Jack Zimba

 ·     But is anyone getting any richer? A man holding a fleck of gold.  A gram of gold sells for K500.  A woman breaking stones. Add caption The miners use rudimentary tools to extract the gold. Inside one of the old tunnels in the mountain. Men carrying the stones down the mountain. Panning for gold.   JACK ZIMBA A MAN shows me a tiny yellowish speckle in the palm of his hand. It is so tiny that I have to pull his hand to my face in order to have a good look at what he is holding. It sparkles. “That is gold,” he tells me, his own eyes sparkling with excitement. Next to him, his colleague is meticulously swirling a small bowl containing muddy water and a shiny glob of mercury dancing in the middle. I had driven 40km north of Petauke Town to the newly-created Lusangazi District, branched off onto a winding bush track deep into a lash forest and reached a dead end at the foot of a mountain. The mountain is calle...

The Ngonis won the war, but lost the language. Pictures by Jack Zimba. A Ngoni warrior stabs his spear in the air. What does the future hold for young Ngonis? Paramount Chief Mpezeni IV. Gankhanani Moyo says relearning the language will be hard.   George Zulu is determined to have the Zulu language reintroduced among the Ngonis. Can the Ngonis click again? ·       After losing their language, they want to regain it JACK ZIMBA More than a century ago, the Ngoni people were a marauding, warring tribe marching through the eastern and northern parts of modern day Zambia. Ultimately, they won the war, but they lost their language, Zulu, when they married women from the conquered tribes such as the Nsenga and Chewa. Now, they want to regain their language.   A PRAISE singer bursts into isibongo (Zulu poetic praise) for Paramount Chief Mpezeni IV of the Ngoni people during the Nc’wala ceremony at Mtenguleni, an...