I believe you have watched some great fights, those physical exchanges of blows on television as Muhammad Ali squared off with Ken Norton, George Foreman and/or indeed, Smoking Joe Frazier.

Tantalising moments as Manny “The Pacman”Pacquiao battled with Juan Maquez one, two and finally three times!

Then of course you may have benefited from those live, crowd pulling Lottie Mwale versus ChisandaMutti one, two and three duels that so totally divided Zambian boxing fans;perhaps Charm Shuffle Chiteule, the Chris Eubank, Sugar Ray Leonard, and why not the Mike Tyson etc., would appeal better to you!

You may indeed have been the wrestling buffs who revelled in the exploits of Shaun Michaels, The Undertaker, John Cena, or my favourite of them all, ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin.

Some of you may have loved to see the martial arts exploits in movies by the likes of Claude Van Damme, Jet Li orBruce Lee, or even the brutal exchanges of blows when the local hoodlums failed to agree on how to evenly share the (only) K10 they had found in a wallet (full of other irrelevant documents) after expertly snatching it from an innocent owner at the Kafue Roundabout underbridge and running a good puffy and sweaty 100 meters to secure their loot!

I for my part, loved to see most of the fights I have described above but if you asked me which of them I would love to see again, in slow motion so that I could take in all the detail, I would tell you it would be the fights within my family inner circle.

For sure I would love to watch … now without flinching as I see heavy punches land or teeth sink into skin, or dustbin covers land on some innocent small head … I would love to watch our mother and her husband, our father, take on each other again.

Preferably on video so they don’t ask me to intervene and stop them from bruising each other to pulp.

I would love to see my older sister Mbikazi beat and kick and toss-missiles out of one marriage after another.

You guessed right too that I would love to study how the twins, Pachikani and Mpachikeni crucify each other over the slightest of discord, like why one of them picked the slice of bread before the other at breakfast and so on.

I detested these fights in the family when they occurred but now that I am only reminiscing, I find something so totally vexing in an amusing way why my family were ever opting for kicks and butts and blows when there was a simple dispute.

It’s not exaggeration when I say that I can hardly ever remember why mum and dad would fight but I do remember with relish how it all started,always with much venom and threat coming from the male, but soon the male, being the more minute in size, being crashed between mum’s gigantic stranglehold, quickly and frantically requesting (and when the request was not heeded, ordering bystanders, mostly us the children) to disentangle him from his wife’s hold, which if not done, would cause him to clobber her to death!

Of course he would first have to be saved from sure death by causing our mum to let go before he could exact any sort of threat as he appeared to be suggesting.

In most of those comical public displays of apparently unsolvable disagreements, the man would usually succeed in landing only the first punch, furiously aimed at the face but his wife, the target being so tall and huge (while he was the exact opposite, a dwarf so to speak) his punch would feebly land somewhere around the midriff and only serve to infuriate her into tossing three punches (though using the wrong side of a fist – the rubbery palm) before wrapping her arms around him in a stranglehold.

It didn’t matter which part of our father’s body she wrapped her arms around, he would soon be running out of breath, panting and ordering us to stop his wife before finally beginning to gasp for air! Tell you what? I can watch that over and over again.

The thing about Mbikazi and her fights with any one of her many husbands one after another, is their unpredictability.

While the man was still attempting, for good measure, to justify why he had done abc or why in fact it was a wrong report about him having done xyz with pqrs, the woman would have already had enough of the talking and be already decided which of the kitchen utensils was most apt for purposes of exacting the most damage if landed on her husband’s head.

I tell you, if I was to quarrel with good old Mbika, I wouldn’t allow it to be in the kitchen or anywhere near her display cabinet. If she decides brother Meexy is finally due for a beating, her unused brand new kettle, which she extorted out of niece So-and-So after her recent kitchen party could be landing squarely on my nose!

Of course there were a few times when, perhaps because for once she had gottenfor herself an audacious husband who felt he could subdue the intemperance in her by throttling or punching her, she instead taught them a few lessons about how to secure their private parts first whenever their wife was angry and raring for a fight!

Wherever she learned the art of crashing her right knee into your You-know-what and left you screaming for divine intervention as those little unseen limbs suddenly went on fire, the feeling was so gory you thought they had been crushed right into your intestines!

In most cases, when she used that tactic, it was game over with the first kick of the fight!

If you thought you could show yourself to be tough and stood up, you either got round two of the same treatment, which would most certainly knock you unconscious, or she took your fingers into her mouth, ate all or some of them at once and left you not sure where the most pain had been inflicted so you went tossing about on one leg, blowing at or flapping the hand where her teeth had been planted,while with your free hand trying to adjust the things which had been kicked in by rubbing them hard to soothe the pain.

Weren’t you lucky then if you knew the rules and just avoided quarrelling with Mbika?

That, I tell you, is another drama I would pay a lot to witness again, especially on video!

I never saw myself fight though, like I have told you before, I was a damn good loser whenever it came to fighting with play mates or those from other ‘camps’ who either ambushed us along the way and wanted us beaten simply because we came from the other side of the township, or those fights that occurred simply because I had caused a disputed penalty in a soccer match and after our opponents had grudgingly accepted that it be taken, they were so embittered that I finally scoredthe winning goal from it they vented their frustration by abandoning the game, chasing after me and landing a variety of punches on me as my team mates, rather than come to my aid, scampered for safety (the fools)!

There were a few times, maybe just once if I remember correctly, when I got thoroughly hit (and I mean nicely clobbered) by a much bigger boy for writing and sending to his girlfriend some love proposal on a note book page fully decked with flowers (those letters whose addresses read something as crazy as “Love to Love, Kiss to Kiss, P. O. Box 4 Legs in Bed, FOREVER”)!

I sure would love to see myself beaten sir. It probably would annoy me and grind into me the desire to turn the clock, go back to the bad old days and perform better in the fight.

I think I still am a weakling but I fare better whenever a beating is on the horizon! What I would love to see most are those fairly countable times when I invariably came out tops, thoroughly whacking my opponents in real fury!

I mean times, sir, when someone told me I had a head like my father’s! I never liked that joke because indeed my father has the type of head you cannot be proud to own.

You try, even as a son, to pretend that all is well with that head hovering over the shoulders of the only father you have and closing your ears when you hear adults taking a pot shot at his looks without knowing you, standing so close, are the son.

If you told me, therefore, that my head was like that of my father (even though I know there is very, very little resemblance and that you were just poking funat me) I would doubtlessly beat you badly.

Sorry, sir, but on that one, you had no choice but to get so angrily and thoroughly outclassed you would never ever talk about my father’s head within my earshot again.

Now these rascals, the twins Pachikani (Cruficy) and Mpachikeni (Crucify him) still do give us their free boxing, kick boxing, wrestling and biting fights! I just don’t want to watch them.

Instead of enjoying, I am forced to be the referee and invariably end all fights in disqualifications (either of both pugilists because they were fighting for no reason and outside the rules of fighting, or I join the fight to exact justice on behalf of the victim).

So, take me to the past, especially to see mum squeezing the (nthota/ifikansa/likanyi/nkazi/nkhwesa) – that quarrelsomeness out of dad for good!

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