ActionAid feeds Gwembe families

Gwembe men marry four or five wives on average

Food donated by ActionAid will go a long way in averting hunger in this region

Home to Zambia’s Tonga people, the Gwembe Valley of Southern Province must be one of the few places on earth where the Biblical injunction, go forth and multiply, is fulfilled down to the last detail.

A single man here begets as many as 30 to 40 children, with his two, four or five wives.

But the big Tonga family has since become a nightmare for couples here due to the hunger crisis currently plaguing the drought-prone region.

A man who typifies the prevailing miserable situation is 60-year-old Billy Jolezya, a man of an erect and balding figure, who cracks up when he grabs to his side one of his four wives.

“I’ve 32 children,” he discloses. “It hasn’t been easy. We’re trying by all means just to burn a little charcoal and collecting some wild fruits just to sustain [ourselves]. At times when we’ve rain we grow a little sorghum or maize, though [it’s never enough].”

Until now, little or no rainfall has characterised the Gwembe Valley, turning it into a poster child of climate change and household poverty, with hundreds of residents almost dying after collapsing from debilitating hunger.

The big families are hardly managing and the harrowing hunger crisis has clearly become their indictment, whereupon ActionAid has intervened and included Gwembe district in its robust humanitarian programme which provides food for immediate support and goes on to build resilience for sustainable livelihoods among the affected communities.

After consultations with Government through the Disaster Management and Mitigation Unit (DMMU), ActionAid together with support from its International Humanitarian Action and Response Team (IHART) this week supported the most vulnerable households in Gwembe district.

The deserving families were selected from the three zones of the landlocked Sompani Ward, which are Kalama, Jumbo Central and Chilamba, where income diversification and accessibility is not only limited but also a tall order.

At full pelt, ActionAid vehicles and tractors carrying the food aid travelled through this region’s only gravel road that dips and rises with multiple corners and curves through the mountainous landscape.

The families receiving the food included not only Jolezya’s but also that of Luckson Munyumbwe, just some of his four wives and 22 children, since others had to tend to the fields and fend off baboons from raiding crops.

In fact, Munyumbwe’s family has been living on the edge of a cliff, as it were, because they often take to the fields and subsist themselves on crops while they grow.

“How’re we going to survive?” he says, “because there is almost nothing to save from the fields. We still have a year to go. Because we’re hungry we’ve no option but just to eat what is in the fields.”

So though the rural communities here are emerging from drought, the spectre of death from hunger still haunts households because what has been cultivated during the current farming season will hardly be saved for the future.

The rationale behind the big family tradition in this district, and largely throughout Tonga culture, is that it is a source of cheap labour, which should be a resource during such a time as this.

But the irony is clear: from what the locals say, big families have become a burden with each passing day.

ActionAid understands this and this is why its humanitarian response incorporates both short-term and long-term support, not only to enable families to withstand the problem of climate change, but also the economic struggles brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

To commence its humanitarian response this week, the organisation provided an assortment of food items—2 bags of 25 kilograms of mealie meal, 2.5 litres of cooking oil, 1 kilogram of salt and 10 kilograms of beans—including disposable sanitary towels, hand sanitisers and face masks to 250 households.

“The immediate support is the food response that you see,” said ActionAid head of programmes, Musonda Kabinga, on behalf of the organisation’s country director, in his address to Gwembe residents during the handover of the food items.

“The long-term response, as I keep on emphasizing, is to ensure that you adapt and help you build [survival] mechanisms,” he added. 

The organisation has set aside over K 1,000, 000 for its humanitarian help, with its provision of food and other materials running for two months, while its resilience building capacity trainings shall take place in the next five months.

Through the capacity building trainings, ActionAid will enable families identify and pursue more sustainable livelihoods, for example providing them with drought-resistant crops or rearing goats, and also learning about the causes of climate change and how to avert them.

An emphasis on sustainability is more preferable, as noted by Charles Maimbo, the DMMU representative.

“Gwembe district is a drought district. We fail to produce food that we can eat up to the next season. In the farming seasons of 2018 and 2019 we had drought that has caused crop failure and water supply storage problems,” he says.

Such a development through ActionAid has elated Gwembe district commissioner, Timothy Siakaziba, who says “Government appreciates the work of ActionAid in complementing Government efforts in alleviating poverty. We’re open to CSOs and other organisations offering humanitarian support because they’re key in achieving our Vision 2030.”

The highlight of this intervention is that it will empower and be led by women because as usually first respondents and caregivers who largely tend to homes in such a rural setup, they bear the burden and challenges posed by household poverty and drought.

But with food in their homes and opportunities to pursue sustainable livelihoods made available, food security at household level will be guaranteed.

With such a well-planned intervention by ActionAid Zambia, the big Tonga families in Gwembe Valley, like that of the Jolezyas, will no longer barely survive but begin to thrive, and should now be able to draw on their family size to lead a happier existence.

Such a response is the most serviceable, after all, because merely telling men to stop having children and marrying the women they love would be catastrophic for the structural functionalism of this society and would lead to probably more pain and suffering than would have ever been caused by climate change or poverty.