Curious Rituals of the Valley People (Part 2)

Honouring our ancestors


Uncle A decided to take to take us on the river. This is always a treat, not just because Uncle A has a fine aluminium flat-bottomed boat, perfect for this hippo-studded river, but also because he is simply a fine person to be in the bush with. Safe, experienced, deeply in knowing with the place, its rhythms and warning signals. Just like his father, Norman Joseph Carr.

We all have different levels of literacy in landscapes. When I am at the ocean, I always feel a slight tip and swell of strangeness. I love it, but I am not literate in oceanscape, not like I am in the bush. I can't read a shorebreak like my other half can. And when we are in the bush, and we wake in the night to a strange belly roar echoing across the dambo, it is he who will sit upright and say, 'wha wazzat?' and I will mutter in my semi sleep 'hippo' or 'elephant', depending on the exact timbre of the roar, trumpet or bellow. [elephant stood on a thorn. elephant shouting at lion. elephant shouting at human. indignant hippo.]

Well, Miranda has written about the role that our grandfather, Norman Joseph Carr played in developing this kind of literacy, and so have I. Somewhere.

But the gals, the young revolutionaries, are too small to remember him. So they learn from their Papa, and its the same lessons of course.

What a treat when Uncle A takes us to Bonkar's memorial stone in the National Park, by boat! In the dry season you can go by road, but not now. So we pack some water, and apply lashings of sunscreen. We drive to the river though its not far to walk, skip off the side of the landcruiser and tramp over soft ankle hugging grass to where the boat is moored. Past the trichelia where I sat and sulked, dreamed or smoked as a teenager. Now strewn with the ex-coals of a fisherman's fire. Clamber down into the boat.

I'm telling my youngest cuz, the one who was born hours before her grandfather left this world, what she said to me when she was barely two years old.
"My Bonkar is under a stone," she said to me, eyes big and serious.
"He's in the sky. He's under the stone, he's in the sky." she'd repeat this over and over, like a mantra, anchoring the concept of having had a grandfather, then letting it slip away again like a kite and hauling it back again. Sweet thing. She giggles and says, I don't remember. Uh. I'm not suprised.



I can't believe how crowded that riverfront has become in the last 11 years.

You see, the National Park is on the 'other side' of the river - untouched and just for the animals. Historically there were only ever a few permanent structures in the NP itself. Most of the other camps and the majority of the residents live in the Game Management Area (GMA). On 'this' side of the river.

At first, there was only Chinzombo, sweet little whitewashed chalets on the rivers' edge, with the flood marks of '76 painted half way up the wall, like a warning. Few kilometres upstream - a little thatched studio on the corner, then nothing til the bridge, which is also the main entrance into the park. Directly after the bridge, the house of Jemz Shuz (James Schulz, RIP) and then, the Croc Farm - built circa 1987 or 8. A major milestone in civilization, at the time. Concrete snake pens, a teahouse where you could buy lime milkshakes, how that rocked my adolescent world.

If you trace that riverfront now, its all different.
Chinzombo has been swallowed by the river. The pretty little camp where we played Marco Polo in the tiny pool on hot Christmas days of quite a long time ago. That pool is in the river now. The Luangwa ate her.











But upstream from there, especially beyond the bridge - Oooh, its starting to be like a Zanzibar beachfront I tell you. Squish squash no elbow room and [shock! horror!] sandbags tessellating the side of the river bank! Hmmm. Will that protect your camp when the river really rises to the occasion? Will it stop the steady lick of that persistent tongue? Hmm. Someone should do a socio-economic history of this stretch of river. Of land claims still contested, ruined walls of houses still occupied by tenacious ghosts. Deals are forged, fought and abandoned and everybody wants a piece of it and everybody is aghast at the development but of course they're not budging either.

Before the old benign patriarch (aka my grandfather) passed away he said that there was 'a gentleman's agreement' that there would be no development on the stretch of habitat between the lodge he built (inland, away from the Luangwa's licking tongue - he'd learned) and the Luangwa bridge, the entrance to the National Park. Keep it as an intact game corridor. A conservation area, even though its in the GMA, you can do nature walks and its still forested. A gentleman's agreement. Ah, but the age of gentlemen, bwana, it is passing us by. Reed walls are replaced by concrete, thatch with tiles. And where the mzungu settle, they bring their plants, their cats, their dogs...

To be sure, though, there are elephant aplenty and they still cross there, and there was an old gruff-looking buffalo hanging out the past few weeks. An elderly kakuli haunting the peninsular.

I digress. Again.

We got there, and moored the boat. We clambered out. Always a hush under those mighty ebony trees.


We talked a little. Not much. We nudged some msikili seeds into the ground so that they might grow there.

For company.












We examined the big msikili tree by where we moored the boat and Uncle showed his daughters how to tell that it had been inhabited by a leopard. The girls each got a leopard hair, unmistakeable, gleaned from the folds of the bark. Mimes kept hers the whole way home where she stuck it in her book. RoobyRu kept hers pinched between her fingers but then forgot as we were mounting the land cruiser, and released it into the wind.

Boundaries, boundaries

I have thin skin. Some days I'm as porous as a cuttlefish, soaking up the sufferings of random people I share pavement space with. Some days I'm as ragged as a plastic bag that's been flapping on a barbed wire fence for a week.

I have to be diligent about repairing my colander aura. I practice a technique called "zipping up" where you literally have to seal up your solar plexus chakra with the palm of your hand. Sometimes I have to mantra myself with "I don't need to get my energy from anybody and nobody needs to get their energy from me." Its like the valve on my heart chakra is faulty and I must remember to replace the seal.

Sometimes its a good thing. Its helpful in my chosen career of theatre making, for example, as I can empath the world around me and channel it into something. Many actors suffer from this condition, the ability to absorb emotions and vibrations, and transmute them into fine, quivering peformances. I can work with those actors.

It might have something to do with having grown up in one of the wildest places on earth, the South Luangwa Valley, when it was still really, really wild. For more on this, read my sister's delightful posts on www.thetimesofmiranda.blogspot.com . As a toddler I had both the boundless skies of life lived outdoors combined with my mother's terror of the very real dangers (lionssnakesscorpionselephantscrocodiles) that lurked closer than the umbilical stretch most toddlers want to experiment with. Its no wonder I have issues with dependence in my relationships (furious need to be independent plus sometimes crippling need for reasurance from a solid other.)

I cut my teeth on the backs of motorbikes and open landrovers. Your spirit can really unravel like a kitestring on the open plains of the Luangwa. The zebra flats, the salt pans, Lupunga spur. The Lukusuzi riverbed, silt-white under the moon. The sudden cool pocket of potatobush air as you dip into a gully, racing home at dusk. My energy would soar and spiral like a thermal taking a stork high into the october sky. I would float by a flock of crowned cranes and join their owaaaaani calls, dissolving like aspirin in a glass.

At night walking with a torch you send your breath into the trees and wait for it to come back with the rumble of elephanttalk or the chomp of a hippo. You cast your torch in swathes, dowsing for danger, alert for every elephant shrew spring.

In the city, its different. You gotta be alert in Jozi. Its far, far more dangerous than the wilderness. Taxis slice and dice, the murder rate is higher than a good night for leopards on the wafwa and if you have a covetable car you are prey. So, I'm a lert and our city needs lerts. But the wideopen energy thing, doesn't work here. Damn I spend a fortune driving from one side of the city to the other, R2 at every robot, and a wrung out heart. I'm a pushover. In the bush, you see a packet someone dropped out their car, you pick it up. You respond. In the city, I can't respond to every blemish, sobstory, gluesniffing streetbrat and garbage spill I encounter. But if I'm not vigilant, it all gets in, tugs at me and leaves me exhausted. Daily, I come up with really good plans for homeless Zimbabweans, people living on and eating out of rubbish dumps, abandoned pets and child-headed households. Can I implement all these plans? I can't.

So that was a long introduction to two very interesting examples of boundarylessness from the last 36 hours: the meeting with the Lieberman pottery guy, and the knocking over of the front gate.

I have a friend, H, who is by nurture and spirit every bit as wild and discombobulated by city life as I am. In each other's company something quite magical happens that by other folks' definitions would seem completely disfunctional. We get crazy. Both too wideopen for our own goods, we also relish the relief of not trying to be too sane in each others company. Usually, we do coffee in the safety of our homes or we go to the theatre. I have never been 'to town' with H, with a set to-do list. Until yesterday.
Task 1: die Boekehuis, Melville. She will intro me to the lady there and see if they will stock the book. On the way there I impulsively swing down a certain road to show her a certain paint colour on a certain wall. We run into a friend of hers - a fortuitous synchronicity. Glad we turned down that road. The bookshop? unsuccessful.
Task 2: Adam Levine's shop Imagine Nation at the trendy 44 Stanley Rd. I want him to stock my book in his shop. Adam's not there and I fumble shyly in my bag pretending I have a business card when I don't and muttering that I will come back later. On our way back to the car - a chance encounter with an old friend who I have been wondering how to track down, coz she's in publishing and could help. Synchronicitous.
Task 3: the Newtown bookshop near the market theatre that stocks books on Africa. On the way we drive past Lieberman's pottery where I've been meaning to go for ever and I say so and H says, yes lets so I swing left and park and we step into the magical forest of clay vessels that is Mr pottery guy's sticky web.

I love pots. I have an affinity for clay, glazes and vitrified earth. In a former life I was a Chinese potter with a plaited moustache that reached my knees. Mr pottery man, Adriaan, sussed us instantly. Two pretty girls on a quiet friday afternoon? Maybe. I like to think there was more going on. He looked right at me
A: Where are you from?
Me: Um, well, that's a long story
H: She's from Zambia. From the bush. The bushbush.
A: Oh really? You look foreign. What can I do for you here? You brought me lots of money?
Me: Haha. Um. I like pottery, I've been meaning to come here for absolute ever
H: She's got lots of books. Do you want to see her book?
Me: Ja, its um, its a book on Zambian ceremonies.
A: African ceremonies? Like, traditional ceremonies? I'm an anthropologist, I used to be very interested in ceremonies.
Me: Oh.
A: I have over 200 hours of footage of traditional pottery techniques from all over the world.
H: Oh! I see a book! Another book!A pottery book!
Me: I'm fascinated by that stuff. What about a documentary? She's from a TV family.

The afternoon split wide open.

We talked about all kinds of things. The manic depressive Japanese potter who created the exquisite glowing celadon bowls that I admired. His oh fuck theory of political science. Being Jewish married to a German and meeting her Nazi parents. Guilt. His Divorce. How being born into a family of artists (or writers, or potters) will keep you in the loop of poor business sense and giving away your products for free. I swopped my book for some beautiful plant pots – pots for stories, its always been a good exchange.

It was one of those timeless magical afternoons, it wouldn't have happened if H and I weren't so mutually open, boundaries merging with the afternoon, with the cold front coming, with the energy of a sad clay salesman and two kooky artist bush girls in the city. I'm reminded of Martin Buber: "every journey has a secret destination, of which the traveller is unaware"

Then its nighttime and my man and I are Friday night lazy and not into cooking and I have a wheatfree pizza in the oven and we pre-order one for him from the little pizzeria down the road ( I love take-aways, never take em for granted).
We get in the car. I remember my pizza in the oven. Oh shit. We must drive like the wind so we can be back in time for mine.
He puts foot. The merc (an automatic) is in reverse. The gate is not open. The gate is derailed.
And within five minutes, so are we. Yes, the same boy who fell off the ladder 3 weeks ago has now reversed into the gate. His arm is still messed up from the fall so he can't help me put the (very heavy) gate back on its tracks. As men often do in situations where they feel a bit helpless, he gets overdirective, which always riles me (that thing about dependence I mentioned earlier – I don't take instruction well) I get the irrit in me and within minutes we are a swearing mess. We get a pole to try and fulcrum the gate back into the right place and it falls forward and I catch it with my shoulder and several litres of adrenalin. We prop it up on some metal poles and go to bed, figuring anyone who tries to breech this gap will get booby trapped. Our own personal booby trap is that on bad days we are way too sensitive to each other's energies. “You were in a panic so I got into a panic.”

Eish. Boundaries, boundaries, I tell you.