kuomboka ceremony

for all of you thinking, ‘jen, aren’t you in africa, why does your blog sound like you are working and doing research in canada?’ to that i would answer, there are always more similarities in the places that i visit than differences, especially in the capital cities. a city is a city. i watch movies in malls and drink coffee. things are different but also the same. fried chicken usually tastes better than in canada, even kfc is different (not that i’ve eaten kfc in canada since i was young… but you get the point).

last weekend i attended a traditional ceremony in the western province of zambia. for those of you who are wondering if i am experiencing your perception of africa, i am, only sometimes. this traditional ceremony, kuomboka, is a ceremony for the lozi people in western province. kuomboka means ‘to get out of water’ in lozi (one of the 72 languages in zambia but one of the main tribes). it happens at the end of the rainy season when the Litunga (King of the Lozi people) must move from one palace to another as the zambezi river has flooded the lower palace, Lealui, to the higher palace, Limulunga. thousands of people flood a town called mongu for the celebration.

karla, kristen and i set out to celebrate and enjoy kuomboka. after a few hiccups with transport, we decided to take the 9 hour bus to mongu early friday morning. we arrived at the bus station at 6am to buy our tickets for a bus that was meant to leave at 8am for mongu. at 11am we finally departed, after spending 5 hours standing in exhaust at the lusaka bus station. after a long trip, we arrived, tired in mongu. we went to our lodge and watched some traditional lozi dancing before heading to bed early.

the saturday morning we woke up again before 6 in order to get down to the docks to get a good boat for the day. the quality of the boat was emphasized as important by many zambians, as they are generally overloaded and apparently a few years ago a reporter drowned, something i was told numerous times. when we arrived at the dock there were many boats and people. the first boat we got into was leaking quite a lot, so we got out and found another boat. this one seemed fine, they gave us life jackets and even took our names, although the purpose of that was not clear.

we set out on a two hour boat ride to the Lealui. it was a very beautiful ride, past lots of very small villages (only three or four houses) and children waving at us. they kept calling out in unison, smiling and waving at us. i had no idea, but was later told, that the cute children were in fact not sending us warm wishes in lozi, but were saying “we are hungry.” this made my waving back and smiling seem a bit patronizing i imagine.

upon arriving at Lealui we waited around for the King and other important people to depart in their boats. the king leaves in a huge boat paddled by 99 (or so i’m told) men that are carefully chosen for the honour of paddling their king to the other palace. these men must train very hard as they paddle in perfect unison and it is quite beautiful. they also wear animal skins, mostly leopard. on top of the boat for the king is a huge elephant that has been made and whose ears and trunk move. it was difficult to see the whole procession. but, just as the king was leaving, a man asked karla if she would like to go out in his small canoe and follow the procession. so we jumped in to this canoe and had an amazing opportunity to go out on the water and see both the king and the queen’s boats up close as they paddled away. it was extremely beautiful, particularly because we were so close to the water and going out with other small canoes all in a fleet, the celebration was really great, although we almost missed our boat back to mongu because of the length of time we were following the king.

we than headed to the higher palace in the afternoon. the grounds were packed with people pushing and i did not enjoy it as much. we were pushed up against a rope in order to see the king and queen (who we finally saw). the trip from the lower palace to the higher palace took the king and his fleet about 6 hours or so to go by boat.

there was a scandal this year where apparently the king had already left the lower palace before the ceremony because of the high amount of water. a lot of older lozi’s were also talking about how some of the traditions were not being followed, the drums being played at the wrong time and such. considering the ceremony is now heavily promoted to tourists and the main cell phone provider and bank logos were everywhere, i imagine a lot of changes have been taking place.

we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and i wish i could upload photos for everyone to see. unfortunately i would like to write more but i have a busy day. last week was out of control because i had to finish my final papers in order to graduate from my masters!

i hope this short post makes people feel that i am at least getting the most out of my urban zambia experience, and do in fact leave the capital city. actually, on the drive back to lusaka we saw three elephants from the car window. i know we laugh when people pull over to take pictures of elk, but i certainly made our new friend who drove us back pull over for photos of elephants!