ROAD TO DAMBOLAMADZI- Muyange Nsefu

CHAPTER ONE.

As Wezi sat at his table, sipped his coffee and listened to him recount the past 60 years it sounded like he was reading off a shopping list. Every event, his first job, his second wedding, his third divorce, none of them received more than one or two sentences. Yange plowed through the years, the curt, dispassionate curator of his own personal history. Yet the story itself was so fascinating, so rich with moments and so wildly meandering that it somehow stood on its own merits.

It was a great story, no matter how he told it.

By the time Yange was 25 years old, he had gotten married, he had a son, he worked as a farmer, he was a mover, a boat engineer in Kafue, and grown estranged from his spouse— Here's him talking about that.

YANGE: "Of course my wife started to get dissatisfied, I was away for a while."

WEZI: "Away for work or something else?"

YANGE: "I was in the lower Zambezi national park in the illegal trade of game meat."

WEZI: "Oh, you were a poacher? How was that for you?"

YANGE: "I am going back into that venture."

That was everything Yange had to say concerning his first divorce, and the entire poaching business he was into.

Yange had five marriages after that, and even more professions. After the poaching business, he worked as a forest ranger, got shot at once by the mob of a ruling party that were trying to sell the same forest land he was trying to protect, then he became a courier, which was how a poor boy from the Zambezi Escarpment got to see more than the place he was born and raised from.

YANGE: "I have been to all 10 provinces in Zambia with that job. I've been to the Copperbelt. You from Kopala?"

WEZI: "My mother and father are from the Copperbelt, Ndola to be specific, but am currently based in Lusaka."

YANGE: "Ndola huh, you see I could tell you're from the Copperbelt province."

Yange had been arrested once in Livinstone, after one of his packages had been found to be full of white powder. He spent three days locked up before someone got around to checking the substance. It was actually chalk. Poor guy.

A friend he made during his brief custody, Madalisto Mvangeli, invited Yange to stay with him in Livingstone. Just getting over the breakup of his third marriage, Yange gladly took the offer. He stayed in Libingstone for another five years.

YANGE: "Southerners are good people. They have good manners. But they got all these strange urban legends and ghost stories that Madalisto was crazy for, he spent all his free time chasing them down. Like, have you heard of the Nyambe?"

WEZI: "I don't think so, but isn't that what the Lozi people call God in their language?"

YANGE: "Well it is, but she's not what you think. And yes, its a she. She is this spider-looking woman who lives in the Mosi O Tunya falls in the Mosi O Tunya national park. It was meant to be real pretty but real dangerous too. Madalisto took us out there to the falls, we even swam in the Devil's Pool, but our intentions were to get a picture of Nyambe."

WEZI: "Did you ever meet Nyambe?"

YANGE: "Nope, she didn't show up. None of the supernatural of Livingstone did. I didn't believe in them at all until we went to the Dambwa North Forest."

Dambwa North Forest, which is located between latitude 17° and 18°S and longitude 25°and 26°E, with an altitude of 1,000 m above sea level, is home to the Kantumbi, Sianyumbu, Ikasaya villages— among other eight villages located in that forest. Rumour has it that it is one of the forest with the biggest suicide cases in Zambia. Its like people chose to go there and just kill themselves. The next stop on Yange's adventure. It was an area of woodland at the base of Mount Poroto, another notorious hotspot for young people looking to take their own lives. Madalisto, Yange's ghost obsessed jailmate turned best friend, took him to Livingstone to chase down the ghosts of the forest.