It is time to begin the long retrospective (though everything feels like retrospect, even moments after) of my days spent in Zambia, a process which I imagine will last long after my departure. It seems to have ended before it really began, but I like to believe it matters how you approach it. There were so many beginnings and stories moving off in all directions that it had a way of dividing my attention. The trick is being able to observe them for a while, though they are often invisible to me most of the time.
In some ways I feel completely defeated by what I produced, in particular when I look at what I wrote about Zambia. It didn’t necessarily amount to much in ways I can readily communicate. On the surface, the experience was reduced to a handful of blog posts and a few hundred pictures. I wrote letters to friends at home, which were a fun way to communicate what I was feeling, but they are all just slivers.
It’s as though you can only ever scratch the surface, whether you’re given one year or two or a lifetime. No matter what you can communicate, it will never encompass the immensity of what you’ve seen, heard, felt, and done. Yet again and again we drive pipes into that source and attempt to draw out some inner essence, something to take away and perhaps give to others. It allows us to savor the past, however fleeting it may be.
So let’s do it!
What might the essential be in my case? Beyond appearances of day-to-day life, there are so many stories to share. There are so many stories I encountered but never comprehended. They weren’t even stories of words, but glances, gestures, and expressions. It didn’t take long for someone to communicate their intentions, their hopes, their struggles, but they’re still locked away in that wordless place. I remember the day I broke down when I heard about Johnny’s death, but I’ll never understand why that kid died. “He was sick.” The answers were not satisfying, and I was always left to wonder. All I had were the small ways he affected me, and they weren’t even all that poignant. Johnny was indeed sick with something, and this resulted in a running monologue that I couldn’t understand in the slightest. His left eye seemed to roll back into his head, and he only paused to take a deep breath before continuing his address.
Speculation is a sneaky thing, but sometimes it’s all you have from where you’re perched. You might try to glean as many details as you can about anything, but sometimes you have to fill in some blanks with what is hopefully a fair interpretation. You’re assigning words to a space that may never align with all perspectives, but without this assumption we may never move towards anything that might resemble reality, even if it’s somewhat narrow and unappealing.
So I’ll dig back into the pile of scraps and see what I can find:
A herd of cattle approaches, their backs glistening with morning sunlight. The mechanical pounding of their hooves lumbers their bodies forward in a swinging gait, their heads bobbing up and down as they placidly chew their cud. A tight-knit formation of some twenty animals, a handful of which are young calves, (though not a really a handful as that just seems too diminutive; we measure them in hands but they measure us with horns?) stomps along the dusty path, heading out to the fields to diligently chew on dried up stalks of maize from the last harvest. I unfocus my eyes for just a moment, and the orchestration of their nods and bobs starts to take on a timing that might be described by some simple mathematical formula, as though their rhythm is dictated by some marvel of engineering, as though they’re connected by invisible shafts and cams and rods which all operate under a central conductor. Their tails sway as the bulk of their bodies undulate, shifting visibly under their skin as four stomachs and other hefty organs pull this way and that on what must be a remarkably burly skeleton. What they lack in agility seems to be made up for by staunch construction, a sack of flesh that grows tough over time, possibly measured in years of endurance and toil.
Their horns point in all directions. Some forward, some backward, some down, some up to the sky. I wonder how heavy they are. I wonder, if a cow could lament anything, if it would complain about the ever-growing encumbrance of these gnarled and wide protrusions coming from their skull. I imagine it’s a very itchy ordeal, too. Occasionally I’ll see a goat or a pig rub up against some abrasive structure to quell a pesky itch, so I imagine cows are similarly afflicted.
A young one lets out a deep groan unexpectedly loud for how small it is, its neck extending and bending as it seems to take every inch of its being to open its airway, like a fully extended, bellowing accordion, blaring a single note. There seems to be an inverse relationship between size of a cow and its effective volume, as is unfortunately sometimes the case with humans.
They mostly stick to the paths, which were likely stamped out by them to begin with, leaving a wake of hoof-prints and feces, slowly moving on and out of the village before the heat of the day works its way in between the tiny particles of dust in the air. But of course, they’re not in motion under their own volition.
A long, slender switch waves in the air behind them, like a metronome conducting the lumbering bovine engine. From this perspective, as the cows approach, I must say it is a remarkable sight to see, or rather, to not see the human that is holding this treebranch. This very sight brings new meaning to the occupation of cowboy, or cowherd, and it somehow takes that romanticized notion of the gaucho and casts it into a peculiar light. It isn’t always the case, but it’s a typical sight, too: the cowboys of Zambia are often just that. They are little boys, some of which are no older than five or six years old. I’ve heard it in these terms: “If you’re old enough to walk, you have responsibilities.” And it’s true. There isn’t much room for whimsical things like idleness (and education) when you have to fulfill your duty to the family.
In this case your duty to the family isn’t directly your own. The cowboys tend to the cows of other families, those who can afford to either purchase cattle, or, as the cowboys themselves hope to do, have earned them by dedicating years of their lives to the eventual transfer of one of the calves to their own possession. After something like four or so years, a cowboy earns his living in the payment of one cow. But this is not enough, of course, as you need at least two to drive the oxcart, so the cowboys tend to have their careers cut out for them for the better part of a decade. It’s difficult not to judge, to compare this upbringing from my own, one which often asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” In this case, a cowboy is not even grown up when he already becomes something, and suddenly this makes my own culture seem awfully strange, promoting the notion that you only can be somebody when you grow up and consign yourself to a specific career. Sure, in the case of the cowboy, it hardly seems like there was any choice. Choices are quite limited here, so much that the word choice begins to seem like a bizarre notion. The boys herd cows, and the girls work at home. But everybody works in the gardens, and in the fields. Even the oldest. Cows and people alike, they work until their bodies give out.
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I still remember this morning with some clarity, though I couldn’t tell you how many cows there were or what that boy looked like or if I ever saw him again. I’ve seen so many sights like it, but I suppose what I see as “clarity” comes from the mere act of taking a moment to write about it, to appreciate such a commonplace sight in a way that made me think about life in a bigger way. The slightest thing can spin your mind in many directions, but it takes effort on your part to pursue and contemplate the meaning of it all. You have to choose what to think, and what to believe. Coming from a place of what we like to believe is perfect, I realize that I could only judge everything around me from that limited experience. It is tempting to dismiss the happiness of others when it does not fall in alignment with your experience. But in rare moments like these, you simply exist and observe. I stood by my fence and watched the parade of cattle, as I did many mornings and evenings. Often I was just making sure they weren’t eating too much of my grass fence, but there was a sweetness in exchanging a greeting with these small children. They walk the same path almost every day. As it turns out, I do too.
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As it turns out, I have a handful of scraps in my journal written to this effect, but many times I seem to depart from reality entirely. It’s all very hard to reconcile, but occasionally I come across something that seems to have some lasting truth to it. This might be the essence of my staying here: to see, and to happen upon some words that seem true, and move on to the next truth, but not before stringing them together as best as I can. Seeing such a drastically different way of life has a peculiar power to elicit unity. When things appear so ostensibly alien to each other, the common becomes that much more powerful.
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As for the here and now, I want to say more, but I think these things will come with time. I'll sign off with a quote from Beryl Markham:
"There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa —— and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else’s, but likely to be haughtily disagreed with by all those who believe in some other Africa."
