Calm Before the Dust

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  Solwezi, Zambia
Thursday, June 23, 2005

The highway north from Lusaka to Ndola, Kitwe and other cities on the Copperbelt is smoothly tarred and pot-hole free. Termite mounds tower up in the fields beside the road, some as high as telephone poles, coloured red, yellow, brown or white by the tones of earth dug up by the ants. Between small towns roadside huts offer watermelons here, charcoal there, gourds fashioned into water vessels, sweet potatoes.

"This is the area for honey," says the driver, Bwalya, as we pass stands of plastic bottles filled with a smokey-golden fluid. Between us sits Brian, Bwalya's painfully-shy nephew. The truck rattles with dozens of metal support beams destined to shore up the HIV/Aids awareness billboards my father's advertising company put up for the Zambian Central Board of Health. We're driving up through the Copperbelt on our way deep into North-Western province, an area of the country few people I know of, including my father, have ever visited

Finished Billboard, Chavuma

.

Unlike vast stretches of road where we are headed, we make good time on the road, stopping here and there to inspect billboards, and slowed occasionally by roadblocks. At one barrier we're pulled over for running on thread-bare tyres, a minor infraction which delays us as Bwalya negotiates with the cops. "The crime committed costs a 45,000 kwacha ($10) fine," he says, getting back in the truck. He had slipped the cop 30,000.

The officers were laughing as he walked away. "They think you'll be surprised to see how things work here in Zambia," he says. I'm not. We get nailed again for the same thing a hundred kilometres on, and the same payment is quickly palmed.

There are a lot of checkpoints in the Copperbelt, and cops here must make a good deal of extra money letting things slip by. They're supposed to be on the look out for itinerant Congolese. At some places the highway is only a few hundred metres from the border with Congo, and Congolese bandits have been known to set up fake checkpoints to relieve drivers of more than just their pocket change.

But the Copperbelt has always had a reputation as a tough place

Our Ride

. For decades Zambia's major source of wealth, the region is still producing much of the country's copper, slowly recovering from years of declining world copper prices. Even as a kid I remember the names of cities like Ndola and Kitwe spoken of as remote outposts of hard-driven, hard living miners. On the surface the reality seems quite different.

While the miners may yet be hardy and rough, the towns themselves are well planned, spacious and pleasant. Even in winter green grass sprouts along avenues in Kitwe; a stately golf course and modern-looking hospital flank the edge of Ndola. Beside these cities and surrounding smaller towns, Lusaka looks mangy and poor. Even if it's dried up in recent years, copper money was been well-spent here.

But we're not staying long, not even stopping, as we push on to make the edge of North-Western province before nightfall. We're on an 8-day schedule, with 17 billboards to inspect and reinforce, some of which have over in the three month they've been up. Time is pressing.

As the last light fades we hit a stretch of highway Bwalya says is infested with bandits and thieves who wait for trucks to slow down around particularly bad pot-holes, climbing aboard to steal anything they can. Bwalya says he once lost ten bags of oranges off a truck he was driving on this road. "Luckily the owner was on the truck or he'd have thought I took them," he says. And lucky for us the road has been recently repaired and we cruise along unmolested.

If some people here lift goods off passing trucks why do villagers leave their bundles of charcoal out by the road overnight? "People here are afraid to steal them," says Bwalya. "They're afraid of witchcraft." While most of rural Zambia is rife with mankwala, or black magic, this area is particularly feared for it.

(Belief in juju is so prevalent that it even reaches into the capital, where with all seriousness, Zambia's major papers sometimes publish stories involving mankwala. A recent news item told the story of a man who'd stolen a bag of charcoal, only to have his hands mysteriously burn when his wife set the charcoal alight. Another story quoted a man who, attacked by a lion, believed the beast was actually a witch who'd taken the animal's form).

Bwalya tells me that in some regions banana farming has been banned, because people believe witches use the stands of banana trees as discrete landing pads after their forays into the sky.

But it's not hard to see how such beliefs could occupy people's minds so far removed from cosmopolitan life. Out here, with little or no electricity, the only light after dusk comes from stars, the moon or the roaring brush fires villagers seem so fond of.
I begin to see faces in the bush, shape-shifting trees, and menace in passing night owls, a particularly feared animal in rural Zambian culture.

Back in the "civilization" of Solwezi, a small city on the border between the Copperbelt and North-Western province, we find rooms in a guesthouse and a beer at a local dive. It's Saturday night in Solwezi, and Popo's Bar has a small crowd. I figure I'm the only muzungu for miles when a trio of white roughnecks stroll into the place, one of them sporting a grubby blond mullet and a Canada t-shirt.

But the place is emptying out, playing "Sikci ya lelo nipempa weo", by Exile, one of the most popular songs in Zambia, on a loop as if trying to stem the flow of people heading out. We leave, probably the only people with a 6 a.m. assignment the next day.

For the first and last time in the next week I go to bed with perfectly clean clothes. The dust is about to settle in.

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