16/12/2025
PRACTISING STORY TELLING. THIS ONE IS BUT FROM THE BLUES! iCISUNGU NA CO!
ONE MAN’S MEAT
Kapotwe, dressed in a traditional beige crimplene wedding suit, strides confidently with his Australian bride before an assembly of elders. Nine grey-haired and bald men of Mwansanga village—guardians of Unga chiefdom’s cultural doctrines and ancestral norms—sit restlessly, preparing to deliberate on his audacious 1969 marriage. For them, even their own children marrying outside the tribe is unthinkable; bringing home a blonde, blue-eyed woman from Australia is beyond the pale. The scandal is more than they can bear.
“If this is what academic achievements entail, none of my children should even think about it. Over my dead body,” swears Petticoat Lunkunka, an old wiry village headman with a scruffy long beard, as he sinks into the presiding Nduna’s chair. His smoke-treated bamboo walking stick guided him to the centre of other venerable traditionalists.
As he squints in the direction of Kapotwe and Tanya, his facial expression is as contemptuous as that of a janitor disgusted by a pungent odour from a mucky latrine.
A few women sit on the other side of the court arena floor, its dust, thankfully, suppressed by stagnant water. All are wearing multi-coloured head coverings in a show of submission and obedience to tradition.
Kapotwe’s mother, a beautiful, medium-built woman in her early fifties, sits aloof on the left side of the arena. She couldn’t hold her emotions; these brute-thinking villagers are tearing her between her love for Kapotwe and custom. She imagines the burden of facing this jury would have been lighter with her late husband around. Not just herself, her thirty-year-old son, against the livid tribe!
“Our gods ‘ve cursed this tribe because of senseless acts like this,” says another red-lipped, fat old man.
A brief silence falls. Hot summer wind stirs pollen from the mango trees, scattering it onto the centrally placed calabash—the village totem, the medium through which Lunkunka communes with the spirits. The fresh scent of beeswax smeared around its girth mingles with the air, while its polished surface gleams with an eerie, fetishistic sheen.
Sitting next to her troubled new husband, Tanya looks solemnly at Emeliya, her expression full of untold remorse.
She never imagined that marrying a loving, intelligent man of colour would provoke such contempt from the tribe. Tanya recalls the joy and laughter she and Kapotwe shared on their wedding day in Australia, just four months ago. She expected the occasional whispered prejudice, but nothing like this senseless uproar.
Tanya agreed to follow her husband to Mwansanga village, on the outskirts of Ncheta Island in the swamps of Northern Rhodesia, to complete their marriage ceremonies. Here she is now, rejected, as forewarned by her kin, in the midst of riled elders accusing her husband of immoral flattery to their gods. They are roundly cursing him in their ancestral denunciations, pouring everlasting damnation for marrying his “Princess of singular beauty.” She is thinking deeply about what comes out of all this mess.
“Tell that damn ghost of a woman, in her very own language, that she cannot insult our gods with impunity by yoking her foreign spirits with ours,” Lunkunka shouts angrily at Kapotwe in deep Ciunga language.
“Muleya, your father, must be turning in his grave. You are a disgrace, Kapotwe,” he says, throwing fine soil in the direction of the totem and later, Muleya’s grave site.
“My, elders, please. Deal with Kapotwe. Not his wife. She’s just a victim of love. Deal with my son,” Emeliya says amidst sobs, disregarding the ban for women to utter anything at such a solemn meeting.
“Enough of your insolence, woman!” shouts Saninga, a well-respected traditionalist. “True to our forefathers’ saying, if a mother be stubborn, what of her offspring?”
Kapotwe, a young, Western-educated political scientist, can no longer stomach the incessant attacks on his family. He is shaking with anger. His diminutive stature notwithstanding, he rises and looks at the men in front. The sound of his chattering teeth is unmistakable.
“My elders,” he begins softly, his cheeks flushed as he meets their gaze. “With all due respect, I must express my deep disappointment at how you have responded to my individual and human right to choose my life partner.” He pauses, looking at Tanya, his most cherished companion. “I returned from Australia to honour my ancestors and to affirm my right to live the life I choose…”
“End of this meeting!” interjects Pumba, the deputy headman. His thick lips stammered, and his voice became increasingly croaky. “We- cannot- allow- this- brat- to- come- and -lecture- to- us- about- human -rights… What about our rights to follow our ancestors’ culture? Because of this uncultured, poor little idiot, he procured overseas for a wife? Because of her long hair, her colourless skin, Kapotwe can have the audacity to speak over you, representatives of our gods? God forbid,” he says, gesturing furiously at all while rising to leave the meeting, clutching his oval-tripod-shaped stool in his left hand.
As if to add salt to the community elders' fresh wound, Tanya stands to hug Kapotwe. She whispers into his ear: “I’m sorry for the trouble, my love.” Her frightful posture betrayed her inner resolve to stick to him. Tears roll down her cheeks as Emeliya stands to wipe them with her headdress.
“See the kind of taboos this tribe will ‘ve to endure if you allow these cantankerous little nothings to go ahead with their bad manners?” Pumba says, pointing at the two, who are tightly clinging to each other. “The gods will be infuriated with this community, and will spare no living person. What a curse of a child Muleya left us.”
Kapotwe, Tanya and Emeliya stand in silence as the elders leave the assembly, swearing.
This village has always punished insubordination by banishment. And so, I risk my hut, barn and garden. Kapotwe has just started work in the Ndola City Council as the first black Town Clerk. My own brother, Bono, is against Kapotwe’s marriage, insinuating a white woman would never treat her black in-laws with respect. Will we survive the village wrath? Emeliya muses.
The trio dashes to Emeliya’s hut to pick up their belongings. The hut is already in flames! Kapotwe, realising that their lives are in danger, drags Tanya and Emeliya to Petticoat Lunkunka’s house. He picks an axe and commands Lunkunka’s wife to get into their house or risk her life.
Lunkunka briskly follows inside the house as if he just regained his sight. Kapotwe locks the door behind him and orders Lunkunka: “Old man, I know you’re wise. Tell the people to burn us in here now! Let them tell the difference between the ashes of my wife and the rest of us.” Kapotwe moves close to Lunkunka as he assures Mrs Lunkunka that he would not harm her family, but wants the headman to realise the folly of racial discrimination.
“Kapotwe, my son,” comes a deep, panicky voice from outside. “Don’t harm anyone in there. Open the door and let sanity prevail.” It is Heliko, Kapotwe’s father’s best friend. He was the headman of another village where Kapotwe had left his government LandRover for safekeeping.
“Do us a favour, Papa Heliko, torch the house now! Let the people distinguish the ashes of a white person from those of a black person. That action will settle the case for posterity,” he says.
Old Lunkunka and his wife sit on the floor near his bedroom. Thinks for a moment and asks Kapotwe: “Would white people accept your tradition as readily as you want us to believe?”
Kapotwe angrily looks at Lunkunka, points at Tanya and says, “Old man, is she black or white? If she didn’t readily accept my tradition and culture, would she be here, ready to die for me? Is she not being tormented by you and your blind followers for loving another human being not from her race? Do you think she dropped from the sky with no cultural beliefs of her own?”
“Alright, my son,” Lunkunka says softly. “We can resolve this issue without going to extremes,” Lunkunka says, standing up. His frail body barely stooped. “Allow me to calm the crowd outside so the people can hear you out.”
Lunkunka moves towards the door. Some irate young men are almost breaking down the mud-brick house to attack Tanya and Kapotwe. Lifting his rod, Lunkunka calls out with all his remaining power in his voice: “Men of Mwansanga, listen to me,” he says, pointing the rod at retreating youths as Kapotwe prepares for defence. “This tribe believes in bloodless resolution of differences; however much upset we may be... Remember, at the centre of this controversy is our own child.”
“As educated a person as Kapotwe claims to be ought to know that ‘One man’s meat is another’s poison,’” shouts a youth, as Lunkunka restrains him from getting into the house.
“Instead of village elders deciding this case, we will ask you, the inhabitants and heritage keepers, to judge Bernard Kapotwe Muleya,” he continues. “You know his father, Muleya, was a kind but firm man who wanted nothing but justice in his dealings with anyone,” Lunkunka pauses as the five walk out of the house. “I have, personally, listened to Kapotwe’s voice of reason. I request all of you to hear him out,” concludes Lunkunka.
While everyone troops to the village ground where they hold community meetings, Namambi, a strong, youthful, well-built man in his late thirties, whispers to Kapotwe that he and Heliko had arranged to have his mother’s belongings secured. She has only lost the hut.
Kapotwe, Tanya and Emeliya walk to the meeting in silence, cordoned by Namambi and his friends.
Pumba rises to speak after a brief from Lunkunka.
“You all know why we’ve this emergency meeting,” he says, wiping sweat from his bald head. “Kapotwe has taken a white woman for a wife, as you can see.” He pauses to let the audience sink in his words. “And, he has come to ask you people to approve of this marriage. In other words, he would like us to legitimise this unique union of cultures. We now give him the chance to exculpate himself.”
“My fellow esteemed tribesmen, I can speak about this matter all day. But, I realise, you all have more important things to do,” Kapotwe says, turning to make sure everyone was listening. “I agree with you that man should live in line with nature’s laws. That is why I’m requesting you to do a simple exercise on me and my wife, Tanya.”
Kapotwe asks Tanya to stand with him before the elders. Facing the crowd, he says, “We are not afraid to die. Death is natural and useful to nature. But before you kill us, or any one of us, do compare our blood samples and tell us the difference.”
Pumba, astonished, says with a smirk: “Maybe her blood could just be red too!”
But Kapotwe insists that villagers see blood samples to erase any doubts in their minds. This act, he says, is the simplest lesson that will help them treat people of other races like themselves.
While a man took a spoonful of blood samples from Tanya and Kapotwe, some people were surprised to find they could not tell the difference between the two.
“You see the way education has diluted his thinking? Before you know it, the entire tribe will be thinking like him,” says one Na-kulu Pipo.
Turning to the elders, Kapotwe says, “Human beings are unique, yet fundamentally the same wherever they live—regardless of colour or creed. People may be short or tall, red or black, but they are all people. God in heaven, the sum of all gods on earth, made us this way—and is infallible.
“Everything else, culture and tradition included, can vary or even change among races at the passage of time or even circumstantially, but you cannot change the fact that we are a tribe of humans…”
“Banish him! Banish him!” shout the crowd.
“Alright,” says Lunkunka amid increased shouts. “For the sake of our rights to believe in our tradition, and for the sake of your right to live life the way you want, we meet halfway. You leave Mwansanga in peace as you go and enjoy your pet!”
