The pumpkin seeds that were planted in our garden last year have sprouted. Twisted emerald vines creep along the brick wall fence as silver-tinged leaves unfurl toward the sunshine. Delicate orange petals flutter in the slight breeze and a waft of sweet perfume lures bees and butterflies, but there is no fruit yet.
To say the seeds were planted is an untruth. They were tossed on the compost and left to their own devices, crackling through the husk, feeling about in the dark, dank, mulch until they broke through the surface, like feral children who succeed to spite their parents.
Driving back to Lusaka from Chongwe in Zambia’s east over molten potholed asphalt, I’d stopped at a roadside market. A bustling oasis of commerce amongst the crispy brown October grass, a mishmash of stalls cobbled together from dried-out sticks and wood. Stacks of fresh vegetables drew me in like a mirage.
I’d waited for a blinding gust of ochre dust to settle before emerging from the air-conditioned cocoon of my car and into the sweltering heat. Women clad in colorful chitenge called out to me – groundnuts, cassava, kalembula, sweet potatoes, watermelon and impwa. They jostled for attention, haggling while holding out their wares, carrying them unbidden to the open boot of my car.
My eyes flickered past a woman nursing her baby, a leaking nipple abandoned for a moment by the curious infant. The woman shifted her crossed legs on a shiny white mat made of stitched mealie meal sacks. She smiled and waved at the pumpkins at her feet.
“Ifipushi, Mama?” she encouraged. “Pumpkins, Mum?”
I made a mental note of all that I’d already spent.
“Only 45 Kwacha,” she called, flopping her breast into her blouse and tying her baby to her chest with a yellow-green chitenge, the knot resting on her shoulder.
“Intu ya lowa,” she said, standing up to hand me a green-white bulbous squash. “It’s sweet.”
I had not uttered a word yet, but my eyes betrayed me.
At home I sliced, quartered, boiled and mashed the pumpkin, sprinkled it with cinnamon and paired it with shredded beef stew.
The woman was right. The pumpkin was melty on the tongue, sweet and buttery. And when I’d mopped up all the spicy soup and savoured the last bite, I scraped the ropey orange bits from the seeds, set them on the ledge of my balcony to sun-dry before handing them to our gardener for planting. A season passed and it was obvious that he hadn’t bothered with them.
But now, months later, here was evidence of their existence. I watched the vines slide across the wall, wondering as I often do about the depth of their roots.
This curiosity about the roots of pumpkins emerged in secondary school. Already a voracious reader, I finally encountered African literature. Before that it was all pearlescent white children roaming the countryside on exciting adventures, plucky American cheerleaders flicking their blonde locks at bullies and batting their lashes at the school jock, before I moved on to my father’s bookshelf where MI6, the CIA and sometimes the KGB jostled for supremacy over every single courtroom scenario that John Grisham could conjure up.
Boarding school meant books as contraband, and for me that included whatever the African literature students were studying. In my time this meant 40-year-old African classics, books written in the 1960s when a young continent was emerging from the ravages of colonialism, its writers carving out an identity: Things Fall Apart, The River Between, Cry, the Beloved Country and Song of Lawino.
I took a mishmash of classes that appealed to my sense of adventure and my father’s need for something concrete: technical drawing, additional mathematics, French and history. There was no room for literature, so I mopped up titbits of information about the texts through discussions with friends.
Song of Lawino, a book of epic poetry by Ugandan author Okot p’Bitek, stood out. It is about the influence of Western culture on traditional African ways of life. The theme is illustrated as a lament by a woman, Lawino, towards her husband Ocol. Lawino believes Ocol has been corrupted by Western education and thus shunned his African roots. He no longer thinks her beautiful and has taken a second wife, one who straightens her hair, lightens her skin and dares to dance chest to chest like the English.
In a series of poems Lawino’s colourful anger bursts onto the page. She scolds her husband sharply for turning against his tradition and culture. “Let no one uproot the pumpkin,” she declares in the poem titled The Graceful Giraffe Cannot Become a Monkey.
The book’s animated, lyrical style drew me in and I giggled as my mind conjured the image of an African wife so wantonly chastising her husband.
Lawino complains in the poem My Husband’s Tongue is Bitter:
My husband’s tongue
Is bitter like the roots of the lyonno lily,
It is hot like the penis of the bee,
Like the sting of the kalang!
Ocol’s tongue is fierce like the arrow of the scorpion,
It is ferocious
Like the poison of a barren woman
And corrosive like the juice of the gourd.
Lawino’s words seeped into my malleable teenage mind – to depart from my African roots would be considered a sacrilege. The lesson percolated, bubbling over after I left Africa and began to be identified as African.
*
At the turn of the century, at the age of sixteen, I left Zambia to study in the UK. It was not the first time I was crossing continents. Two years earlier, my father had thought it fit to ship me off to practice my French with a family friend in Belgium. In the UK, though, I was going to live independently for the first time.
I was met at the airport by a higher education agent who facilitated applications for international students. He put me on a train to Kettering, a small town in the middle of England. Upon arrival I bundled my luggage into my new hostess’s living room, nodding when she offered me tea, too nervous to ask for sugar. Sugarless tea became one of the symbols of my untethering. I still drink it that way.
Free from the shackles of expectation, I elected to take a course in English language and literature. Our teacher, Mr. Gill, was a white-haired tubby little man who was in the throes of resisting the college’s new pronouncement that all students address their tutors by their first names.
Mr. Gill had us study texts on slavery that first year. He hadn’t banked on one of only four Black students in the entire college being in his class. I watched blankly as my fellow students squirmed their way through out-loud readings of Huckleberry Finn and Othello, literally beeping out the racial slurs. In the second year we read texts on the Great Wars, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and The Grapes of Wrath, the victory of the imperialists much less contentious than race. When left to my own devices, I wandered, homesick, to books by those who looked like me. Zadie Smith and Andrea Levy became my refuge, and when I wanted to feel home, to taste and smell it, I read Indian texts with places as textured as Zambia.
A year later I came back home for the holidays, flexing in a myriad of bandanas, defiant with my piercings, and fooling no one with the breath of hastily smoked cigarettes. But every year after that, and through law school, I joined the hoards in England’s bustling summer parks. Azure skies blinded the page as I scribbled profound notes in between bouts of reading The Book of Chameleons by Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa, Kehinde by the Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta, Maru by South African writer Bessie Head and Nervous Conditions by Zimbabwe’s Tsitsi Dangarembga. I only looked up from the page to notice the drunken crowds bathed in startling 10 p.m. sunshine, stumbling to yet another pub. Or, in the winter, I huddled in Christmas-filled cafés, cold breath blending with a steaming Pumpkin Latte, as reluctant fingers unclenched the warming mug to flip another page of Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, Ken Saro-Wiwa and Doris Lessing.
I devoured the meagre selection on the single “African” shelf of every Waterstones I could find, scribbled endless signatures for book deliveries before settling into the Nottingham Public Library and discovering the fantastical world of Ben Okri in between readings of Cloth Girl by Marilyn Heward Mills, who had come to commemorate “Refugee Week” by discussing her story, set in the “troubled country of Ghana.”
“To Mwanabibi,” Okri wrote years later in sliding boxy cursive between the pages of my copy of The Famished Road, after I’d assailed him with my feverish dreams of a rising Africa, “Best wishes for all the magic & fire of life & to changing the narratives. 6-9-12.”
What I hadn’t told Okri was that I was terrified. Twelve years away and I was making the big leap back home. To allay my fears and steel myself for the great unknown I had reinvented myself as an African renaissance woman, shaved my relaxed hair and taken to wearing khanga scarves.
I joined an artists’ collective, making and selling crafts. Mine were always decidedly African – chitenge earrings, cufflinks and bracelets. I wrapped everything in print. I even partnered with a South African female empowerment project and sold intricate beadwork on its behalf. I revelled in this act of transplanting, testing the soil in the nursery before plunging into the main field. My customers lapped up the exoticism.
I had also, naturally, started a blog for which I had lofty ambitions. Endless trawling for African writers to read had led me to Nawal El Saadawi and African feminism. My blog would be about that but also social commentary as well as social enterprise and maybe even book reviews. Now, all I needed was a name.
I drew a spider gram, my favorite form of thinking, arrows of ideas shooting out of a fluffy cloud. Female empowerment, African criticism, development programs, my doodles filled the page. I scrolled through internet search results until I paused at one, “Let no one uproot the pumpkin in the old homestead.” I clicked. It was a quote from Song of Lawino, a warning to Ocol from his angry wife. I fiddled with the words. Uprooting the Pumpkin, I scribbled. It had a ring to it. I had spent all my formative years abroad and felt like a composite, neither here nor there and not willing to make a clean break either way. I would, I decided, plough the central thesis of Song of Lawino, adhere to its lessons: not an uprooting but a grafting, the creation of a hybrid.
A few hours later my Blogger page was populated by a background of orange-brown gourds; the theme was all about my journey, the confluence between cultures, traversing my identities, trying not to do an Ocol and abandon my heritage wholesale.
I hadn’t read Song of Lawino since secondary school and wouldn’t read it again until two years later, in 2014, when I’d already moved back to Zambia. I was walking along Cairo Road in Lusaka’s concrete city centre. The pavement was lined with vendors selling stationery, fruits, carved wooden animals, stone chess sets, and, laid out flat on some newspapers, rows and rows of books.
The bookseller watched the direction of my gaze from his corner of the stall. He picked up a copy of Jeffrey Archer’s Honour Among Thieves and stretched it out toward me. I shook my head but kept looking. His fluffy yellow plastic feather duster brushed over Virginia Andrews and Robert Ludlum as I scanned the books, and then, tucked in the third row, I spotted it: a small volume with black and purple text, and, below the title, a sky-blue disc with a black silhouette of a dancing woman in the background. In the foreground a menacing Picasso-mask-like face, its eyes turned toward the dancing woman, a scorpion crawling over its mouth. Lawino and Ocol in all their glory.
I did not need prompting to buy the book. Having returned home with all the gusto garnered from a relatively successful attempt at blogging, I was now in a sort of limbo, feeling my way through this new terrain, figuring out if I had what was needed to take root. Reading p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino again was sure to ground me.
The poet says thus in the author’s note:
Translated from the Acoli by the author who has thus clipped a bit of the eagle’s wings and rendered the sharp edges of the warrior’s sword rusty and blunt, and has also murdered rhythm and rhyme.
I brushed over the text with my fingers before turning the page, absorbing this new information. Ocol’s words no longer induced shallow mirth; they carried a greater weight, the weight of the Acoli anchoring them in the culture. Now the florid descriptions made sense. Ocol’s voice is fortified by the original language – Acoli – in which the text was written.
The eminent Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a contemporary of p’Bitek’s, has made it a matter of principle to write and publish first in his native Gĩkũyũ before translating his work into English or any other language. He argues that we must not make foreign languages the standard and laments the gradual loss of our African tongues. The blurb on Ngũgĩ’s Wizard of the Crow, first written in Gĩkũyũ, states that the story “dramatises with searing humour and piercing observation…” Anyone who has tried to translate an African word into English knows about this “piercing observation.” Here’s an example: the woman who sold me the pumpkin could have described it one or another way.
“Icipushi ica menshi,” a pumpkin of water, a watery pumpkin. That’s straightforward.
But what about “icipushi ica bunga,” a floury pumpkin? Maybe. But what would that mean?
The word bunga is often used for flour or, more commonly now, the mealie meal with which we make nshima, a firm porridge that readily soaks up soups and is incredibly filling. So, it can be surmised that icipushi ica bunga means a firm fleshy pumpkin that will fill you up and not disintegrate upon swallowing. So many words needed to relate what we innately know.
Chinua Achebe, another contemporary of p’Bitek’s, argued for primary publication in English partly as a means of ensuring the widest possible readership. But, could it be that this translating of text, this layering on of an African language as some sort of peat before the planting, fortifies the roots and enriches the fruit? The book still gets read in English and, of course, some of the essence is lost in translation. But, overall, the story is better for it.
That initial lesson for the teenager bubbled into uncertainty as I reread Song of Lawino – watered roots are malleable, not brittle. I had read Lawino’s lament as a treatise on rigidity, but was it more about flexibility? The student who once had owned my copy of Song of Lawino had grappled with p’Bitek’s work, leaving her mark on all the pages: underlined text, square brackets, squiggly lines, and circled words.
Chapter 1:
Who has ever uprooted the pumpkin?
Chapter 2:
The pumpkin in the old homestead
Must not be uprooted!
Chapter 5:
Let no one
Uproot the Pumpkin
Final Line of the Final Chapter:
Ocol my husband,
Son of the Bull,
Let no one uproot the Pumpkin
Chapter by chapter the notations had reduced to a few shaky, reluctant lines.
My own journey through a second reading of the book was tumultuous: gleeful expectation, fuzzy familiarity, and then gradual horrific realisation. Had I, in my quest to reconcile my varied influences, become Ocol?
“Let no one uproot the pumpkin,” Lawino asserts, “but what does it actually mean?” observed the student who first read my copy of Song of Lawino, scribbling anxiously in the margins of the text. We were – are – in conversation.
In 2024, ten years since that first jolt of awareness, I search for discourse on Song of Lawino and discover that there is a sequel – Song of Ocol – a response to Lawino. Maybe I can read that and take bits and pieces of it, a sort of blended compost in which to sow ideas.
*
Charles Darwin and his son Francis in their book The Power of Movement in Plants wrote:
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle thus endowed [with sensitivity], and having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense-organs, and directing the several movements.
Does this mean that roots, as brains, hold the memory of plants, of the fruits of plants, of pumpkins? There is another theory: that plants and trees retain the essence of the soil they grow in. That taste or scent is transfused from the earth, seeping into every branch, stalk and leaf. If the root is a brain, then its knowledge of the soil in which it grows stays for as long as it takes to yank it to the surface. Given that the composition of soil can be altered over time by various environmental factors, how does this impact the roots and, as intoned by the Darwins, influence the direction of growth?
*
In 2023 Zambia hardly had a rainy season. President Hakainde Hichilema declared a national disaster and emergency, which persists with the ongoing impact of el niño conditions. Our food stock is running dangerously low. The earth is parched and our garden beds are shallow graves. We may have to wait another year for a harvest. So, instead of pumpkins, we’ll have to make do with their leaves, plucking them off the vine, pinching at the edges of each stalk to tug the tiny silver strings that line them, chopping up the now tender chibwabwa, sautéing with onion and tomato before sprinkling them with pounded groundnuts and scooping each fragrant mouthful up with mushy balls of nshima. ▪