Harvest Time and Our First Mongu Trip.

Rain returned to Portugal this week, marking the start of Autumn. In fact, 58 mm in total. The rainbow was over the hills behind our house.

There it is: the very first rains arriving, marking the end of summer and the beginning of Autumn. As I have said in earlier blogs, our seasons in Portugal are the opposite of what we experienced in our old home country, Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe, the first rains, often in October or November, mark the beginning of summer and hopefully a damp, if not wet, summer growing season when our crops would flourish. Mind you, more and more farmers have installed irrigation to mitigate the idiosyncrasies of the weather, including its changing patterns, which I believe are the natural cycles of the world’s climate rather than solely man-made, although man is to blame for most of the environmental damage, and all of that is not down to natural causes.

“From the overpopulation of the elephants that causes devastation in their habitat in Africa to the desertification caused by overgrazing, to the pollution in our rivers in Europe, all can be attributed to man and his greed for land, minerals and products to fulfil his needs. Not natural causes, unless we believe the way of modern man is natural.” - Peter McSporran

Here in Portugal, the first rains mark the end of the hot, long dry summer, when food crops, cereals, or horticulture are irrigated to obtain good yields, while in many cases growing drought-resistant perennial vines, fruit, and nut trees is the favoured alternative. Even these are increasingly irrigated to ensure viable yields, given that current crop commodity prices have long lagged behind rising production costs. This is the worldwide situation all farming communities are facing. So our first rains hopefully do not come too early, to mark the end of summer in both the Southern and Northern Hemispheres. Unfortunately, these early rains often coincide with the harvesting. Since we have been here in Portugal, we have seen a couple of grape harvests suffer damage due to early rains; let's hope this is not the case this year, with a heavy crop in the vineyards following an ideal season for grapes being wet in the beginning and hot during fruit set. This is the crazy thing about farming: it relies so much on the vagaries of the weather. Not just the actual rainfall and sunshine hours but also the timing of the rain or shine. To get good yields in most crops, from maize to tobacco, you want early but limited rains to start the crop to ensure good root development and a long growing season with plenty of heat units following germination; and the opposite: a dry period to harvest. As a child and a youth, those years were rare, especially on the Island of Mull, where I can recall many times the hay would rot in the fields unbaled and the cereals would sprout in the damp after being flattened by wind and rain. It is little wonder townspeople say farmers are never happy, not knowing they have many reasons for being unhappy, the vagaries of the weather being only one of a long list. First it is the stone fruit, then in early August it is figs and almonds, and the end of August marks the beginning of the grape harvest, with its peak in September. At the end of September and into October, it's walnuts; olives run from October to December in our area, and finally citrus into the New Year. 

The two main cash crops here are olives and grapes, although figs and walnuts are abundant, with virtually every household in the rural areas being self-sufficient in all. It is a very busy time, whether you are a full-time farmer or part-time, holding a wage-paying full-time day job, which restricts their harvesting to evenings and weekends on their ‘quintas’ or small holdings. In many cases, they help each other, and especially during the grape harvest, this is a strong tradition called ‘vindimas’, where the vineyard family rewards those who come to help with copious quantities of food and drink, the drink being wine. Many expats get roped into the community spirit and join in the harvests, and it is seen as a compliment to be invited to do so. The real fun bit about harvest time is you have to have a ‘festa’ celebrating each harvest. These occur in nearly every village, with additional festas celebrating other products such as sardines, cheese, or even honey. I often wonder why we celebrate the coming of sardines when we are a long way from the sea. Never mind, we enjoy the free sardines, which you receive raw and cook on open-fire grills or ‘braais’. In fact, there are so many reasons to ensure a festa happens; the list is endless, including not only numerous crop harvests but historical and religious events, the latter probably claiming the most. Needless to say, there is rarely a weekend where we do not hear music and fireworks echoing down our valley, the Rabaçal Valley, from some such festival. There are no nightclubs, discos, theatres or cinemas; festivals suffice, and the nice thing about festas is that they encompass everyone.

“From my own personal observation here in Portugal, family events such as festas which encompass all ages, reducing the chance of violence despite the copious amounts of alcohol drunk.” - Peter McSporran

Few people outside Zambia know that the second-largest migration occurs on the plains of Western Zambia when 75,000 blue wildebeest are on the move.

Going back to 2003 and our first trip to Mongu, I was accompanied by Rozanne, aka my madam, and Jones Akapelwa, a Lozi friend and soon-to-be business partner in a proposed timber harvesting business. As related earlier, we were heading to Mongu to introduce ourselves to the Lozi King, the ‘Litunga’, to get his blessing for our project, which was going to be in the south of his kingdom of Barotseland. Finally, after enduring a six-hour pothole-ridden journey, we arrived in Mongu and made ourselves known to the local government administrative office. Zambia is high on protocol, although John had previously, through the Litunga’s Council, the ‘Kuta’, had organised our audience with them; we still had to meet with the state representatives. I remember that day well for two reasons: one, as we booked into the only hotel there at the time owned by the Government and, despite the rather grubby sheets, decided we needed a bath before bed, to find there was no cold water, only brown coloured hot water. We therefore ran the hot water, which was boiling, and left it to cool while we went to dinner at the only place open that night, a rather dingy joint that claimed chicken was its speciality. Unfortunately, hygiene was an issue, and before we finished the meal, Rozanne was struck by the ‘runs’, as we call diarrhoea in Africa, and retreated to the back seat of the Land Rover with a very painful stomach. John and I persevered in finishing the meal. We had a clue to the cause the next morning when we drove past the local prison, which seemingly supplied the vegetables, to see prisoners happily applying fresh human waste to their veggie plots. Funnily enough, the only other resident that night at the hotel was the now late Guy Scott, who I knew as he also did some consultancy, that is, between being a political animal. Following the death of the incumbent President, Sata, he became the first white president of Zambia or, for that matter, the first in post-colonial Africa. Nor has there been any since.

The Mongu Hotel back in 2003. The exterior belied the poor service and dirty rooms

The whole of the next day was taken up waiting to see the Litunga; you are expected to have lots of patience when you get an audience with tribal leaders. I think that perhaps in Africa all politicians make a point of being late for meetings, it is a tradition they have adopted rather than their due. This meeting took place at his summer home out on the  Bulozi Plain, where he stayed in his summer home once the annual floods receded. His winter home was in Mongu on the high ground, which he moved to before the rising water submerged the plains. This was done with fanfare, and a three hundred year old ceremony called the ‘Kamboka’  which has become a major annual tourist attraction. After finally seeing him, we decided to start our journey south to Sesheke, where the timber project was planned and decided we would rather stay at one of the lodges on the road than in the grubby hotel. A good idea, which proved to be wrong. For that evening, with Rozanne declining to eat, when we went to run the bath, all that came out of the tap was raw sewage and, unbeknown to us, brown river water. So much for cleaner quarters, as the sheets there were even grubbier. I cannot remember the name of the lodge, but all the other guests seemed to be on government business and consumed beer rather than risking a bath. The next day, when we walked down to observe the Zambezi from its bank we saw the reason for the sewage in the water. The pump used to supply water to the hotel was straight from the river, which in itself was bad enough, as the town of Mongu was a few kilometres upstream, but even worse, the lodge’s waste pipe spilt its contents right next to it. 

Jones and I found a cold Coke in this store. They were few and far between.

This trip was late in the year, and the rains had just commenced as we headed south towards Katima Mulilo, on the west bank of the Zambezi, on non-existent roads. They were closer to being wide ditches than roads. Encountering bad roads and two scary ferry crossings across the Zambezi on our way to Katimo Mulimo, which lies on the east bank of the Zambezi, opposite Sesheke. Most of the road south was on the west bank and I believe it now has been tarred. The road was so bad; at one point, the Land Rover was completely submerged, with our fridge in the back floating in the water. Luckily, we had a snorkel on the vehicle and got through; it was touch and go. Once at Katima Mulilo, we waited for another ferry, more like a motorised barge, to come and carry us across. This was before the Germans built the new bridge in 2004.

The ferry crossing the Zambezi- overloaded, of course

It was another scary ferry crossing in the leaking barge, which just stayed afloat by means of its pumps competing with the inflow of water in the pontoons. If they stopped, I have little doubt the overloaded barge would have sunk in minutes. From there, onto Mwandi and clean sheets and clean water at the mission guest house there. We would only have its use for another year, as the new mission head, of Scottish descent, Keith Waddell, decided, we are reliably told, to see the guest house much more comfortable than the old mission house. From there, due to the poor roads, after meeting with the senior chief there, it took us two days to get back to Lusaka with a thinner and pallid Rozanne. An adventure all the same, and I would spend many weeks in the Sesheke area in the future, including numerous repeats of this initial journey. Unfortunately, there never was anywhere nearly as comfortable as the Mwandi Mission Guest House in those later travels.

Disclaimer: Copyright Peter McSporran. The content in this blog represents my personal views and does not reflect corporate entities.