This evening, a storm came in just before sunset. The most interesting yellow-orange light was cast across the village. I tried to capture it with these pictures. There was a beautiful contrast in the clouds as the storm rolled across the sky. White puffy cloud intermixed and then were pushed aside by the dark blue-gray storm cell coming in. In those blue-gray clouds were long, vibrant and lasting lightening strikes. The rain didn't reach us for a good 20 minutes, but when it did, it began falling in huge, quarter-size, splashing drops.
Before the storm approached, though, two sisters and their brother came by to show us the small, red and yellow caterpillars they'd collected for the evening's dinner relish (the side dish to the nshima). Our friend ba Beauty, who was visiting at the time, made a face and said these were not for her (meaning she didn't eat them and didn't like them). But, she told me how to prepare them.
First, you must boil them in water for 5-10 minutes, until all the red seeps out of them. Then, you dump the water and boil them again for 5-10 minutes, again letting more red seep out of them. These caterpillars, if you touch them, will give you a raised, itchy rash that's apparently quite painful. So, you must double-boil them to get all the toxin out of them. Then, you throw out the water and fry the caterpillars in saladi (vegetable oil) until they are nice and crispy. Finally, they are ready to eat.
Later that evening, I asked ba Beauty's father, ba Godfrey, about these caterpillars. They are a traditional food Zambians have been eating for as long as anyone he knows can remember. People eat them now, people ate them when he was a child, even his father ate them when his father was a child. He guessed the people of Luapula (and other parts of Zambia and DR Congo) have been eating these caterpillars like this for generations, "maybe even centuries," he said.
This discussion led into what ba Godfrey ate when he was a boy. At that time, he told us the people in this area were not cultivating maize or gardening. They relied on cassava (which they cultivated in fields in the bush) and bush meat. Ba Godfrey told us that by the time he was 12, the age of his youngest son now, he was a hunter. About twice in a week, he and a group of boys and older men would go out into the bush to hunt impala “and the animals like impala- yes, something like that.” Impala, Puku, Black Lechwe and Sitatunga are all native to Zambia, and I have seen Sitatunga in the Bangweulu Swamps, so my guess is that as a boy he might have hunted any of these animals.
Shaun asked if people performed sacrifices to different spirits before they'd go hunting, a question prompted by the topic's treatment in a book Shaun is currently reading, Africa: Altered Stated, Ordinary Mircales by Richard Dowden. (By the way, I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a genuine picture of sub-Saharan Africa). Ba Godfrey said that in the past- for example when his father was a hunter- people in fact sacrificed goats or chickens to the spirits in order to have a good hunt. There is a large rock on the outskirts of our village where hunters would go, kill a chicken or goat, pour the blood on or under the large rock as a sacrifice for the spirits, and then the hunters would cook and eat the animal.
By the time ba Godfrey began hunting as a boy, people here were no longer making these sacrifices to the spirits because “Christianity arrived,” as he put it. He said people no longer made sacrifices to the spirits because they no longer believed in their powers or existence. The rock where hunters would make their sacrifices is still in the same place and ba Godfrey said he will take us there. However, no one makes sacrifices there now, and as a testament to the waning belief in the spirits who live in the rock, someone is currently building their big, “modern” house on the land right next to this rock.
As ba Godfrey grew older, the number of animals dwindled until there were virtually none left, at least not nearly enough to make hunting a viable option for providing a family's food. People started turning more to making charcoal in the bush and selling this in exchange for money or food for the family. Many families we live with in Chebele still do not cultivate and rely solely on the proceeds from their charcoal sales (the 50kg bag of charcoal we recently bought was 15,000Zkw, or $3USD).
Other families, however, have turned to cultivating maize and vegetables in their gardens, which they sell for money, keep for household consumption, or a combination of both. This practice of farming is quite new to the area, though. Many farmers here only started cultivating anything other than cassava around 2000, and ba Godfrey around 2005.
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