An example of the "African Homeland"
plan...@bellsouth.net
article about the current situation in Zambia. When Cynthia McKinney or
Jesse Jackson travel to Africa looking for support, let them compare our
great land to the standard of living in Africa. No where on Earth is the
standard of living higher for a person of color than America. So, STOP YOUR
WHINING JESSE.
The President of Zambia, Levy Mwanawasa, congratulates himself on being the
first African leader to reject US aid donations of genetically modified corn
and soya, but the starvation affecting millions of his people is reaching
catastrophic proportions.
Even the wild fruits, leaves and tree roots on which up to three million
Zambians rely for survival are running out in some areas.
With desperation among the rural population intensifying, people have
started using the elderly as guinea pigs to test untried and potentially
poisonous varieties of roots.
"If we resort to a new type of root from a plant we are unfamiliar with, we
first get the oldest person in the village to test it before the rest of us
eat it," says Tom Hamonga, 28, a villager in Chimbe in an area of southern
Zambia hard hit by crop failure and food shortages. "This must be a person
who is already too ill either because of hunger, disease or age that he is
going to die sooner or later anyway. If he lives after eating the roots, we
then feed them to the children. If he dies, we won't," Mr Hamonga added.
In this isolated village of mud huts 90 miles (150km) from the capital,
Lusaka, a narrow dusty footpath leads to Ellie Luwindi's compound, a
collection of three tiny, dilapidated pole and dagga huts which she shares
with her three children and 10 orphaned grandchildren.
Mrs Luwindi, aged 70, a cousin of Tom Hamonga, is slowly drowning a bunch of
roots which she describes as being highly toxic and poisonous in a bucket of
water. Mrs Luwindi, her own body withered by the lack of food, invites us to
sit under a shade. "I keep them in water for three days so that the poison
can swim out," she explains. "After that period, I boil them and eat them
with the family. In the meantime we have nothing to eat until I complete
this process." The roots in the bucket look barely enough to satisfy one
stomach.
Her cousin says he and other villagers experimented with the roots in a
nearby small dam before it dried up because of lack of rain. They spread the
roots on top of the water. Every living creature in the dam perished.
In the local graveyard more than two dozen shallow graves have appeared over
the past few months. There are no official statistics, or confirmation of
anyone who has died of hunger. However, the fact that people are succumbing
to HIV and severe malnutrition is self-evident.