THREE weeks ago, I was in Lusaka where I had gone after receiving the sad news of my aunt passing on.
Apart from attending the funeral, I had some unfinished business in Lusaka which has been pending for some time now.
Having no wherewithal of travelling to Lusaka every now and then, I have just been conducting this business on phone with the people concerned, but usually, phone calls are not as effective as compared to seeing and talking to the people you are dealing with face to face.
So I thought this trip to Lusaka which was meant for a funeral could also be used to see the people I had been dealing with on the phone.
It was an opportunity I did not have to misuse because I was not even sure when my next trip to Lusaka would be.
Instead of travelling back to Ndola on Sunday, I set Monday, Tuesday and part of Wednesday to do the business of seeing some bosses of institutions who owed me and other colleagues some explanation.
It was after completing this business on Wednesday when I went to the Post Bus station to catch a 13:00 hours bus which I had booked myself on.
However, the bus could not leave until 14:30 hours because of some complications best known to the operators.
Nevertheless, the journey was on.
With recent political scenario going on in the country, there were a lot of discussions concerning the forthcoming presidential by-elections which were necessitated by the demise of President Michael Chilufya Sata who died on October 28 in London.
This talk has been the order of the day everywhere you go, be it at funerals, weddings, schools, churches, bars and you name it.
And because these politics have been interesting, newspaper sales seem to have increased considering the number of other people who were not contributing in the talks but were engrossed in reading The Times of Zambia, The Post, The Daily Mail and The Daily Nation.
However, there was a young man seated next to me. (I was on seat 34 and he was on seat 33) who did not seem interested in either talking about the goings on or reading the recent political happenings in the country.
The young man did not only seem not interested, he also looked sad, lonely and lost in deep thought.
After I had gone through my newspapers, I offered him to read and when he shook his head negatively, I thought he was not just interested but he did also not know how to read.
But the young man thanked me for my generosity and this opened him up.
“Thank you, big man! I have heard a lot about what is going on in Zambia but I can’t make any comments or contributions in this because I am not a Zambian. I am here in Zambia to see the man who is ‘supposed’ to be my father but has distanced himself from me from the time I was born to this stage,” the young man said to me.
As an eavesdropper, I thought this was a good chance for me to listen to him. This young man did not know who he was talking to. I thought I was lucky to hear a person talk directly to me because this would be easy for me to take a story and if possible, ask questions and not be suspected.
In fact, this young man did not know the existence of the Eavesdropper.
Why was this young man referring to someone as a man who was ‘supposed’ to be his father? Why was this supposedly father distance himself from him?
I thought I needed to ask the young man:”Why are you saying the man who was ‘supposed’ to be your father and why has he distanced himself away from you?”
Well, some people, especially women, are very ‘cruel’ in life. There are those who have been impregnated by men who have refused to marry them. Some of these women have ended up going for illegal abortions – terminating the lives of would-be innocent human beings.
Some of the women have not aborted, but they have dumped the innocent infants in pit latrines or somewhere else while others have ruthlessly strangled the babies to death just because they did not want to bring up fatherless children.
For some men who don’t get pregnant but impregnate women, have vehemently refused to have been responsible for the pregnancies and when the children whose father they had refused were born, they did not take charge.
Some men who have been dishonest with their wives and have had other women outside and have had children outside wedlock did not want their legal wives to know that they had children anywhere else apart from home.
It is for this reason that these men secretly sponsored the women whom they did not marry but have children with and ensure that they did everything for them so that they do not spill the beans.
Because of his, there are a lot of children who have grown up only with their mothers and did not know their fathers.
However, the story was different with this young man – let us call him Smith – who told me he grew up with his grandparents in Ndola’s Chifubu Township.
His trip, together with me on the Post bus, was his mission to go and face his father who hid himself from him despite being together at his grand parents’ home for so many years.
They shared meals together on the same table. The man used to send this young man wherever he wanted but never revealed that he was his father.
The unfortunate part was that this young man was treated as an orphan who had lost his mother at a tender age of four years.
His mother was not married to the man because he was a married man to another woman and had four children with her.
Explaining this predicament to me, the young man told me that he was staying with his grandparents, mother and father to his supposed father because his mother died while he was still a toddler although he was not told about the whereabouts of his father.
“I was raised up by my grand father and mother in Ndola, Chifubu Township. My grandparents are Zimbabweans who emigrated to Zambia many years back and my grand father was working in Ndola until his time of retirement when he decided to get back to Zimbabwe a couple of years back,” Smith narrated to me.
He looked at me probably to see whether I was following what he was saying.
He continued and said his grand father decided to get back to Zimbabwe in 1999 when Smith was only 10 years old.
In 2002, his grand father fell sick and each time he looked at him, he looked very sad and appeared like someone who wanted to tell him something but could not until he died.
Although his grandfather died not telling him anything, he told his grand mother to explain everything and tell him who his father was because he was feeling guilty.
“It was last month in (November) when my ailing grand mother sat me down because she said she had something very important to tell me which my grand father could not divulge,” explained Smith.
What happened is that Smith’s father was a married man but he fell in love with a woman in the neighborhood.
He was going out with this woman until she got pregnant. The man did not want his wife to know what had happened and so he pleaded with this woman not to let other people know that he was responsible for her pregnancy.
He told his parents and the parents of the woman about the incidence and pleaded that they should not let his wife know about this predicament because he was going to take care of the pregnancy and look after the child once it was born.
Both families agreed and when Smith was born, both his grand parents from the mother’s and father’s sides took care and kept the secret.
So, when Smith’s mother passed on, it was grand parents from his father’s side who took complete care of him.
He didn’t know that the man ho was coming to visit his grand parents so often was his father even long after he had started school. In fact he was calling this man as uncle.
“It was last month when my grand mother told me the man I knew as my uncle was indeed my own real father. I was most of the time with him and he never showed any signs that he was my father. It is for this reason that I have come to Zambia to see him and talk this thing over. My grand mother gave me his cellular phone number and I called him. I told him that I knew everything and I wanted to face him and know why he behaved like that or else I will report him to the human rights commission or the victim support unit or whatever department deals with such cases.
Like I explained earlier, the Post Bus we used started off late – instead of 13:00 hours, it left Lusaka at 14:30 hours.
Besides, it was moving at a snails pace and so we reached Ndola at 21:30 hours.
Smith told me he was going to Chifubu Township and he was so happy when I told him that was where I was going also and he booked a cab which we used without me contributing anything on the fare.
We dropped him first and he told me that I should visit him the following day at 13:00 hours and I was very glad about this because I was very keen to know the outcome of his trip to meet his negligent father.
When I got there the following day at 13:00 hours, I found Smith who looked like a photocopy or duplicate of the man he was sitting with in the veranda.
After staying with the two men for some time, I told Smith that I was leaving to see someone at the center and he offered to escort me.
We ended up at one of the bottle stores where we took some beers as he explained to me that his father was sorry for what he had done to him.
One thing pleasing was that his father introduced him to his siblings but not his stepmother because she had died three years ago.
“Imagine, I have stayed for 25 years without knowing my father and yet it was someone I was always with. It was different with my mother because she died when I was young,” said Smith as he finished his beer and went back to the counter to order another round of Castle Lager and Windhoek for me. What a life!
Potipher2014@gmail.com. 0955929796.
