The past few days for me have been filled with some measure of strangeness beyond the usual. It all started when I got back from my New Years' weekend in Lusaka. My manager, MM, thought it would be a good idea to use up the remaining sunflower seeds; though it's getting really late in the season, I thought it was a good idea until I found out that we had enough seed for five hectares [!], or about 11 acres.
A year ago last September, my buddy Gereon and I spent a weekend preparing 15-20 acres for a stand of rye. It took us most of that time, the use of two tractors, and considerable physical effort to finish the job. Though this job represents a comparable amount of spatial area, the size of the job is far greater. Key word is tractor ... instead of roaring through the space with a twin plow behind an International Harvester followed closely by a smaller (yet still doughty) Farmall, this job is entirely reliant on both the strong backs of oxen and men.
Despite my misgivings, we mobilized the most easily accessed source of labor: Senanga Prisons. So Thursday and Friday found me in the field with 20 men in ragged green uniforms bearing cane choppers, cutlasses, and machetes, hacking away at the considerable growth of shrubbery throughout the plot. I made some contour markers utilizing some spirit levels mounted on a string between two sticks of equal length, and after knocking back the brush, we marked contour lines and heaped the brush along them (a technique commonly referred as "making trash lines").
I won't comment much on the work other that along with the 20 prisoners, there was a guard who kept a bored watch over the group with an "exhaust pipe" (an AK-47) strung over his shoulder. The men didn't say much; mostly they hustled along, as two "captains" (higher-ranking prisoners) kept hollering at them to hurry up: Angufe! Angufe! Aliyeni! (Hurry! Hurry! Let's go!), brandishing homemade batons to keep them moving along. I wasn't uncomfortable in there midst; actually, they seemed taken aback that a boss, especially a mukuwa, was working as well (I chopped the corners and boundaries). When clearing brush on Friday, one man spoke with me ... he said the prisoners had seen only a few white people, as most of them were from Shan'gombo, the isolated district across the Zambezi to the west of Senanga.
It wasn't until this afternoon that we found out what the next stage of preparing the land (plowing) would cost; the gentleman PMu took to the farm on Saturday decided to come up with a really atomic calculation for use of his oxen; 20 steps by 50 steps (about 1,000 meters square) was worth K30,000 ($6.25). Our 50,000 meters square would then run about K1,500,000 ($315) [I should toss my day job and plow!]. PaM was mildly incensed; he knew the guy had boosted the price because it was for our cooperative, and he figured he could make a killing. Unfortunately, this is a rather common occurence; people think we have money to burn and we can never get a fair price; having a white man around only seems to exacebate the situation. We will break the news to our boss tomorrow, but at that rate (and given the risks inherent in planting this late in the season), I think we'll scale back our plans considerably.
Oh, and if you're still wondering ... the Ransome Victory is the equivalent of the Mauser action when it comes to farming equipment in Africa. A single share plow that can be pulled by either a single or double span [team] of oxen, it was introduced around 1920 and has been almost univerally adopted in cattle-rearing areas of sub-Saharan Africa (the notable exception is Ethopia, which has had a traditional plow known as the zha (sic) for eons beyond counting). Roundly cursed by advocates of conservation agriculture for its creating an enabling environment for extensive farming and soil erosion, the Ransome Victory nonetheless remains the ultimate symbol of advancement for non-mechanized farmers. Hmmm ... it might warrant a Wikipedia page ...
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