by Adeline Loh
As late evening came about, Daniel illuminated our picnic table with the van’s headlamps and opened the bag of mealie meal for dinner. Steven, feeling emasculated in the presence of our hombre of a guide, kept harping about the fact that he was only marginally less amazing. If only he was given the chance to showcase his cooking skills.
‘All right, Steven,’ Daniel sighed. ‘You can make the nshima.’
Having been granted permission to impress us, delighted Steven folded up his white sleeves and got down to work. I sat next to him in the hope he’d teach me how to make it. He did, and here’s how:
NSHIMA RECIPE
What’s needed:
4 cups of water
2 cups of mealie meal
First pour 4 cups of water into a medium-sized cooking pot. Then count the number of crockery items in your kitchen that require a good scrubbing until the water is lukewarm. Using one tablespoonful at a time, sprinkle 1 cup of mealie meal into the pot while stirring slowly. Keep stirring until the mixture bubbles. Then let simmer from 3 to 5 minutes with pot covered. When it’s time, remove the lid. Add another cup of mealie meal a little at a time and stir until thick and smooth. By now your arm will be throbbing from all the stirring but don’t stop unless you like it lumpy. While stirring, it helps to imagine that you are developing triceps of steel. Once the nshima reaches the consistency you desire, cover the pot, turn the fire off and let it settle for another 3 minutes. Voilà – you are done!
* Serves 4 extremely hungry people. Eat together with ndiwo (relish) of choice: beef/fish/chicken and vegetables.
As we dug into our delicious nshima and chicken, Daniel decided to spoil our dinner.
‘We cannot stop over at Lochinvar National Park any more,’ he said. ‘If we do, we won’t have enough diesel to go back to Lusaka.’
I was too upset to respond.
‘Ah, there’s nothing to see there anyway,’ he added.
That did not sound like anything he had said before we left on our safari – he had told us that there were many majestic riverine birds of prey and rare medicinal trees in Lochinvar for us to stare at. Our limited fuel reserves also meant we couldn’t drive further into the vast heart of Busanga plains in search of wondrous beasts. No cheetahs. No sables. No black-maned lions. We had barely scoured the fringes of Busanga as it was. I tried to look on the bright side.
There was none.
*
The sun rose just as lazily as we did the next day. Since we could not go anywhere far, we went for an early morning game drive around Lufupa Lodge where we had the good fortune of bumping into a pair of painfully shy roan antelopes. These horse-like creatures were like mime artists of the bush, with their peculiar black-and-white facial skin and ridged horns. We were truly lucky to chance upon them as they were rare and preferred to isolate themselves from other herbivores, such as wildebeests and zebras, which hog their food and attract predators. Though they sure did not mind the family of mischievous warthogs that were scuttling around their legs.
And let me tell you – warthogs? They totally rule Kafue. There were plenty of warthogs to be seen, which was fantastic for me because these short and stumpy creatures were my favourite African animals by far. Normally spotted in small groups of three or four, I always sniggered in my seat whenever these easily spooked pigs fled with the ends of their tails pointing skywards. No, they’re not being snooty little buggers – their erect tails actually act as flagpoles for their little babies to follow in thick long grass, especially when predators come a-biting.
Further down the trail, a blacksmith plover bird plopped itself in front of our vehicle, seeming to lead us the way. As we got closer, the tiny bouncy bird with a black-and-white body casually toddled to the driver’s side, where I was, and perched on one leg. After each click of my camera, it changed poses professionally as though it was Zambia’s Top Bird Model. Definitely the most PR-savvy bird I’d met so far.
While the bird was cute and all, the highlight of the day was definitely an adult hippo lying behind thick barbed shrubbery.
‘Hey Adeline, go snap a picture of yourself sitting atop the dead hippo!’ Daniel suggested irrationally before laughing like a rabid cockatoo. I thought he was only kidding, until he actually stopped the van and got out. The rest of us telepathically agreed to just observe him.
Daniel walked without trepidation towards the motionless hippo when all of a freakin’ sudden, it rapidly stood up on all fours. Startled out of his skin, Daniel jumped and clutched at his heart like a girl, before glancing at us briefly and laughing nervously.
‘Way to prove your manliness, Daniel,’ I muttered.
‘I hope he doesn’t get killed,’ Steven said, genuinely concerned. ‘I do not know the way out.’
The piteous hippo’s body was streaked with fresh fight scars, most likely earned from a failed territorial battle with a dominant male hippo. So, there it was, minding its own beeswax, trying to recover from injuries when some busybody comes to interrupt its mid-morning snooze.
After communicating a dastardly snigger our way, Daniel began agitating the hulking hippo by beating his hands on his chest and hopping around like a chimp. The hippo, visibly irritated, merely glowered at him. As it became apparent that the red-shirted human pest was not going away, the hippo clapped its massive jaws repeatedly, exposing its dagger-sharp tusk-like canines. I whipped my camera out quickly to catch the hippo running Daniel over. Alas, it was not to be.
When we returned to camp in the afternoon, our hopeless tent had finally been blown away. Kyle and Julie were chilling out under the camp’s shelter, raving about the birds they had just seen on a short stroll outside the lodge. Both of them were convinced that our tent had been stolen, but we soon found the limp plastic thing snagged on some nearby bushes like a popped bubblegum. It was definitely a sign that it was time to go. So we tossed the holey tent into the van, hugged Kyle and Julie goodbye, and doubled back to Chunga.
Along the way, we happened upon a lone elephant bull that was dismembering a once-healthy tree. One would assume that since a large elephant has to haul six tons of weight around, you would hear it thrashing through the bush from miles away before you can see it. On the contrary, I had been frightened out of my knickers many a time because I was unaware that a big fat elephant was right behind me. Never ever underestimate the sneakiness of a pachyderm – no matter how awfully obese it is, it can move as stealthily as a ninja on a tin roof, thanks to its impressive padded feet. Trust me, when an elephant creeps up on you, the only warning you’d likely receive is a sudden breeze from the flapping of its oversized ears before you are bitch-slapped upside the head by its powerful trunk.
As soon as our approaching headlights were spotted by one of the workers at Chunga, he rushed out to Daniel with distressing news. Apparently, two separate Indian families from Lusaka were fighting for territory – the same rondavel. One group was a six-strong bachelor herd while their opponents were a matriarchal breeding herd composed of granny, 14 kids, mother, father and assorted cousins. Daniel hurriedly went off to settle the scuffle, leaving the helpful staff to pitch a new tent for us – without holes, this time.
Later in the evening, Chan and I ate dinner by an unsteady candlelight next to our tent while being treated to some pretty riveting dinner theatre. We stabbed at our food absent-mindedly, our attention focused on the clamorous drama unfolding in the chitenge where the two aforementioned warring parties were hurling verbal abuse at Daniel.
‘Bravo!’ Chan cheered and broke out in applause.
‘Encore!’ I hooted, giving a standing ovation at the end of a spectacular finale of dexterous finger-pointing, shouted insults and tumultuous screeching. If it weren’t for the sad lack of PG-13 violence and flashy pyrotechnics, I would’ve awarded the entire performance a full five stars.
*
Lusaka-bound this morning, Chan rose from sleep more exhilarated that she’d ever been since we arrived in Kafue. ‘I am s-o-o happy we’re l
eaving,’ she said musically as she helped me stuff my puffy jacket down the gullet of my pack. ‘These past five days felt like five months! I absolutely cannot bear another minute of Daniel. Or camping.’
Daniel tried to make us stay longer, presumably to torture us some more, but Chan would have none of it. She threw a fit and insisted we left before noon. And with that, we kissed Kafue goodbye and headed out on the journey back to civilization. I looked hard out the window, hoping to catch some final glimpses of wildlife but none of the animals seemed to want to say goodbye to us – they had all gone into hiding. Even the usually abundant impala and puku were AWOL for some reason. We began to miss getting dirt kicked in our faces when Daniel thoughtfully filled the void by pointing out the only life forms that could not run away at the sight of us: the trees. It was interesting and held our attention for a considerable time, but after the tenth tree he described the marvels of, I had completely forgotten what the other nine looked like or what they were good for. However, thanks to one particularly ribald tale, I shall always remember the dead man’s tree with fondness.
A gnarled honey-coloured tree devoid of leaves, the dead man’s tree looks like the kind of flora you would expect to find down a godforsaken trail that leads to a creepy, abandoned house. According to sleazeball Daniel, the fascinating myth behind the dead man’s tree goes like this: There once lived an overly lascivious man in Africa. Although gifted with a permanent erection, the poor guy couldn’t find any ladies who were willing to sleep with him. One fine day, he died, but his stiffy did not – proving the old adage that these things have a life of their own. Villagers chucked him into a coffin but found that they couldn’t close the lid because of the offending organ. To solve this problem, the prettiest women of the village were summoned to perform a pre-burial ritual for the partially dead sex maniac around a special tree. They danced, sang and lifted their skirts, sans panties, around his body all night until the penis turned flaccid. (Daniel demonstrated this dance in graphic, cringeworthy detail.) With the correct placatory effect attained, both man and penis finally rested in peace. And that’s why that same tree today is called the dead man’s tree.
Although it sounded like a great piece of historic folklore, there was a huge possibility that it was little more than Daniel’s idea of a dirty joke.
*
Once we returned to good old Lusaka, we carried out our obligatory duties as bona fide tourists. After all, we had only two days left in Zambia, so it was time to remove the shackles of modesty and reticence, and go hog-wild in the city’s shopping institutions – all in the name of bringing back some tacky trinkets for memory preservation and appeasing materialistic friends.
At Manda Hill – the only other shopping centre in town apart from The Arcades – I bought several wildlife books with lavish illustrations that I could lovingly caress and weep over on the flight back. Picture books make it much less stressful to show the people back home what I saw on safari, rather than trying my best to convince them that the fuzzy brown smudge in my photographs was a leopard or an impala.
Next stop was Shoprite supermarket, where I bought a sleek bottle of delicious Amarula cream liqueur (better than Baileys Irish Cream any day), a dozen flavours of Super Maheu (the local vomit drink), and a squishy three-kilo bag of mealie meal. Against the advice of the store clerk, I decided to be adventurous and picked the cassava grain instead of the snow-white maize grain that the locals usually eat. For that, I paid dearly when I attempted to cook it at home – the glop turned out the colour of excrement and tasted just about as good.
Our arms laden with purchases, Chan and I hailed a taxi to the Kabwata Cultural Centre curios market. And who did we hear droning over the cab’s radio but Zambia’s rotund third president Levy Mwanawasa, who was nicknamed ‘The Cabbage’ due to his slow and slurred speech, leading many to question his mental fitness. He was no pushover, though. ‘I am not a cabbage,’ he said in response to detractors. ‘They call me a cabbage but I will prove I am a piece of steak.’ In another classic retort to an opposition politician, he said: ‘They will never get into government because the party is like a matako (buttocks) which cannot suddenly find themselves in front of a human being.’
In fact, all three of Zambia’s presidents were equally comical. After 27 years, the longest-serving president, Kenneth Kaunda, was ousted in 1991 for being an autocrat and turning the country into a one-party police state. So what did his successor, Frederick Chiluba, do? He put the former president in jail for staging a coup. In 2001, Chiluba caught Kaunda’s power-hungry disease and contemplated changing the constitution to allow himself to run for an extended presidential term. He did not succeed, sadly, and was forced to elect Levy Mwanawasa to take his place in 2002. Mwanawasa then showed his gratitude by accusing Chiluba of stealing millions from the government while in office and sent his predecessor to the slammer. See a pattern here?
‘The president is addressing the fuel crisis. He says it should be back to normal in a few days,’ the taxi driver translated the president’s dreary monotone for my benefit. ‘But you know cabbages,’ he continued with a smirk. ‘They give you gas.’
At the Kabwata market, Chan lugged our numerous plastic bags to an open-air amphitheatre where cultural performances were occasionally held. “I’ll wait for you here,’ she said and sat on the concrete steps. ‘Don’t buy too many things!’
‘I’ll try ...’ My voice trailed off as I walked towards a couple of vendors who were salivating at the arrival of fresh tourist meat. After an hour or so of haggling and fondling trinkets, I ended up getting two papier-mache bowls painted with helmeted guineafowl, two small wooden giraffe statuettes and an unpainted lagniappe, a copper bracelet, three necklaces, and a weirdly cool pen-holder carved in the shape of a pen-holding hand.
As I was waiting for a necklace made of seeds to be adjusted to the girth of my neck, Chan ambled over. ‘Can we go now?’ she asked impatiently. ‘Some Zambian guy wants to marry me and follow us back to Malaysia.’
Our last supper in Zambia was at a filling station’s fast-food diner called Wimpy (there was no McDonald’s here). Plonking ourselves down at a booth in the corner, we chilled out in front of a snowy TV set – a modern-day invention I had forgot existed, along with the world beyond Zambia.
‘It’s ZNBC!’ I chirruped. Being out of town so much, we hardly watched the local programmes, much less the Zambian National Broadcasting Corporation channel. We gazed at an amateurish newsreader yapping about arable land and small reptiles, and then marvelled at the unsophisticated commercials. The kind we Malaysians used to see in the sunflower seed-riddled cinemas of yore, with booming manly voiceovers, a screen full of blinking capitalized text and a ridiculous bikini-clad woman levitating at the side selling fragrant rice or Tiger Balm.
‘Ah, it’s nice to be doing nothing for a change,’ I said, before chomping on my beef burger.
‘It’s nice to be going home for a change, you mean,’ Chan spluttered through her Coke. ‘I miss Mum.’
‘Well, just imagine the stories you’ll be telling her when you get back home.’
‘Actually, I’m imagining the stories I’ll be leaving out,’ she corrected.
In between gulping down food and reliving the places we had been, we caught a Nigerian movie. If the tempestuous relationships of The Bold and the Beautiful were transported to Africa and imbibed with B-grade voodoo elements, it would be a Nigerian flick – frivolous script, ridiculous plot, hammy acting, and a wardrobe lady that went a wee bit too crazy with the glitter, stacked heels and luminous dresses. Oh, and tears, tears, tears. In other words, it was incredibly enjoyable.
Believe it or not, in the last 13 years, Nigeria has become the world’s third largest film industry after America’s Hollywood and India’s Bollywood. Aptly nicknamed Nollywood, most of the movies made in Nigeria are dirt cheap, direct-to-video witchcraft horror flicks shot with a home video camera, cost a few thousand dollars to make and maybe ten days to p
roduce. Regardless, with an impressive turnover of 2,000 films per year, millions of fans in Africa’s English-speaking countries, like Lusakans, were lapping them up religiously.
As Chan and I watched the movie’s climax, we understood why.
‘Oh, so you think you can just leave me now that you have stolen my virginity, huh?’ screamed the actress, her eyes wild with uncontrollable rage and her finger pointing at a frightened young man. ‘You will pay – you bastard! Pay ... with your LIFE!’ She tears off her skimpy spaghetti strap dress, her eyes start rolling backwards, her hair turns green, and she starts shivering and chanting some mojo gibberish. A glass wall breaks and pretty strappy sandals are flying. Seconds later, a man shrieks hysterically, his eyeballs pop and his face starts melting.
Brilliant, simply brilliant.
*
At 10 a.m. on the day of our departure, we decided not to wait for tardy Steven who had offered us a ride to the airport and walked out to look for a taxi. Luckily, just as we got out of the hostel, an inflamed taxi driver was in the midst of throwing out a Caucasian couple for having the gumption to negotiate the fare. He took us instead and we waved the nonplussed couple goodbye.
After a few minutes in the taxi, I started to feel guilty for ditching Steven. ‘What if he really came all the way to pick us up?’ I asked Chan.
