Polygamy, Witchcraft and Jump Over the Stick

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In Southern Province of Zambia, the majority of the people here are of a certain tribe called the Tongans (there are 72 other tribes in Zambia). Tongan is a culture that I have immersed myself in, a language I have learnt to speak and a people of whom I have become so attached. Culture is a very deep concept and it would take hundreds of pages to just scratch the surface of it, but I’ve written a few things that I’ve observed about that culture that I thought would be of some interest. Of course, these are only my perceptions of the culture and only being here for less then a year, I have definitely haven’t understood things entirely the way they probably actually are.

People

Tongan people, comparative to many of the other tribes here in Zambia are very friendly and considerably more passive. They are quite distinct in their opinions from other Zambian tribes, especially political, and they feel they have been somewhat repressed by some of the other tribes as they have been displaced from their lands on a number of different occasions.

Housing

Most Tonga people usually don’t live in what we would think of typical African villages back in Canada with maybe 50 - 200 small grass roof huts. Instead, because the majority of them are pastoralists (meaning they raise cattle), families typically all live together in one small area with the next family usually located some distance away after a large open field for grazing. In a sense, it is sort of like rural Alberta in a lot of areas with large farms separating different families. However, much different then back in Alberta where there would probably be one big house for the family to stay in with many different rooms inside that house, here there are about half a dozen small grass roof one room huts that different members of the families sleep in, with other huts used for cooking and eating in and still other ones used for storing things in.

Marriage

Traditional Tongan culture is polygamist so many of the male farmers I work with have more then one wife (one farmer I’ve met had 9 wives and 80 direct children!). This was a bit of a shock for me at first and took some time to accept and adapt to. Being educated in a culture that strongly emphasizes women empowerment and equality, I was a little bit skeptical and even condoning of it at first. But after living with and learning about the polygamist system, I’ve decided to take 3 wives of my own………..ahem ………. I mean I still don’t completely agree with it, but now I have a deeper understanding and acceptance of how it operates and realize that women can still be empowered and have somewhat equal rights within it.

Family

You might be wondering about why Derrick, the farmer I wrote about in my other entry, has so many orphaned children staying with him. Although there are always many complex reasons, there are two main ones that stick out. The first and by far largest reason is because of the HIV/AIDS pandemic here in Southern Africa. 1 in 5 people here in Zambia is infected with the virus and the repercussions of the disease are having massive effects on all areas of the country. One of which is that it is killing a large number of the working aged / parenting population leaving a hugely faltering economy and millions of orphaned children without any parents to take care of them. I have visited a few orphanages while being here and those visits have been some of the saddest days I’ve ever had to deal with.

The second reason which is partially a result of the first is that in the Tonga culture, as well as many other African ones, there is a much more communal culture. I feel there are both positives and negatives to this way of life as there are with any type of culture. On a positive note, there are fairly strong family ties and people tend to take care of one another whenever someone is in trouble. However, from what I’ve seen here, most of the time you end up getting a couple people working really hard and being extremely generous, while you have a much larger amount of people taking advantage of that generosity by not working hard and free riding off others. Whereas in a more western culture, independence is touted very highly and people are shown respect for how well they are able to take care of themselves, here this is not the case. It is culturally acceptable here to be highly dependent on other people and expect to be taken care of by them and therefore what is often talked about here is that there is a culture of dependence. Again, the root causes of this dependence is a complex issue, but in my opinion it is a product of a mixture of having traditionally collective societies, a long colonial past, followed by a long socialist past, followed by a long development charity past. All of which emphasize that there is always going to be someone else who is going to take care of you.

In practical terms, this culture of dependence has far reaching ramifications. On a large scale, there is talk about how Africa is becoming completely dependent on aid money from other countries for its survival instead of figuring things out for themselves. On a more micro-level, anybody who is seen as doing well, all of a sudden gets bombarded by other people needing them to take care of them. When I first arrived here, I thought that the reason I was constantly being asked for money was only because I have white skin and these people were so used to white people giving things to them that it just was a natural thing to do. But being here longer, I’ve seen that it isn’t even so much the white skin as it is just being someone who is better off. My Zambian co-worker, Joshua, is asked for money way more often then I even am just because he has a good job that pays well. In the same manner, Derrick is seen as being a farmer who is doing fairly well. Therefore, when people in his family die (often because of AIDS), or just if someone doesn’t want to take care of their kids anymore and they abandon them (which happens more then you would think), he is the one who is expected to take care of all the orphaned children.

Life

I also have spent some time living with some various Tongan families, working on the fields, fetching water, burning bricks and building structures all to better understand what it was actually like being a Tongan farmer. After working in the fields in the morning, we would sit in the shade under a big tree in the hot afternoons and drink this sweet lumpy maize drink called Chibwantu of which I’ve gained a great taste for. We would again go back into the fields in the afternoon for work and then end around dinner time. As with most other Zambians, dinner ALWAYS consists of Nsima (a doughy maize staple), as well as some vegetables such as cabbage or rape (canola leaves) and some chicken, beef or fish.

After dinner I would usually play fun games with all the kids such as “Jump over the stick” and “Throw rocks at the snakes”. Then at night, we would all sit around the fire while we played drums and danced and sang songs. On a few occasions, I would badly attempt to use my broken Tongan to tell exciting stories and fables from back home to the kids and then they would tell me the many stories of WITCHCRAFT!

Witchcraft

Witchcraft is a major belief here and strongly affects the way people view life here. I’ve had troubles understanding it completely and even when I feel I do, I have even more troubles explaining it to others. It isn’t exactly the hocus pocus pile of fluff that I initially wrote it off as in the beginning. Instead, I would now correlate it much more closely with peoples faith and their need to be able to describe why things happen. So whereas our western societies have religions and science to attempt to explain the unexplainable, the Tongans have witchcraft. It usually can explain why somebody gets sick, why there is a poor harvest and why someone’s house burns down. Witchcraft is often a product of someone else’s jealousy and that jealous person ends up casting a spell on the person they are jealous of. Now I am pretty lucky here because most witchcraft can only be cast within your own family and unless my own family wants to cast a spell on me (Steve, you’ll get a beating when I get home if you do), I’m fairly immune. You can try casting a spell on someone of a different family, however very often that spell gets reversed back to you because you don’t know how strong a witch in another family is compared to you, thus making the venture quite risky. But almost all the occurrences of witchcraft that I’ve been told about have been within ones family.

Now witchcraft isn’t just something you find just with the very rural traditional people. I’ve met many university educated and even Ph D. holding Tongans who are strong Christians and live in the city but who still explain many things using it. Especially when that person gets sick and they don’t get better after going to a regular hospital, they instead go to the local witchdoctor who gives them remedies to remove the spells cast on them and according to them they are all of a sudden cured. I maybe feel that sometimes what I would call “bad luck” or just a strong gut feeling, is exactly the same thing the Tongans feel, but they just term it witchcraft. I feel that with witchcraft, as with many other cultural things here, on the surface it’s pretty easy to dismiss them as being silly or unjustified. But once you start to integrate in a little bit more, you start peeling back layer after layer and discovering that there are usually very intelligent and meaningful reasons for it’s existence.

I could probably go on and on and on talking about this sort of stuff and I know you are all begging to read more because I never seem to write enough…..=^), but I figure if I told you everything, then you would have no reason to write me back with questions or even to come and visit and experience it all for yourself. Because the best way to learn is to do and then to teach. Overall, the Tongan people have been extremely open and welcoming me into their lives and have taught me a tremendous amount about life and about myself. Walking down the streets, almost everyone knows me by my Tongan name Moonga and often people will stop and point at me saying “Ah, this man, he’s a real Tongan man” as we grab each others hands and hold them walking down the path talking of football and the latest Choma town gossip. I know that when I go home, it is going to be these cultural moments that I look back on, cherish and miss. But I also know, that as long as I occasionally boil and pound up some maize meal in a pot every so often, I will never forget them.

Thanks for listening.

=^)

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Photos

What we call a flyswatter, they call a spirit chasser awayer
The traditional Shiamunenga ceremony begins with someone getting possesed with spirits, taking off all their clothes and running around telling everyone about how the future rains and harvest are going to be.... sorry guys, but this is a PG rated blog

Lwasyoma (Trust), Lwyando (Love) and Junior (Junior)
My coworker Joshua's three sons including his brand new set of TWINS!

Aren't they a little young for...
Traditional ceremonies almost always involve children dancing (read: madly thrusting hips and grinding together while their parents hoot, holler and stick money down their shirts and pants)

mmmm, worms
Funny thing is that right after I pretended to eat this worm, the kid next to me asked if I wanted to eat "that" worm as he pointed to the biggest snake I've seen here yet. I jumped up onto a concrete slab as everyone around me laughed

Jump over the stick game!
I didn't want to embarass myself so I decided to limbo the stick instead.....good thing falling on my head isn't embarassing.