Early December 2011

Adventures in Lundaland


The Road 

Returned from my provincial meetings a few days back. It proved to be an interesting journey, both to and from. The meetings weren't particularly noteworthy, except for a costume party held on Halloween. Its theme: Black Friday Walmart Sale. It was, more or less, an excuse for North-Western volunteers to dress and act more white-trash than the norm and it was glorious. But let us return to the journey now.

The journey there took about three days. One day from my village to Mwinilung'a on the back of a canter-truck. One day from Mwinilung'a to Kansala in an overcrowded bus. One day from Kansala to Solwezi in another dreaded bus. From Kansala to Solwezi was interesting because of the macabre parade we had to drive around on the way to Solwezi; a parade of Floating Coffins! It seemed like at least two people died and were being carried in coffins in the middle of the highway/barely-paved-road with about fifty people walking behind them. Along the way we also got packet-drunk, ate umbrella-sized mushrooms, met an Angolan Consulate worker while drinking Congolese beer out of plastic 40 oz. bottles in a hut, and visited a fellow volunteer whose house resembles a 19th Century American fort. It was profitable experience overall.

Getting from Solwezi to Lusaka and back to my village, on the other hand, was nothing short of an odyssey. On every long bus-ride there is a preacher who stands up and shouts a near-endless prayer for the safety of the bus and its patrons. One such prayer seemed to take about a hour to complete and sounded more like a medieval curse than a Christian prayer, sounding something like "Give me food and my family food. Give me money and give my family money. Kill those who dislike me and my family. Kill them! Kill them! God will crush my enemies! God will crush those who seek to hurt me and my family!" and so on. At least they are honest in their desires. Getting from Solwezi to Mwinilung'a was quite entertaining compared to the bus-preachers and African lack of personal space. I hitch-hiked in the bed of a truck, along with a drunk man. He was trying to convince me that Gin was "the best beer" because it never spoiled. I let him believe this and then he insisted that he didn't want to drink alone, so he bought me three Castle lagers for the drive-up and this helped the time go by. It also helped that, unlike the bus, this truck could go a solid 110 kph and make no stops along the way. From Mwinilung'a to Ikeleng'e, however, was a bit sticky. It took about five hours for a vehicle to show up and it was something like a Honda Civic, which seemed unlikely to survive the trip but none-the-less I took it. I was certain that I was going to die in that little car, as it hurtled through the unpaved bush-paths and wooden bridges of Kalene Hill. It took about double the time and I'm pretty sure the guy's brakes and transmission were about to fall out of his car, but I made it to a fellow volunteer's home by about 23hrs.

The Normality of Juju

I think its easy to lose perspective when considering juju, as an American, whilst in Lundaland. I hope that my writing this can clear up the situation a bit more, for Americans at home and abroad.

As touched upon before, we can deduce the history of juju using historical sources and simply observation. There was an indigenous pantheon in Dark Africa before colonization. This includes ancestral spirits and other lesser forces as well. Juju, or rather the folklore, practices, and ideas of inter-relatedness, was an aspect of this system. Colonization, slave-trade (practiced by both Africans and non-Africans alike), and missionary activity all destabilized the old ways. Modernity and further missionaries corrupt the old way further into being so-called African Christians. Juju, however, still remains under this veneer.

From here we can more easily grasp the situation of juju and its functions. Shared folklore and practices create and strengthen communal bonds, and it creates a common world-view for them to understand the world. Its practices act as ventilation for social stresses within the village, such as jealousy and feelings of communal inequality. Is it so shocking that "witches" and "wizards" tend to be feisty old grannies and successful businessmen respectively? Of course not. This fear of witchcraft also, I may add, bind the community together.

By the inter-relatedness of juju, I mean the logic of disparate forces and things having physical effects on each other. I will go into this further. Jealousy creates spirit-lions that kill villagers. Ill-will leads to illness or car wrecks. This seems illogical to us Westerners, and it is, but only because we have a system of logic based on Greco-Roman tradition. The Zambian logic, however, does not share this heritage. This logic of Dark Africa (the previously unmapped interior, not related to skin colour), hinges on the assumption that death is an unnatural force. Once you understand this assumption, this principle, the system of logic makes sense in a way. Or to be more specific even, death is only caused by outside agency and this agency does not need a biological source of power. For example, just a few days ago (as of 12/6/11) a young Lunda man from near-Angola (just there, as Zambians say) was hospitalized due to an illness which later succumbed to. They found his killers, witches of course, using a Floating Coffin. In this example the unnatural state of death was caused by a demonic-force which stole his shadow (what'd we call his soul) and this force was the agent of the witches. While this seems odd let's compare it with American Juju for a second.

What does American Juju entail? A man finds a lucky penny on the way to a job interview and he gets the job. A man at a poker table wears the same, specific trucker cap and wins every hand. A woman prays with a candle for a man and gets her wish at a college class. A person writes his desires on a white-board wishes them into being using positive thoughts. We speak of ghost-stories around a campfire, in just the same manner of Lundas speaking of invisible water-serpents around a fire in their huts. We speak of intention and positive thinking in the exact same ways of Zambians speaking of charms that prevent illness. We fear Middle Eastern boogeymen so much that we've recklessly traded our Constitutional rights away faster than a Zambian would run away from an accusation of witchery. Who are we, with our rabbit-feet and horse-shoes, to mock them?

As I've said before, let our judgments coincide with action. If an American wishes to harshly judge Zambian juju, let him purge himself of his out superstitious ways. I'd like to meet such a man; his neck adorned neither with rosary beads nor cross, his mind unmoved by petty sentiment, his actions untarnished by illogical notions and desires. Where is this American?

The Night


It is 12/4/2011 and it is night-fall here in Nyilamba. Night is such a beautiful and Wyrd thing here. The stars are always radiant and clear, though I barely recognize the constellations this side of the world. The night is both limiting and boundless. It is limiting since few dare to be out when darkness falss, lest they be accused of witchery or become harmed by witchery themselves (aka animal attack or automobile accident). I've never seen wild bats until being here. They love to wait in my bathroom/outhouse (chimbushi) so that if I dare to use it at night I'm treated to the furtive fluttering of wings and fur. You get used to it by the second or third time though. The malaria prophylaxis plays a big role in the nocturnal experience of Zambia. Mefloquine has multiple side-effects depending on the person, but for em these are most common: insomnia, nightmares, increased lucid dreaming, and profound confusion at night. Often one has some terror-inducing visage come to him in dreams, only to awake in absolute darkness without knowing where he is or how he arrived there. On numerous occasions I've gone outside after a nightmare only to become lost in the darkness and the rain-forest, but then I discover that I'm actually still in my bed and pawing at my mosquito net imagining that I'm outside. The dreams I've had are numerous and vivid, so they can be a pain to consistently note and publish. I've been told by Anthony Bourdain to rewrite the Ten Commandants in a more awesome way. I've had Joseph Campbell write a book about Hitler and discuss the commonalities between Dr. Who and the Resurrecting Hero God. I've wandered about ancient stone monuments among mist and living statues. What wonders the mind holds, I can now only wonder and hope to see myself in these visages. Tonight I will take my prophylaxis and can only hope to either sleep deeply or at least not end up tangled up in my mosquito net yet again.

Conquering Philosophy

I've been writing quite a bit regarding Political Philosophy in the United States. Soon I will discuss those ideas here. But until that time, here are quotes from authors who I've been influenced by since being in Zambia.


Notable Political Quotes

“In modern society man had become prisoner of the institutions he had created to free him. He had lost his sense of direction. The worker expended his daily efforts in creating a piece of a product he might never see, to be sold to a customer he may never know. Where was the ego satisfaction in a daily impersonal routine in which creativity was stifled under a cultural blanket of standardization and person effort produced monotonously for an impersonal market? Modern man exhausts himself in endless occupation, his creativity cast into a mold, his accomplishments lost in an endless chain o anonymous products. Little wonder that his so-called freedom proves frequently unbearable; nor little wonder that man becomes as standardized as his products, merely a digit in a numerical mass, a willing victim of mass manipulators; and, indeed, little wonder that even the normal man must struggle for sanity in such a situation.” - Alan Pendleton Grimes “American Political Thought” paraphrasing the theme of Erich Fromm's “The Sane Society”

“Democracy had reduced mankind to a 'dead level of incapacity' in which good leaders were neither available nor desired. Social order demanded leadership; yet the social temper of the democratic age militated against the creation and perpetuation of an aristocracy to lead...for democracy, he argued, had enthroned mediocrity, and mediocrity in power tended to degenerate into outright inferiority.” - Alan Pendleton Grimes “American Political Thought” paraphrasing the theme of Ralph Adams Cram's “The Nemesis of Mediocrity”

“The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading; men are created differently; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.” - David Riesman “The Lonely Crowd”

“The conservative principles par excellence are proportion and measure; self-expression through self-restraint; preservation through reform; humanism and classical balance; a fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux; and a fruitful obsession for unbroken historic continuity. These principles together create freedom, a freedom built not on the quicksand of adolescent defiance but on the bedrock of ethics and law.” - Peter Riereck “Conservatism Revisited”

“But of all the views of this law none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty...and to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree.” - Thomas Jefferson “Basic Writings of Thomas Jefferson”

“Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural enemies of error, and of error only.” - Thomas Jefferson “Basic Writings of Thomas Jefferson”

“The states could not have reserved any rights by the articles of their union, if they had not been sovereign, because they could have no rights, unless they flowed from that source. In the creation of the federal government, the states exercised the highest act of sovereignty, and they may, if they please, repeat the proof of their sovereignty, by its annihilation.” - John Taylor “New Views of the Constitution”

“As, then, there never was such a state as the so-called state of nature, and never can be, it follows, that men, instead of being born in it, are born in the social and political state; and of course, instead of being born free and equal, are born subject, not only to parental authority, but to the laws and institutions of the country where born, and under whose protection they draw their first breath.” - John C. Calhoun “A Disquistion on Government”

“It is, indeed, this inequality of condition between the front and the rear ranks, in the march of progress, which give so strong an impulse to the former to maintain their position, and to the latter to press forward into their files. This gives progress its greatest impulse.” - John C. Calhoun “A Disquistion on Government”

“It is a reward to be earned [liberty], not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alive;- a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving;- and not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable of either appreciating or of enjoying it....A reward more appropriate than liberty could not be conferred on the deserving;- nor a punishment inflicted on the undeserving more just, than to be subject to lawless and despotic rules.” - John C. Calhoun “A Disquistion on Government”