Long weekend at the Victoria Falls

Mosi-o-Tunya is the Smoke that Thunders is the Victoria Falls. Located on the border of Zambia and Zimbabawe, it is really quite special.

Some Smoke, definitely thundering

There was a variety of over-priced but very enjoyable activities. My mom and I went on a game viewing walk (we saw 5 out of the 9 white rhino left in Zambia!), very cool because the animals return your curiosity and allow you a lot closer than if you were in a car. This was followed by a sunset cruise down the Zambezi sipping Gin and Tonics and the next day, a treacherous trip to the Devil’s Pool-an unholy place to swim, at the very edge of the main falls. All that keeps you from being swept over the edge is a rocky ledge about 2 metres wide...

Leonard, our guide, diving into Devil's Pool

On Monday morning I hired a bike in Victoria Falls town (Zim side) and took it for a spin. Thanks to a little map provided by the bike shop I was able to find the ‘Big Tree’ a huge baobab tree in the Vic Falls National Park. I think it said it was about 1000 years old. I read later that baobabs were (are) held in high esteem partly for their fruit and partly because their flowers supposedly held the spirits of the ancestors. If anyone plucked a baobab flower off the tree, it was said that they would be eaten by a lion. I learnt this and various other interesting tid-bits back over on the Zambian side at the Livingstone Museum. What struck me about the information in the ethnography section was how folklore, myth and tradition are used for very functional purposes. The Nyami-Nyami or river god was purported to dwell in the turbulent Zambezi River and so people didn’t enter the waters or even the gorge (probably a good idea because of their incredible power and meant thriving wildlife populations in the gorge). Trees whose bark had been previously stripped for medicinal purposes were left alone because it was believed that if you too stripped bark off that same tree, you would contract the same disease as the first bark-collector (a great means for keeping trees healthy and thriving). People use mythology, folklore, ritual etc to explain, understand and perpetuate very important truths and ways of doing things, plus it’s more fun than simply telling your kids ‘don’t do that.’

The Big Tree

A dried up Baobab flower

 One of my favourite discoveries of my cycle around town was the COMESA (Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa) market. There is one in Lusaka too, where I’ve bought chitenge (fabric) but this one was especially great because of the piles of second hand clothes. From what I understand, piles of these used clothes arrive from the US and Europe and are donated as a means for income generation. You want vintage, you got vintage. Piles of flamboyantly coloured 80s men’s swimming shorts, perfect quality slacks and jeans, T-shirts with anything from “Wilson Family Reunion 1992” to lace or embroidery and even underwear. I’m a big fan of second hand shopping for various reasons and try to only buy used or South African manufactured clothing at home, so this was a real treat. For US$13 (around R100) I bought 2 pairs of shorts, a pair of black Levi’s skinny jeans, a t-shirt, a plaid button up shirt and a skirt. Feeling very pleased with myself I left the market and continued my cycle up the road into a residential area and then back down and around to the main road to marvel at Zimbabwean stone sculptures at the craft market.

COMESA market

Piles of second-hand clothes for sale

 One night in the hotel, as my mom was preparing her conference paper, I settled in to watch some ZBC (Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation) and AfricaMagic on the TV. Offerings on ZBC included music videos with a variety of footage of Bob Mugabe in the background of dancing musicians. Then there was a programme in a series highlighting the links and friendship between China and Africa. This particular episode was about the Tan-Zam railway. And even a documentary on a Chinese pop star, imperialism round two? Africa Magic had one of it’s perennial low-budget, questionably acted, Nollywood classics: a tale of love and desperation, of kidnap and rescue and the value of family love over money. All in all, edifying viewing.

Queues

I’ve been meaning to write for a while now and now I’ve eventually got around to it. I suppose since I only have 5 blog followers (2 of which are people I’ve never met and two of which are my parents...) it’s not really that  much of an issue.

I wanted to write about my theory of “queues.” I had this realisation about the Western-ness of queues whilst at Adventure City (or Adventure World, I can never get it right) Lusaka’s Water Park complete with super-fast red water slide, long mellow cruisey blue slide, various swimming pools and kiddie slides and more attention than a ‘mzungu’ in her swimming costume would care to deal with. Oh what it is to be exotic.

Anyway, I was standing at the top of the slide, watching a bit, I didn’t really want to go down the slide just yet, I was content to just stand for a while. There was a crew of young men waiting next to the slide as various people came up the stairs and went down the slide. There didn’t seem to be much of an order going on but after watching for a while, there definitely seemed to be some kind of understanding about who could go and when and why. So I came to the following conclusion: in the ‘Western’ world (used loosely, but you know what I mean) the quasi-sacred Queue functions under the belief that the best way to maintain order and distribute or allow access to something, when there are many people who desire it simultaneously, is on a first-come-first-serve basis. This system is regulated by the physical structure of a queue (a line formation) and corrects any stepping out of this physical line (from a polite ‘ahem’ to an ‘Excuuuse me, but there is a queue’).

The more African approach that I observed at the slides centred around need and a bit of resourcefulness. It was regulated by the faith that those wronged would speak up, and those in the wrong would accept being told off. What it seemed like was happening, not just ‘pushingin,’ but rather that there was an unspoken mutual understanding (just like the physical line of people that form a queue are in an unspoken agreement to stand in this way) that mostly, one waits in the general order that one got there but that one may go straight to the front, to the source of the goods or service, provided that one was in greater need (e.g. perhaps in an obvious hurry when others weren’t, or in a greater state of excitement about going down the twisty blue slide) or took a greater amount of initiative to do so. I also think that the understanding extends to include the regulating factor: if someone takes advantage of this arrangement, the others as a group will speak up and set him right.

Neither is perfect, in its most basic form, the former relies on a single unviolable concept: the Queue. It means that there is an easier way to manage a range of situations but on the down side it doesn’t allow for the specifics of a situation or accommodate special needs. The latter is more fluid and can thus be adjusted based on the situation and can be moderated democratically. However, if there are inequalities amongst those present (for example the kids sometimes had to wait longer before they could go down the slide because young adults would go in front of them) then it is not always possible for the situation to be fairly regulated. Just an interesting observation I thought.