Mikimba

Mikimba is one of the elders in the village, and an important ally to the Same World Same Chance project.  He has been with it from the beginning; its present incarnation is his brainchild, and he believes strongly in its ability to build capacity for Kibombomene and all of Solwezi East.  I met him as he preached at the front of the church, wearing a black three-piece suit and a sharp silver tie that would have easily given him fashion currency on King West.  His face is severe as he speaks and dangerous when he laughs, but it melts into a kind of dusty dusk as he kneels and claps twice to greet villagers with the respect that is culturally afforded to him.

I went to Mikimba’s house on Sunday to introduce myself more casually to him, to discuss ideas and to better understand the culture to which I had come.  In the fifty metres from the highway I was greeted along the rusty mud path by no fewer than four or five of his sons or nephews.  I passed the little shed where wood was being cut, and waved at the women cooking in the straw shelter behind the house before going inside.

Bricks in Kibombomene are made locally; red clay is quarried from the gargantuan ant hills and kiln-fired until hardened.  Houses made of brick and cement mortar, with cement floors, are owned by the wealthiest people in the village, of which there are not many.  Mikimba is one; he has made a decent living cutting a local tree, whose name eludes me, that is made into splendid hardwood doors and furniture.  In this part of Zambia, forestry could never be considered intensive; Mikimba cut this wood and ferried it to vendors on a bicycle until he became too old to do so.  At about fifty-five years of age, Mikimba has exceeded Zambian life expectancy by nearly fifteen years.

The inside of Mikimba’s house is an extraordinary kind of dark; he has solar panels that power LED lights, which seem to only light themselves and little of the inside.  Past the dining space which seats six at a hand-made table, he has a living alcove cluttered with plush furniture, a television, dozens of unidentifiable electrical apparatuses, and a small coffee table; the walls are adorned with doily-like curtains. Above the door to the rest of the house there is a shelf that supports a large wet cell battery, always connected to the solar panels.  This battery is how I charge my computer.

When Mikimba emerged from the darkness beyond that door, he was wearing a black T-shirt with some sort of flashy corporate logo; I struggled to decide if it suited him better or worse than the three-piece.  He invited me to sit, and he did the same, veritably draped over the arm of his chair, forearms supporting his head as he spoke.

Mikimba is a paleoconservative if there ever was one, and as I sat in dialogue with him about the future of the village I couldn’t help but think that this must be a common paradox; hyper-liberal Westerners coming to work in hyper-traditional settings.  Of course, when it comes to the will of the people of the village, I have no desire to impose any unwelcome foreign ideas.  But it occurs to me that the ideas of the village are, by definition, the ideas of Mikimba.

And on the way home from a very pleasant evening and conversation, and all cordialities extended and accepted on both sides, I couldn’t help but wonder what it is, exactly, that afford an elder respect and deference.  Is it just a way of congratulating someone for getting old?

As Mikimba and I walked, I felt very sharply (though I had known it intellectually before, I hadn’t felt it), that there was not a single person that I had seen in the village who was older than Mikimba; few were older than I.  And then it occurred to me: Mikimba had a long life because he abstained from extramarital sex and excessive drink and excessive leisure and other such sins that are deadly in this society and economy.  Villagers don’t articulate it this way, of course; they simply remind me that in Zambia there is a “culture of respect”, which is simply a way of describing how younger people defer to older people as a matter of principle.  But of course they do.