tonight i want to write about a ceremony that's close to home for me - the tuwimba ceremony of my own people, the nsenga of petauke.
i mentioned this briefly when i wrote about the nsenga a little while back, but i think it deserves its own post, because it's one of the stories from this whole project that has stayed with me the most.
the story goes that, long ago, there was a severe drought. the rains that should have come in october or november simply didn't arrive. the ground stayed hard. nothing could be planted. and in a farming community, that's not a small inconvenience - that's the difference between a year of plenty and a year of hunger.
so the chief led all the nsenga people into the deep bush. they found a huge, special tree. they prayed there. they made offerings - tuwimba. and before they even got back to their homes, it started to rain.
i think about that story a lot. not because i'm certain about how literally to take it - that's not really the point for me. what strikes me is what the story says about the relationship between a community, its leadership, and the land it depends on. when things got desperate, the response wasn't to wait it out individually. it was to go together, as a people, led by the chief, to a specific place that held meaning for them, and to do something collective and intentional.
every year on the 15th of october, the nsenga still do this. paramount chief kalindawalo makes an offering at the traditional shrine. choirs and dance troupes come from all over nsenga land. the nsongwe dance - the one i'm proud to say is ours, distinctively nsenga - is performed by young people in traditional dress. in good years, ten thousand people or more show up.
i wasn't raised attending tuwimba every year - my life took me into business, into kitwe, into all the things this page has been documenting about flow valve and the copperbelt. but writing about it for this series has made me think about how much of who i am comes from petauke, from kachilonda village, from a people who - when things got hard - went into the bush together and prayed for rain, and the rain came.
that's not a small thing to carry. i think it's part of why i do what i do - why i keep building, keep trying, keep believing that things can turn around even when they look hard. my people have a story about exactly that. and every october 15th, they tell it again.