From Mwalusaka to Lusaka…Journey to the stars

Cultural heritage with Pathisa Nyathi

LUSAKA is a well-known name in southern Africa. It is a bustling city that serves as Zambia’s capital town. Prior to attainment of independence by southern Africa’s former colonies, Zimbabwe included, it was home to several liberation movements. Many youths and adults left their countries to take part in the struggles for independence.

There were frequent broadcasts that sought to politicise party cadres that were faced with a protracted and vicious armed struggle motivated and driven by racial considerations and economic interests. 

These broadcasts initially were beamed from Radio Moscow in the Soviet Union and later from the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Jane Ngwenya of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu) was a voice associated with passionate pleas to the young both at home and in South Africa to heed calls to come and take part in the struggle for independence.

During the days of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, (1953-1963) broadcasting services targeted at the Africans were beamed from Lusaka. I was doing a biography of George Silundika, the firebrand nationalist, when I knew about this. Ndebele programmes, for example, were recorded at the Luveve studios in Bulawayo and shipped to Lusaka where they were beamed. One of the persons that I interviewed then was Amon Maqhulayibambe Nyamambi, a veteran broadcaster who had seen it all in the field of broadcasting. The other was John Manyarara.

The word and name Lusaka took on a new meaning beyond being the major city in Northern Rhodesia, as Zambia was known then. Propaganda beamed to counter the activities of the nationalists based there created an impression that what was beamed towards the oppressed masses in the colonies were lies, fictions of imagination. To refer to someone as “uyilusaka” then meant they were engaging in peddling beautiful lies. That was how messages of the struggles were countered to a point where they acquired a new meaning outside of politics.

When I got to Lusaka two weeks ago, I had these memories and sought the true meaning of the name Lusaka. Mine is always an insatiable desire to know about African phenomena, particularly those issues relating to African culture. 

The first target in my search was my host, Dr Moffat Gankhanani Moyo, a lecturer in Literature, Theatre and Poetry at the University of Zambia (UNZA). He is the man who created and runs Kalulu Kreativez in Chalala, a section of Lusaka.

What he knew pointed to the fact that the name derives from the name of a man of the Soli ethnic group that used to inhabit the area prior to colonisation. The Soli are a small group of people who are an integral part of the broader Tonga group who are found in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and Zambia. They are also found in other southern African countries but in a less conspicuous form.

Beyond that, Gankhanani did not know much about the name Lusaka. All the same, he was too far off the mark. It took our trip to a neighbouring district of Kafue to get clarity on the origins of the name that is now well known throughout the world. My wish had been to get some glimpses of Zambian life, in particular their built environments in order to investigate similarities, if any, with what I had been penning in my never-ending articles in the column that has spanned 30 years.

As pointed out in the last article, Lusaka is a fast growing urban conglomerate. As it does so, it devours the ever-diminishing rural enclaves that go down with African heritages inclusive of history, names, traditions and cultures. 

This is particularly more so in terms of African Thought, cosmologies and worldview, as expressed and concretised in the built environment, a field that I have been unpacking in terms of its inspirations and motivations. It took a long drive along dusty roads to get to some surviving huts that are typically African in design and clearly informed by African cultural astronomy where circularity holds sway.

Our aim had been to get to the residence of the local Soli headman in the hope he was going to render a more comprehensive story regarding the name Lusaka. Stones excavated from the belly of Mother Earth had been used in the construction tortuously winding roads within the undulating physical landscape of hills and valleys. Soon our car and us were thickly covered in greyish grime from the dust emanating from the roads. We were determined to get to what I considered remnants of receding and diminishing cultures. The pointer to that had been the few surviving huts characterised by cone-on-cylinder structures.

It was however, when we drove past a group of women who were weaving typical Tonga baskets that our attention was drawn to the enchanting spectacle. That economic activity, usually undertaken in the dry winter months, is characteristic of rural life where agriculture is practiced. The ilala palm baskets abound in the area and the womenfolk, who work grass items, use it to fashion baskets, mats and other related products that find use within rural areas beyond the cold and steely grasps of expanding cities. 

It was when I began documenting the wide range of artefacts maintained within the spaces at Kalulu Kreativez that I would come face-to-face with more items that are manufactured by women, some of them from roots of some plants and yet others from tree leaves. 

My intention then was already to immortalise my trip to Lusaka through writing and producing a book that was going to demonstrate commonalities among African communities found in different places on the continent.

We were still hoping to get to the Soli headman’s residence and then on our way back pass through the homestead where women were gathered to weave the domestic wares that are important in a rural setup where they still enjoy some pride of place. My eyes were darting around to sample all that I could and generate questions aimed at the women. I was rubbing my hands with glee, as I saw prospects of farming more knowledge about Africans and their heritages. At that moment of great expectations, a young woman joined the elders but did not take part in their professional work. She was a teacher from a local school.

Things have changed here. In the past the young, depending on their gender, were apprenticed to elders of the same gender in a social setup characterised by a strict gendered division of labour. Women worked on clay and grass while the male folk worked on metal and wood. I would see more of these products when I proceeded to document the entire collection of artefacts and paintings held at Kalulu Kreativez. My hosts had posed the question regarding whether or not the young were still learning craft skills such as weaving of baskets. The responses were fast in coming, coated with laughter of a derisive nature and ridicule.

The young were too busy with social life and the social media. They have no time to devote to traditional occupations as times have moved on. There are two worlds in the diminishing world that Africa used to know. There I came face-to-face with the disasters of language barriers. The women from whom I sought to extract information and knowledge were not au fait in the language of colonisation. I was not familiar with Soli, their language, either. I thus had to rely on the interpreters and that inhibited me. I knew well that questions are the mother of knowledge. I saw a kitchen hut that, if my language skills were up to scratch, I would have asked to enter and see how it is laid out. It was not to be as my hosts were after sticking to etiquette and ethics. I am aggressive when it comes to throwing missiles in the form of questions directed at interviewees.

After a while, a man appeared on the scene. He came from the direction of a dumpsite from which rubble that was laid on local road networks was collected and carried in heavy and robust trucks. We would later learn, after the man in the company of an assistant, that he was a supervisor at the nearby copper mine responsible for the dump that the trucks were transporting and laying on the roads. He must have been alerted to our car and wondered whether we were friends or foes. Were we up to some mischief in his homestead?

It would turn out this would be the man to inform us about the origins of Lusaka, the name of Zambia’s capital city. Where Lusaka stands today there used to live a man, a leader of his community. They belonged to the Soli ethnic group that was affiliated to the Tonga group, one of the very early Iron Age people to arrive in central and southern Africa.

Names are sometimes given because of the physical landscapes such as rivers and mountains. In the case of the Soli leader, he was named Mwalusaka because where he lived there were dense clumps of trees all around his residence. The word used to describe that vegetation was saka saka, repeating the word to give emphasis to many clumps of trees. 

As usually happened, colonists had African indigenous names corrupted without much by way of a sense of guilt. At independence, the political leadership were too comfortable and embroiled in intense euphoria to bother restoring such corrupted names to their pre-colonial status. Mwalusaka became Lusaka in the same manner that KoBulawayo became Bulawayo. Even as I type this article, the spelling that incessantly pops up is that of Bulawayo. We do not control, we are not in charge as far as spellings of our names are concerned.

I hope that future generations who may be generation that is more liberated will see merit and pride in restoring our names to what they were and not what colonists preferred. 

My interest however, lay more on the impact of cosmic reality as far as the built environment is concerned. 

Here lies the essence of African culture beyond the expressions, manifestations and representation as captured in cultural practices that have been rendered in a hollow and unrooted manner.