4.2 Workforce/popular theories on why accidents occur
4.2.2 Inwardly directed causes of accidents
On the Copperbelt there was a concept known in Bemba as chisomo or ichisomo.
Other regions of Zambia had similar ideas sometimes carrying names as in the Chokwe
I
kumumbilako and sometimes simply known by descriptive stories and teachings. Zambians
I
in their mid-20s and older had learned about chisomo formally through direct instruction by
31 The words chisomo and ichisomo are used virtually interchangeably throughout this text with the difference in spelling being due to usage issues. Ichisomo is more specific to particular instances than is the generalized term, chisomo. The imagery of chisomo suggests something that comes loose and strikes out. A mother tongue Bemba speaker defined the term this way, "Ichisomo is an 'unexpected' misfortune that happens to a person (such as injury, death) especially in an accident (car, bicycle, falling from a tree, falling in a ditch, etc). This sometimes could be in circumstance where one would not otherwise be expected to die or where many survive and only one person dies or gets injured. Often ichisomo is caused intentionally by another person, most times out of jealousy." Email to author, 2005.
their elders and/or by picking it up informally from playmates and casual interactions.
Chisomo suggested that evil spirits could prompt people to do destructive things. Such
spirits would not come to just anyone but would be sent to specific individuals in much the same way that an evil spirit was said to have attacked King Saul in his periodic rages against David.
At least two situations could elicit chisomo. First, would be any individual death.
This was because death was not an isolated occurrence but something that affected family members and friends in ways beyond the emotional or psychological. Through supernatural forces, the death of a person could suddenly take control of a close relative's physical actions whether or not that person was aware of being newly bereaved. Because chisomo could attack without warning, those who had just lost someone were considered to be in very vulnerable positions. For example, during the course of this study, the wife of a senior level administrator at MEF died in Kitwe while he was in a remote part of the Northern Province.
There was no way to communicate this by telephone so a staff driver went to fetch him. The story subsequently went around campus that the driver madly rushed the distance to Mbala, anxious to retrieve the administrator before anything else bad could happen to him. Even without knowing his wife had died, the administrator was the potential target of a spirit that could attack, causing him to harm himself or someone else.
A second situation in which chisomo was said to operate involved bad relationships between people. One person's jealousy of another, for instance, could incite chisomo.
Punishment for errors committed against someone else might also bring on an attack. Such
32 The extent to which younger Zambians were aware of the concept was not possible to tell. By the mid-2000s, my research assistants said they thought young, urban youths would not be very aware.
3 This comparison to events in I Samuel was suggested by my research assistant, Lubasi, a Hebrew Bible specialist.
an attack would generally be recognized by its suddenness and unpredictability. Enock's grandmother talked with him about this when they were discussing what we would term
"freak" road accidents 34
EM: Chuma nakwiva chikwo ngwo muthu kumotoka amumbilanga, kuchi chakupwa?
Gdma: Eeh. Auze twa kwamba ngwo kamutakwila ko kananwene haze makwachila yoze unambe kumu lya, hiku mwamba ngwenyi akuze maya amupupa kuli motoka-auze mukwamotoka muze aneza aye mamona ngwe kanawa anende mba auze muthu aye mbwangu kumotoka ukholekhole-
EM: The other thing I hear is that a person was "thrown" to a vehicle. How does that happen?
Gdma: Yes, that one we say he has been thrust there by the person who wants to "eat"
him. Such a person may have to find a situation to disguise his act, so he will set things such that his victim is hit by a vehicle.
As far as the driver of such a vehicle was
e was
vinp is hian attack would generally be recognized by its suddenness and unpredictability. Enock's grandmother talked with him about this when they were discussing what we would term
"freak" road accidents:34
EM: Chuma nakwiva chikwo ngwo muthu kumotoka amumbilanga, kuchi chakupwa?
Gdma: Eeh. Auze twa kwamba ngwo kamutakwila ko kananwene haze makwachila yoze unambe kumu lya, hiku mwamba ngwenyi akuze maya amupupa kuli motoka-auze mukwamotoka muze aneza aye mamona ngwe kanawa anende mba auze muthu aye mbwangu kumotoka ukholekhole- ngwo auze muthu kamutakwilako.
EM: Mba athu kuchi akunyingika ngwo kamutakwi lako?
Gdma: Mumu keve kanyingikine ngweni kumafa, hanji nawa nyingwe nwazwelele acho mba muthu kuya kuze hafa mba ngwo kamutakwilangako. Kufa chacho chakukomwesa-yize yakulinga muthu aye kanapalikila kulumbu lyeka motoka neyo kwekha mba kutungumuka muthu hamupupa!
EM: The other thing 1 hear is that a person was "thrown" to a vehicle. How does that happen?
Gdma: Yes, that one we say he has been thrust there by the person who wants to "eat"
him. Such a person may have to find a situation to disguise his act, so he will set things such that his victim is hit by a vehicle.
As far as the driver of such a vehicle was concerned he was driving just all right but then the victim hits himself there—mbuuh!
Then fatality results. Then we say that person has been thrust there.
EM: But how do people know that he/she has been thrust there?
Gdma: Because it was very unlikely for someone to die in a particular situation or that he quarreled with someone before meeting his death. So it is said he has been thrust there. It's a death that surprises people—what happens is that a person may be walking on this side and the vehicle on the other side, but suddenly the person has been hit!
As strangers looking in on the situation, we might assume that such talk only took place among older, rural Zambians. But this was not the case. Not only was chisomo present in Zambia's mining environment, similar ideas in nearby areas of the continent were quite strong. A Zambian mine physician offered this from his experience:
[I]f, for example, somebody's disaffected or you know for one reason or another people don't like him and then something happens they would, you
34 Enock and his grandmother spoke in Chokwe. See the appendices for a longer excerpt from this conversation.
know, there's a tendency to blame him. That "perhaps he went because we don't like him"...You know, the relation between safe working practices and accidents, although it is being taught and you have, at the change of shift, there's always a safety pep talk where they talk about issues related to safety—5-10 minutes or so. "This area's not safe. We need to do this. We need to do this." And so on. That has been with a view of trying to get each individual to take responsibility for their own individual safety and for the safety of the section they are working in.
But still when something happens it does not happen because they took short cuts. It happens because the guy who worked there before, and maybe he died in an accident or whatever, he may be calling others to join him or something like that. But...following a fatality [if a miner's] conscience is clear he had no ill feeling towards that person he'll go back and work. If his conscience is not clear, if he had some ill feeling against that guy, you'll find him come, you know, "I've got a back ache, I've this and this" for a good 2- 3 months. Or he may even wish to be changed from that particular section.
Because he feels that that person's spirit will come and visit him.
An expatriate safety manager discussed experiences from his work in South Africa and Mozambique. There, a fatality in a key section of the orebody could palpably affect workers' attitudes. But the company's limited access to orebodies meant work would have to continue in the area where the fatality had occurred. For the miners, however,
people will never be happy and anything that ever happens there will be pointed back to that specific incident.
This manager further related a story from his time at a South African open cast mine.
[W]e had a bulldozer that went over the high wall...So what happened is that they pushed the overburden away from the high wall and he went too far and drove over the edge. So he dropped about 30 metres into the pit. And that happened just as I arrived there. I'll never forget that. And he was trapped in the cab and he drowned as a result. Now as traumatic as that was, no one accepted it as just being an accident because when everyone rushed out of there to do an investigation and they started moving further afield following his tracks, they actually found a graveyard, okay? Because this was old farmland and I mean, you know, it's underground and some of the graves were 80 years old. Now there is a procedure that you've got to follow to exhume graves and things like that...But, of course, no one knew that this was there. So everything was laid out to the fact that we were now mining into a graveyard. And this was the reason why this happened.35
Both quotations taken from interview with safety manager, Copperbelt mining company, 2004.
Another idea closely related to chisomo was iminyama. Iminyama was considered worse than bad luck. It was like an evil aura that would attach itself to a person and go wherever that person went. Ultimately, iminyama could cause someone to do strange or bizarre things. And, like chisomo, iminyama could select people regardless of their physical proximity or awareness.
This had special import for the mines where iminyama had the potential of harming laborers who were already at risk. Underground, miners were physically cut off from their families for their entire work days making them—it would seem—totally removed from what was happening on surface.37 While, in other settings, these work arrangements might be perfect for those interested in having illicit affairs above ground, in this setting such relationships could be complicated by iminyama.
The Copperbelt has certainly seen its share of dalliance and infidelity and, during the time of this study, the euphemistic term for an affair in some communities was "private sector." So a woman seeing a man other than her husband was said to have "a private sector." Certain rules pertained as to how these affairs could be conducted, however, since the wife's behavior on surface could affect what happened to her husband underground. If a miner's wife was engaging in a private sector, other women would ask her to refrain from seeing the boyfriend while her husband was underground. Her infidelity while he was on the
Iminyama was considered Copperbelt Bemba slang. The proper Bemba term was ishamo. A mother tongue Bemba speaker and Anglican priest used the Biblical example of Jonah to explain iminyama. Jonah's running away from his unfulfilled mission caused the storm at sea. "The people on the ship/boat basically started looking for someone whose 'bad luck' could have been responsible for such an experience - Jonah was such a person." Email to author, 2005.
'7 By the mid-2000s, technology existed that allowed officials on surface to communicate with individual miners underground, but this technology was barely being used in American mines much less African mines.
U.S. Congress. Senate. Appropriations Committee, Hearings on Mine Safety, June 23, 2006.
38 See Epstein, Scenes from African Urban Life; Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity; and Powdermaker, Copper Town.
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job could bring on iminyama that might precipitate a rock fall or tangle with a machine, causing the miner to lose life or limb.39
Iminyama or chisomo were also frequently judged to be the reasons why particularly
bizarre accidents might occur. For example, the miner who pulled supporting timbers down on himself was, according to those Zambians who commented on the incident, most likely the victim of iminyama or chisomo. This could be the only reasonable explanation because the consequences of such actions were so obvious.
Miners such as Matthew Kapumba recognized, however, that talking with expatriate managers about these incidents was particularly difficult. How could they explain deaths possibly triggered by chisomo or iminyama when a worker's own mates might not know the cause and when the concept of evil spirits just didn't fit with industrial production schedules?
So why such deaths happen, "katwisha" he said. "We just don't know."
Such not knowing could affect talk about accidents even when the conversation occurred only among Zambians. Once, when Sunday Mutale had gathered a group of miners and miners' wives, the topic of inexplicable deaths came up. As he analyzed an odd underground death for the assembled group, Sunday showed a keen understanding of how corporate politics could affect accident attribution and how more could be going on as well.
Mr. S. Mutale: Ciba so, like uyu uwafwile Mr. S. Mutale: It is like this: like this ifyo caliniso, ine mombela kulya kwine one who died it was like this. For instance, I ukwafwilile ulya. Ne libwe lilya line work in the same area where that man died, afwililepo naliya nyantapo no lukasa. Lyali Even the very stone that killed him, I stepped libwe ilitali kwati lipulanga ili, lyaponene ifi; on it. It was a long stone like a plank, and it alipona ifi, bonse 4 ngabafwilile kulya dropped like this. If it dropped like this, all kwine. Nomba lyakonkelefye ekafye. Ilyo four of them would have died on that spot, afwile umulumendo following day balishile But the stone just followed him alone. The
3 Sexuality and gender relationships were particularly sensitive topics in the mid-2000s Copperbelt environment. But it is important to note the idea of connection contained in the above instance. Whether or not such a rule was concocted by men to keep their women under control is not so much the point as noting that the conduct of one person could have physical implications for another who was elsewhere.
more than 30, ba majestri, mine police Chingola, ba safety aba kuChililabombwe, Kitwe. So ifyo baishile kulya kufwailisha bushe umulumendo acifwa shani, elyo icilibwe epo cafumine apa paipipa. Nomba balya bene abaci bosses besu kufwaya ukucingila ulyo mulandu, nomba ishuko ulu majestrate wapa town nibawishikulu elyo ba safety nine nalebasenda mulikamotoka.
Baikele safety, government inspector na majestrate baleitotosha baikele babili. Baisa bepusha bamangager, uyu wine, Njovu balisa mwipusha ati imwe bashimwana bushe mwalishiba ati iyi ground yaliba bwino nangu tayaba bwino [unintelligible]
mukwasuka bena baeba ati twaishiba ati tayaba bwino—mwaumfwa baikaka apo one.
Baisaipusha futi uwa mukonkapo bushe ground iyi, yaliba bwino, ati iyo taya ba bwino, alelemba. Nomba ilyo baishile kumanda ekwali ubwafya. Kwamba ukuba shobaula ukuba shobaula, elyo aisa beba ati no muntu uwalemipusha tamwamwishibe.
Nalimwipwishe nati bushe ground yaba shani iyi mwajebele ati ground tayaba bwino nomba if ground tayaba bwino ninshi mwaiingishishe abantu? Mwamona so abene beka baikaka. Icasheleko nomba kulasumina fye. Pantu bena balefyaye ukucingilila, bainashisheko, babikepo ifya ifyo, so abene baishina. Emilandu shashala umu nanomba na mailo balelubulula. [He explains more about the victim's jobs and then continues.]
Ubushiku afwile ali na banankwe four, ena afumapo apaikele abanankwe ayaiikala eka filya. Epamusangile ilibwe.
EM: Nomba ifyo nshishibe emo mwinga filosha umuntu aya ikalefyo. Ngacakweba ati tuli pacililo tuleshimika ifyo finshi abantu bengalanda.
Man: Ati balimusunkilapo fye.
Woman: Pantu ico cine icalengele ati cimufumyepo palya pa banankwe
following day after the young man died, more than 30 people came. Among them were magistrates, mine police of Chingola, and safety people from Chililabombwe and Kitwe. The reason why they came was to investigate the cause of young man's death since the stone fell from short distance [e.g.
low level]. When the very bosses wanted to hide the evidence, luckily enough, this magistrate from Chingola is the grandfather to the young man who died. I am the one who carried them in the car. They sat like this: safety people, government inspector and magistrate. So the government and the magistrate whispered to each other. Then they asked the manager, this very one, Mr.
Njovu, "You Mr. Do you know whether this ground is safe or not?" In answering he said,
"We know that it is not safe." Can you hear that? He convicted himself. They asked again the next one, "Is this ground safe?" He answered that it was not safe and they wrote down those statements. Now when they came to the graveyard that is where trouble begun. They told the mine bosses off. Then he said to them that they even did not know the person who asked you those questions.
"I asked you whether the ground was safe or not and you said it was not. Now if the ground is not good, why did you send people to work there?" So you see they convicted themselves. What remained was for them to admit that they were wrong. Because they wanted to protect themselves in order to make things easy for themselves by ignoring the real issue. This is the case which is still there. Even yesterday they were still sorting out the same issue. [He explains more about the victim's jobs and then continues.] The day he died, he was with his four friends but he left them and sat alone a few meters away.
That is where the stone found him.
EM: Now I don't know how you would explain a person leaving his friends and sitting like that. If we are at a funeral house
ecamupamfishe ukuti afwe eka. and we try to explain that, what will people say about it?
Mr. S. Mutale: Awee ifyo ndelondolola nifi,
ifwe fino twikele batatu na mafosholo Man: That they just pushed him there.
natukwata tulelaisha, ine kulya mpelele
napwa abapa tabalapwisha, elyo nomba Woman: Because the very thing that naisafumapo naisa nakuno kunuma ndefwaya caused him to leave the place where he was ukutushako nanaka, mwamona, elyo with his friends is the very thing that forced nansunsumanakofye nelibwe lyaisa, him to die alone.
mukulanda kuti twatilafye nicifye caba.
Otherwise nici ilibwe lyaponene so, aliponefi Mr. S. Mutale: No. What I am explaining is bonse ngabalifwa. this: just like we're seated the three of us here with shovels in our hands lashing, I finish my part while my friends have not yet finished. So that is when I go behind them to get some rest because I am tired. Just as I squat, the stone falls. If we have to talk, We'll just say that "he was just unfortunate."
Otherwise, only that the stone fell like this, if it were like this, all would have died.