I ONCE served in the military and one thing I know is how much servicemen tend to look down upon civilians.
Be it those in the Army, the Air Force or the National Service, they believe they are in a superior league that places them several notches higher than one not among them in terms of what is often known as being ‘jacked up’ the opposite of being ‘idle’!
In our case, along with all others who were lucky enough to successfully graduate from secondary school after 1975, courtesy of Kenneth Kaunda’s free education, compulsory military training awaited us at various military camps dotted across the country.
They gave us military instruction with a lot of human rights abuses in the name of training, including regular use of vulgar and obscene language.
If you were required during Parade to stand at attention, be still, put your chest out, rifle in your hand, but were adjudged by the Instructor to be looking not upward enough but rather at his face, he would ask if his private parts were growing on his forehead for you to be attracted there!
“Look heaven, nyabbwa!” he would scream at you before unleashing a vitriolic torrent of obscenities at you.
In fact reference to his own sex organs sounded polite compared to when the Instructor asked if you had seen female sex organs on his forehead.
Speaking in Nyanja or Bemba, that sounded truly vulgar. But you couldn’t do a thing about it because that was the military! You learned to obey and nothing but obey!
Pasa ulemu Bwana (respect the boss)! If there was any little mix-up in steps while marching, as when one tossed his left foot forward while others were tossing the right, such recruit was singled out, called a ‘shit-house’ (sorry, but that’s not me), a ‘nyabbwa’ (whatever that meant, though it always sounded insulting and humiliating), a maliongo, a bunkum and many other degrading terms.
You didn’t really have to struggle to earn punishment. It was always around the corner, waiting to befall you, for one simple reason or another, mostly in the form of strenuous physical exercises supervised mercilessly to the point where some people collapsed.
Sadly, if you collapsed, then you were inviting more trouble, for instance, spending some hours in the guardroom, which was the most dreaded venue for anyone to do anything.
Luckily for me, I never fainted or committed acts of indiscipline which would have seen me in the guardroom so I only heard how very dreary the place was.
In essence, all the mistreatment in those military camps was meant to destroy the cheeky civilian mentality with which we entered the camps.
We knew for a fact that most of our Instructors might have gone only up to grade 7 in terms of formal education and we held them in great disdain. It was their role to pummel out of us our superiority complex over them.
In a very short time, we learnt the hard way that you could never laugh at ‘bwana’ when he spoke bad English.
As soon as we laughed, that is before we knew how dangerous it was to laugh at ‘bwana’, they would put the entire 1,000 recruits in camp on all fours and force everyone to crawl the entire length of the 100-metre-long Parade Square, on their knees and elbows till four thousand knees and elbows
were sore and/or even bleeding.
In later days, after we had started handling weapons, it was even more fashionable to be forced on all fours with your rifle in your hands.
Hey! That was something, I tell you. To batter the cheeky (nthota) civilian mentality and craft disciplined, obedient soldiers out of you, they did anything they wanted, even limiting our smiling time to the barest minimum.
“Why you smiling?” one instructor would erupt unexpectedly when you thought some occasion was humorous enough for a smile. “Why you smiling? Kneel down all of you!” or “Rifles up, come on frog jumps!” and you started tossing about like frogs with your rifles held high above your heads. That always solicited excruciating pain.
You always wondered what wrong you had done, beginning to develop fear of the instructors because of their unpredictability, but also respecting them totally as your muscles felt like they were tearing inside the skin.
The ‘Bwana! Bwana!’ mentality grew so easily in such a short time when you saw very junior officers like 2nd Lieutenants they started to look like big Generals or Field Marshals in your eyes!
Why not, when the likes of Corporal Katashila, Corporal Jerusa, Staff Sergeant Chikwekwe, and other similar ‘small flies’ in the Service had equally started looking big and full of authority! We had been effectively brainwashed and actually began to enjoy freezing to attention whenever one of them showed up wherever we were and even saluting the commissioned officers. One Private, nicknamed Hitler, essentially the comedian in the pack, also gave us the gases whenever he wanted.
I remember being punished for insisting in correcting him that the metal item used for cleaning rifles was not a cleaning ‘lod’ as he would have us believe but a cleaning ‘rod’!  “Si museu iwe nyabbwa… is not a road but a lod!” Knowing as we did that there was a difference between the ‘road’ which he had in mind and the ‘rod’ which was a piece of metal, (while no such thing as ‘lod’ existed in English), we thought we could correct the man for good reasons.
He instead angrily shepherded the lot of us to the shower rooms, got us all totally drenched standing under the showers one by one, them told us to start rolling in the dust just beyond the parade square! In a matter of minutes, he had the whole platoon looking like ragamuffins, in total resemblance to Nyau dancers ready for the Kulamba ceremony! And we couldn’t argue any more. Cleaning ‘rod’ or ‘lod’, he was always right because he was an Instructor and we were ba likuluti (recruits); he must be obeyed. He was Bwana.
After my time at National Service, by which time I was so happy to freeze to attention for any army man I could recognise, and greet them with total respect, I also developed this feeling that those who had not undergone military service were indeed ‘IDLE’ as the name went.
I came to believe that such people were slow, not sharp enough, argumentative for nothing, and we could easily beat them up! After all, we were by then very physically fit as demonstrated when in heavy military boots, we walked and ran the entire 72-kilometre distance from Chipata to Chadiza just to go and collect our Form 5 results!
With this mentality, it was little wonder there were so many instances of soldiers or Servicemen attacking civilians and giving them thorough beatings for next-to-no offence at all. It wasn’t unusual to find ONE ‘naughty’ civilian being given a clobbering by up to SEVEN soldiers (a whole section in military parlance)! It was the mentality where we held non-military men in total disdain, total disrespect!
I was not surprised, therefore, when Dunduza Du Kamlaza, the man of many juicy tales at our regular drinking place The Hangover Lay By Bar, told us about some civilian who was recently severely ‘sorted out’ by soldiers. The worst part was that he actually provoked them in a manner that could cause even civilians to get upset and probably also clobber him.
One Bias Kadudu was successfully conducting very successful behind-the-scenes sex lessons with a soldier’s wife. I call it lessons because I am told the wife was so over-the-moon (totally consumed and exhilarated) with how Bias Kadudu was literally whipping her into thrills and bliss the like she had never imagined existed anywhere in the world. She boasted to all friends and neighbours that the Army could send her husband to Darfur for however long they wanted as long as Bias Kadudu was available.
The soldier husband, upon hearing these sordid tales about his wife (for whom bride price was equivalent to the price of a Noah family bus) opted to calmly investigate, after which he gathered a few colleagues in uniform who all believed that (i) when they went out on national duties (operations they call them), other men must have respect for the wives of such brave men who were willing to die for their country; and (ii) (especially) civilians must have fear and respect for soldiers such that even when deliberately opting to be adulterous, they must, with fear and trembling, stay away from soldiers’ wives.
In short, they could whack around with wives of fellow civilians but never tamper with girls whose men lived or worked in the barracks!
So they discovered where to locate our Bias Kadudu and whipped him so bad he stopped talking, he stopped thinking, he stopped looking and they only stopped the whacking when everybody thought Bias Kadudu was dead!
Even as he lay seemingly lifeless, the soldiers’ anger was not fully consumed so they removed his trousers and underpants and removed all his vital statistics! Yes, they left that section bare! Nothing left! I tell you… hah!
The man awoke several long hours later, after being hit by the cold breeze of the early hours, excruciating pain all over the body, only to realise in horror after some time that someone had walked away with his most prized possessions with which he had been hitherto conducting serious mischief with many other people’s wives and girlfriends.
Essentially, he had been systematically “relieved of some of his favourite duties”.
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