to camp here."

It was late in the afternoon before I was granted an audience with the Kuta. This council was composed of nine elderly men, the sentries of a threadbare monarchy, sitting on old creaking chairs propped on ceremonial straw mats in an unswept stone building, the council house. I sat some distance away on a low chair and thanked them for their attention.