TABOO BETWEEN HOLY PAGES

It is termed Nkutu in the Bisa language.  The seasonal, temporal farming camp, where families trekked in search of fertile land for cassava cultivation.  This was necessitated by the overuse of land around villages, leaving it barren for any meaningful farming. Almost every capable person would go and encamp ku Nkutu, in distant places, leaving their villages almost vacant, for not less than three months.

 Depending on where you secured fertile land, there would be a sizable number of families in Nkutu. The farming season was normally between November and March. We cultivated reasonably vast fields where we grew cassava and sweet potatoes before returning home.

 Life here was a bit alien, especially when it came to the availability of my favourite fish.  We often fed on two main kinds of vegetables, katapa – cassava leaves or kalembula- sweet potato leaves. For many men from our village who were customary fishermen, living in such conditions without any prospects of fishing was a real challenge.  We had to learn to hunt small animals including kapanga, the bush mice.

By March men couldn’t wait to return to the village in preparation for the fishing season which was due in April. The exodus of men from camps implicitly meant everybody had to decamp. (Some would take their families along to fishing camps.) 

By August to September, they would retire from fishing camps to the villages to take a rest. This was a routine, nomadic life cycle of some families in Muwele, Chiunda Ponde chiefdom in Lavushi Manda District. My two uncles, one of whom was my guardian at the time, lived that kind of life.

Muwele Village in 1975- Pic by Dr I. P. A. Manning

We would build separate, round or rectangular huts at our camp (depending on individual taste) for parents, boys and girls. Usually, related families would be in one camp that became their de-facto village as farmland was apportioned according to relations. Each piece of land belonged to a certain clan that generously distributed to needy families, free of charge. A family would be given just enough land to grow cassava, the staple food, and other subsistent crops.

I was twelve when we camped in a very fertile forest called Kasukuma, some sixty kilometres or so away from home, with my younger uncle. As schoolboys, we joined families in Nkutu in early December when schools were on recess and left in January to return to school.

I had become fluent in reading the Cibemba language. Impressed with my progress in school, the older uncle, whom they referred to as a Chitawala, a derogatory moniker for Jehovah’s Witnesses, gave me an old Cibemba translation of the King James Version of the Bible. I took it with me to the camp during the school holidays. It was the only book available for me to read because I feared my exercise books would be raided for paper in which my uncle and his first-born son would be rolling tobacco; both of who were heavy smokers.

I shared the hut with this cousin, who was by far older than me. He used to enjoy marijuana. His father used to smoke the ordinary kaponda, a local blend of tobacco. They both lacked rolling paper for their favourite roll-ups. Usually, they used old newspapers which they said had the best porosity. Without it, uncle would tell the son to pluck out a sheaf of ‘soft’ paper from the ‘Chitawala’s useless cult book.’  One day, I found the entire book of Revelation tugged out and shared among uncle, son and neighbour. When I complained, I received a severe reprimand for getting into a destructive cult which even my late mother, who was Catholic, would never have allowed. It was a bashing like no other!

I used to read the bible in silence most of the time when I sat alone in the hut. My cousin, who had left school in Grade Seven could read Cibemba too. He, sometimes, used to read at random from pages of the now tattered Bible, between his puffs.

It happened one day.  After a not-so-sumptuous lunch and his habitual joint, he read a passage from the book of Leviticus. It was the entire Chapter Eighteen which awed him. It was his first time coming across ‘insults from a holy book.’  I had never read the chapter before, too. I just saw him burst out laughing. He would pant, close his eyes, throw up his arms, droop backwards and clap. He was so immensely mesmerized that he attracted almost the entire family to come and see what was funny. They thought I had done something really stupid. When they saw him with the Bible on his lap, uncle asked what was so amusing from the book. Cousin couldn’t manage to utter a word. Instead, he sneeringly handed me the book and pointed to the scripture. I was baffled as I knelt closer to him!

“What is it?” I asked in anxiety; not knowing what to expect.

“Read for your uncle, this Chitawala book! Surely, can God author this?” he said amidst laughter. By then everybody who came around had joined in laughing at what they were yet to learn. Laughter is that contagious!

I was dumbfounded. Now, uncle had a good reason why I shouldn’t touch that good-for-nothing, deceptive bound volume. There must have been something seriously wrong with it. If the son could hand it to me with such contempt, something was terribly amiss.  I was commanded to read it aloud!

He pointed to the two numbers in bold, one and eight. I didn’t know whether to read or simply run away and leave him to recite it for them.

“Now, read!” commanded my illiterate uncle; and so were most members of his family.

The ‘graphic’ words used in the Cibemba (KJ) translation of this chapter about illicit familial sexual relationships which I hesitantly read in a shaky voice hit him very hard. He couldn’t believe such ‘profanity’ was in the most revered book. Verse Twenty: “Moreover thou shalt not lie carnally with thy neighbour's wife, to defile thyself with her.” This verse annoyed him more than any of the previous ones such that he swung to grab the book with such vicious vigour that left me quivering.

 The only other time I was under such intense terror was when I was hired by an illiterate, handsome young man to write a love letter and deliver it to my uncle’s daughter. He indicated that he fancied her such that if her parents disallowed the relationship, they would elope and leave the village.

Apparently, these families were at loggerheads because they perceived each other to be backwards. The letter was, incidentally, found among my books by the same chain-smoking cousin as he searched for rolling paper. I knew nothing about their sour relationship with the other family as I was new in this community. Uncle was evidently upset. He was trembling in anger! I had to flee!

There I was again, not really the author but a guilty messenger of these “expressive insults.” He hated the ridiculous idea of discussing sex with family, regardless of age.

“Do you believe God in Heaven can stash such vulgarity in a book read by children like you? I have told you; this book was written by some confused white man who wanted to equally confuse foolish black men,” Uncle heaved as he pointed menacingly at me. His thin lips opened slowly. “Discussing sex with children is… t-a-b-o-o! Do you think you can read this to an assembly of sons, daughters, and mothers-in-law in public; seated in the same pew in a church of God?”

By then I was equally mystified by the candor of the diction of the passage which I read for the first time in my life. But I couldn’t explain anything. I knew my stay here was over.

“Don’t you punish him, father of Phil,” Auntie pleaded as she knew what was to follow. She rushed inside the hut to shield me from the dreaded, agitated, ready-to-strike disciplinarian.

“He didn’t write the book. It was given to him by your elder brother. Why can’t you go confront your brother for the moral erosion of vulnerable children?” she said, trying to reason with him.

“I am confiscating this useless catalogue of taboos,” he said as he frog-marched me out in rage.

 The initiator of my tribulations burst yet into more fits of dry laughter upon his father’s seizure of the ‘infamous’ book.

Auntie whisked me to go and hide in the bush until her husband had calmed down. When I came back from my ‘city of refuge’, I vowed never to touch the Bible again. I cursed the devil who taught me how to read. But then…, taboo between Holy pages?

That was my village’s view of sex education and issues of reproductive health. You never mentioned anything on these lines with your parents. Only with your grandmother; and at the ‘right time.’ Otherwise, you learned things from your peers as you played hide and seek.

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