Culture and Fashion

Ackim - who runs the bar at the Marula lodge where i stay - started doing this job a couple of months ago. He is in his early twenties and has been born and brought up in this area of Eastern Zambia. He has therefore not been in close contact with Europeans (Mzungu) before. So he was not well prepared for the shock of seeing women in bikinis lying around the pool. In Zambia, noone exposes skin between waist and knee, and for a woman to do so in particular is an invitation to a man. He found it therefore a bit unsettling seeing bare thighs - but luckily not too bad - because after all, as he put it -  ‘white flesh is rather unattractive isn’t it!’ So no matter how hot the weather - legs remain covered. 

On the other hand - there is absolutely no shyness about exposing breasts, and hearing that white women would hesitate to feed babies in public amazes Zambians. So different cultures have very similar concepts of dignity and modesty but completely different ways of   

expressing them. 

One of the most important symbols which women here use to demonstrate style and status is by using elaborate hair styles, often involving wigs or hair extensions. The majority of women who have a job wear these. They usually need doing every couple of weeks or so and involve a lot of time (4 hours or so) and expense - from about 10 US$ per month upwards.  And then we are in a seriously hot country! 

But then they do not spend a lot on make up and handbags!

Bushwalk

I am working at Kakumbi clinic which serves the people who live in the flattish land of the Luangwa valley, which is a floodplain of mostly productive agricultural land on which the local people grow their maize, cotton, rice, and pumpkins. 

Further away from the river the land is rocky, sandy, and hilly and is mixed grass and woodland. The status of this land is as a so called “Game Management Area’ , it is not actually in the National Park but the animals and trees are protected. There are very few or no tracks or paths and no signs. It really is wild bush, with a huge variety of indigenous trees. 

With some local mzungu (whites) I set off early on Sunday morning to explore this landscape. After a serious 4 wheel drive trip fording some streams we set off into the bush,   

watched by a large family of wart hogs - which are certainly the most cheerful animals in africa.  

Some of the time we could follow elephant or buffalo tracks, but often we were stepping from rock to rock up and down some very bumpy terrain. I spent some time nervously scanning the grass for snakes - a total waste of time!  We could usually see the next hill  

often around 50 to 100 yards away - but seldom further than that.

At regular intervals we could see sawn off tree stumps and usually nearby there would be 

a saw pit. This is a rectangular hole about 10 feet  deep, 3 feet wide and 10 feet long. It will have been dug by hand through the rocky ground and then the hardwood tree trunks will have been rolled into place and cut into planks using a double ended hand saw with one man at the top and one at the bottom. After this prodigious job the planks are carried out of the area by hand across the rocky and hilly terrain. 

But no longer- Steve Tolan, an ex UK policeman who is with us on the walk, has caught some of the culprits and as a result they have decided to stop logging in this area. 

 After a couple of hours we reached some the highest point in the area. and climb the highest rock and take a few pics and enjoy the view.  We decide to do a bit of a loop along a ridge and then go back to the car from there. We see rock hyrax(closest relative to elephants!) and find a cave which was inhabited hundreds of years ago and has old and faint paintmarks which have been attributed to the unknown inhabitants - possibly pygmies - who were here before the present zambian race. We have a bit of a rest and head for home, which we know will involve crossing a small river which meanders back and forth across our intended path. 

So we cross the river and then come to it again- we think it must be a loop in the river and expect to meet another crossing soon. But we don’t - which is odd! as are we not supposed to be getting to the other side? We suppress our doubts and press on. Then we see a rocky outcrop and the truth dawns slowly. We have spent the past hour going in a circle! 

Cue a rest and then luckily there is a place where we can climb up and get a view. Using the sun to guide us is tricky - as it is shining from directly overhead. But we try to keep on the same heading nonetheless and eventually to our great relief Steve announces that he is on familiar terrain and that we should just keep on for about 2 more miles and the car would appear. 

Which it indeed did! So only a couple of hours behind schedule we got home. Somewhat tired!

Guns, Germs and Steel -relevant to Africa today?

In his iconic book -  Jared Diamond (my hero) postulates that civilisation developed first in the Middle East and then in Europe because of the presence of easily domesticable tools in the form of plants (wheat) and animals (cows and horses). Many other parts of the world lacked them and hence never moved beyond a mostly nomadic hunter-gatherer existence. It was luck - not any particular culture and certainly not any difference in genes  (the human race is in fact very genetically homogenous). The presence of the right plants and animals enabled population growth, and a society in which a proportion of the population were spared from the need to work in the fields and they then became administrators, inventors etc. and that led to slow and gradual economic development which took centuries. 

Rural Africa’s problem is how to get the tools to develop, and how to short cut the process so that it takes generations rather than millenia. This part of Zambia is still a basic agricultural society, with a productive food crop in the form of maize (that came from America), but no beasts of burden, or their modern equivalent - the tractor.  Fields (usually around half an acre) are tilled by hand using a sort of mattock - which has a metal spade type blade at right angles to a wooden shaft. Weeding is done literally by hand. Fertilisers are used very little. Many families main sustenance is the maize and ground nuts they harvest at the end of the rainy season - which must last them for the whole year. They also try to grow a cash crop such as cotton to get cash to buy and maintain their bicycles and buy airtime for their phones. If they have poor rains, such as happened last year - they run out of maize well before the next harvest and those who cannot somehow borrow or sell their labour somewhere in order to buy flour (which of course has gone up in price) end up going hungry. 

As well as the minority that are not getting enough food, there are many who cannot afford transport to get to hospital, or HIV clinic to get their drugs, they cannot afford to send their children to school or if they can, they cannot afford to buy books for them. They cannot afford candles or lamps or books so the kids cannot read or do homework, so they are less likely to pass their school exams and get a reasonable job in one of the lodges. Some girls are tempted or forced into prostitution, which contributes to the appalling HIV prevalence, and some people stand in crocodile infested rivers fishing with nets. If the rains are delayed ( as they have been this year) there is major anxiety that things might be even worse next year.

So much for the idyll of the rural life. Rural poverty is depressing, and many people have tried to help Africa short cut the long painful development that Europe went through and give them a leg up to civilization with various forms of aid and assistance. Some things have clearly been helpful - roads and electricity and a legal framework, for example - some things probably harmful - did colonialism teach paperwork and obedience rather than the entrepreneurial spirit? Some of the money that could build capital in this society is ‘wasted’ on phones and satellite TV . Tourism does bring money into the area, with the safari guides being the top of the social ladder. But the overwhelming impression for me is that even with the tools that can lead to development - it is by no means inevitable, and things could easily get worse rather than better, despite all the Aid.

Africa and the harms of progress

Today a car stops outside the clinic and a man is carried into the small ward and onto a bed. He is only just conscious and smells of alcohol. The story is that he has driven off the road into a tree. There are no obvious major injuries. I am concerned that he may have had a head injury, and tell them he needs to be taken to the nearest hospital an hour away, although i know that they will only be able to provide basic care. 

Then the police arrive in a pick up. In the back lies an obviously dead body of a young woman. She was unlucky enough to be in the way when this drunk man lost control of his car. My sympathy for my patient evaporates. He begins to wake up and complains of pain in his ribs which are likely to be broken. Because of a possible head injury I should not give him painkillers, which is good because I do not want to. This is the second fatal car crash ( I avoid the word accident because I don’t think it is really) in this small area in a week. Last time it was an overtaking car taking out an oncoming cyclist. 

I ask the staff at the clinic what is likely to happen in terms of punishment. The general answer is that the justice system does not really work and that he is likely to be able to pay people off quite easily to evade sanctions. Furthermore it seems that the common way to get a drivers licence here is just to pay for it with no instruction or testing!

Transport is a big problem for most people in Zambia. There are very few private cars and people take minibuses or cycle, or in many cases they walk long distances along the verge of roads that are only just wide enough for 2 vehicles, but not wide enough for 2 vehicles and a line of people walking along both sides. There are lots of rivers which cannot be crossed in the wet season and few bridges, 

which means long detours. 

So it seems particularly cruel that people with little access to cars themselves have to suffer the risk of injury and death from the small minority of car owners, some of whom are careless in the extreme, have never been taught to drive, and whose cars are often in poor shape. If an accident occurs, the ambulance service is non existent and the medical care very basic, so the risk of death or permanent disability is high, and if you are disabled there is no safety net to provide for you, apart from your family who probably simply cannot afford to. 

 As so often in Africa - the problem is easy to diagnose - but  hard to treat.