THERE HAS NEVER EVER BEEN ANY REPORTED CASES OF CHOLERA IN BAROTSELAND?

By Namakando Nalikando-Sinyama This was one assertion of that a brother called fact after my earlier submission on ‘Malozi And Their General Hygiene Or The Lack Of It Thereof ’. Whether or not this...... can be collaborated by thorough Epidemic Research Survey findings collected over a protracted period of time is something we have to subject to scrutiny. I will from the outset state that I am no medical expert in any specialized field or neither did drop off from med school or anything of the sort but I will attempt to explain the above phenomenon as debatable as it maybe. Cholera is a diarrheal illness caused by the bacteria Vibrio cholerae. This species is not endemic to humans, and its presence in the human digestive system is not part of the natural life cycle of the bacteria. Normally found in estuary ecology, the Vibrio cholerae bacteria life cycle naturally shifts between various reservoir species such as small snails and crustaceans, free-floating planktonic forms and static forms resident in the silt and muck of the estuary.Vibrio cholera bacteria enter the human ecosystem through a variety of routes. The most common entry is through contaminated food or water.(SOURCE: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/189269.php) An acquaintance of mine once lambasted this growing trend among academicians of citing web sites in their former scholarly presentations as not being a commonly accepted practice. I am yet to have some good old intellectual intercourse with her for me to fully appreciate the angle she has taken on the matter. It is just unfortunate that I may never even have this chance though. Since I am not exactly writing for my Post-Doctoral thesis yet, nor am I a fledgling academic, allow me to indulge myself as above. It has been established that wet conditions are a necessary precursor for the spread of the disease causative agent or vector of cholera. The topography of Barotseland proper being generally low lying and set so many meters below sea level which mostly would have made it more prone to flooding . Surely this feature ought to have provided ideal conditions for the spread of Cholera, right? Wrong! What would have been technically more correct to state was that when we were still trying to be legally part of Zambia then courtesy of that Agreement, the Vice-President’s Disaster Management Team may never have constantly blackened our door steps that much because look, where we come from we celebrate floods and they are never viewed as disaster per se. Back to the vibro issue, let us address other conditions we see in Northern Rhodesia which has annually helped them get persistently plagued by this same disease yearly just like clockwork. It is almost an officially recognized and accepted occurrence, which is quite shocking if you asked me! The geology of Barotseland even in times when it receives heavy down pours of rain does not predispose it to conditions that can allow cholera to thrive. The Barotse/Kalahari sandy soils we have will always ensure that all the rain water that falls on it never collect in stagnant pools but percolate and seep through right down into the lower lying aquifers , water tables and under lying bed rock. This rain water even if it did fall, does eventually become part of the hydrology in the many sources of running fresh water in the rivers, streams and brooks spread all across the length and breadth of ancestral Barotseland. It is also a well-known demographic effect of population density that if poor sanitation exists disease will almost always be the inevitable end result. This is not usually true though as can be seen from other densely peopled metropolitan cities around the world. In Barotseland, the general description of our human numbers by head count per square kilometer through a stratified random sampling method is termed as sparsely populated. This amount of people is scarcely sufficient to generate the needed filth to provide an enabling environment for germs to breed. I have always held that the degree of urban conurbation is directly proportional to economic activity. This is what attracts people to be huddled up in a small area well exceeding its carrying capacity. The come to cities in that well known cliché of old ,rural urban drift. The only trouble is that the whole of Barotseland proper is mostly rural so there is no one drifting anywhere to search for which jobs in which industries created by whom? So our numbers are by and large mostly scattered in neat pockets of near predestined poverty. This reality we have to seek to redress and fast. This does remind me of a scientific paper I presented as a child at secondary school on the potential of unchecked population density causing mass deaths as espoused by The Right Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus in his dissertation on The Principle of Population. I experimented with bugs and gooey stuff on petri dishes people Yuck! The only problem is that, Barotseland Proper is mostly rural and has endured years of abject inhuman poverty through a sustained subtle form of economic neglect and I shudder to even think of what I had to go through growing up in rural Barotseland .To think that my kith and kin are still going through conditions of similar and even worse squalor just bites at the inner core of my consciousness. Mine eyes get glazed close to tears just recounting our day to day ordeals of life back home. These facts prove that there is hardly any chance of Malozi generating enough litter and waste or disposed of excess food material as most households sadly lack the financial spending power for them to buy the non-existent goodies that would eventually create garbage anyway. Let me put it more coarsely and crudely and for this, I apologies in advance. It is a well-accepted biological fact that you need to have eaten to defecate. Pardon me if you are fresh from enjoying a sumptuous meal, I did not exactly intend for you to get disgusted to the point of bringing the food back. I just needed to put things into their rightful context. Ladies and gentlemen there is poverty in Barotseland , we do not just parrot it, some of us have lived it and who feels it knows it,lord……singing! It is therefore my humble submission that to assume we have not had cholera in Barotseland because we are generally more hygienic than other people may be slightly flawed. The assertion above by the way, is one that, as I would say in Latin tongue Quod Est Demonstrandum (Q.E.D). We should take heart though for,” Amid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, be they ever so humble, there is no place like Home.” – John Howard Payne. There is a clarion call though silent, but when we meditate it ,we will hear it as loud a Jewish Shofar from our ancestors to genuinely look back home in a way we have never done before and answer the call. We urgently need to prepare for a Renaissance of enormous proportion, may God, Nyambe ni Nasilele richly Bless us ALL!

MUSIC AND THE HUMAN BRAIN

By Namakando Nalikando-Sinyama “Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and quits the memory with difficulty. Magical music never quite leaves the memory.” -Sir Thomas Beecham quoted Lord Booth by ‘My Yesterday, Your Tomorrow.” ... We no doubt all have different genres of music we enjoy, some plain and gentle, some mellow and just and others coarse and offensive even vulgar at times and others exquisitely sublime and heavenly. In order to fully enjoy music, a genuine connoisseur is really never that fixated about what genre a musical piece is. For as long as it appeals to their inner spirit, then they will respond to its rhythm. I do completely agree with this assertion however, truth be told, you will never ever catch me dead walk into a music shop with any reputation to speak of and come out with a copy of some of this racket that we are treated to which now passes as music. What we must be alive to, is the fact that, as shocking as it may be,there are actually human beings who do this and we are forever indebted to the great fashioner of human natures for this diversity of interests in all things artistic. After having said all this, you will perhaps appreciate how I have,in my cherished humble collection, New Age tunes, Nature Sounds, The music of The Brave i.e Hard Rock, Native American Chants, Gregorian Chants, Radical & Dub Poetry Yiddish(Jewish)& Arabic folk Tunes, hypnotic Barotse Royal Drum beats. We must however respectfully admit that, for most, their taste is but a cacophony of incoherent unintelligent din.The only consolation is that, and this is true, to those who are keen lovers of music, somehow we all have a particular piece or pieces of music we can play over and over ad infinitum but still enjoy them the same way as if playing them for the very first time. I will give examples of a few of the many songs I cannot seem to stop playing back. 1. Zahara’s Loliwe,an eternal ballad sang in Si Zulu. 2. Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D 3. Giacomo Puccini’s Nessun Dorma ; well ,really most other Classical symphony pieces by great composers just whisk me away to another spiritual plane I never thought existed. 4. Antonio Vivaldi’s "The Four Seasons" or like I would say in the scanty Italian I picked up from my brief Tuscany connections, ‘Le Quattro Staggionni.’ 5. The Celts and their Gaelic Tunes mostly on flute and Harp. 6. Barotse Royal Drums-Sikota Mutumwa litondo lya linene/ Ngoma ya Lume 7. Mzwakhe Mbuli(The People’s Poet’s) poetic renditions 8. Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Dub Poetry 9. Mutabaruka’s (Which is Burundian or Rwandese meaning ‘The Unconquerable One’) his Agitative Propaganda usually delivered as Radical Poetry. 10. Scottish Highland Bagpipes Etcetera et cetera ……….. The simple explanation is that one may just like the song, period. The truth though, is deeper rooted than that. The inner workings of the mind and brain are more involved than earlier realized. This perhaps is why left handed people using the dominant Right side of their brain have an upper artistic advantage. If you are interested in knowing just what happens to your brain under the influence of music I urge you to read up on this subject matter on (http://io9.com/5837976/what-happens-to-your-brain-under-the-influence-of-music) The personality which we are born with or the one we have acquired or attained because of being shaped by the external environment we find ourselves in has a lot to do with which music we lend an ear to as well. To most, the music they choose to listen to is reflective of a certain mood they are in and it keeps them that way for as long as they want. What I can state here with a great degree of certitude is that, whoever we are and whatever we listen to, any music is by its very nature spiritual. I may not be an acclaimed neuroscientist or anything but, I am quite curious to know just which parts of our brains get excited for us to respond to different types of musical pieces differently from other people. I will here give an example of situations when a certain song is loved by a surprising huge number of listeners and manages to maintain its followers. Are we to say these people were touched the same way when they first listened to it? Unless you are wired like me and are not afflicted with Herd Mentality and have not thus succumbed to the Lemming Hood Effect then you would understand what I mean. If you have had to suffer the misfortune of being born in a part of the world replete with overzealous Christian fundamentalists who are perpetually on a high of religious excess where we get all manner of half thought through explanations for certain physical or psychological phenomenon then you will miss my point. From them, you will even get to hear nonsensical talk of certain songs having great appeal because they were composed under the sea by some mythical mermaids! What balderdash indeed, these folks may be abusing substances seriously! I have never done anything because everyone is doing it no matter how strong the urge becomes and i have realized that sometimes I have done this out of sheer stupid pride. The saddest thing is, most pieces of music no matter how nice after they are first released, have been spoiled from being over played to obsolescence. I have, on countless number of occasions, simply kept away from and avoided things that every Tom, Dick, Harry and Jane have taken to like a bear to a honey pot just to be different. I will never be painted with the same brush as my surface is a bit coarser than your average bloke. You may need brushes with wire bristles to achieve this artistic feat. This is exactly what I did when James Cameron show cased Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio as they treated us to that epic romantic nautical disaster that The Titanic was. This apparently also applies to certain movies I find irresistible to sit down and watch over without ceasing. You just cannot seem to get enough of them. So there are Mermen or satanic directors at Holy Wood right? Please get a life! Those who have had an encounter with me know that I am a keen follow of global Illuminati activity and the extent of their reach in influencing events on the planet past and present, but we are now over stretching issues to dizzy heights if we ever started thinking like this. I hope you had sufficient attention span to go through my rumblings which a brother called unsolicited verbiage! Mwiice, I will bring a train on you Mudaala…..