Pregnant virgin marries Muswala

By Irvine Syazyombo
She knocked three times at the door and waited. No response. She nervously knocked harder until she heard some sounds…some movement…some foot falls… inside the house.

Josphine smiled shyly when Muswala opened the door to face her early one Sunday morning.

Josphine had meticulously swept the young man’s yard .Her next task was to hand him the special breakfast, a flask of tea and lunch box of butter coated bread.

Muswala was surprised to see the beautiful young teacher standing confidently on his door step. He ran out of words. It was an incredibly difficult encounter to understand.

“Josphine, how are you”, he said after biting his tongue at the beginning and end of the sentence.

“ I am fine .I just came to sweep your yard early in the morning .Just to help you I know it is very hard for men to sweep their yards. I have also brought your breakfast. I know you hardly cook,” she said smilingly.

“You can come in. Thank you,” Muswala said.

Inside the house, Josphine shyly stayed only for about five minutes before she left , claiming that she was going to prepare for church service.

Muswala had just been a month old employed as a clinical officer in Lusaka after graduating from college.

He had visited a Pentecostal church one Sunday where he met many people, including the beautiful young teacher, Josphine.

A week later he wondered why such an angel spent about an hour sweeping his yard instead of being at her own house preparing to go to church.

According to Muswala, whom friends popularly called Swala, the twenty three year old lady was unstoppably in love with him.

Friends in the neighborhood had consistently told him that Josphine was generally well behaved, saying Swala would not make any mistake by taking her for a wife.

Meanwhile at the clinic where he was working, a gorgeous young nurse, Ester, was also crazily passionate about marrying the twenty five year old young man.

Much as the ladies had excellent behavior and reputation generally, Swala had other personal values to consider, especially tribal fears, because Josephine was Ngoni from Eastern Zambia while Ester was Bemba from Northern Zambia.

Muswala, who belonged to the Luvale tribe of North Western Zambia, always remembered what his parents had told him about other tribes.

“Bemba women are disrespectful, quarrelsome, nagging and notorious for insulting their husbands in public,” his father would say with conviction.

Swala remembered that his parents had said Tongas were greedy people who individually ate hills of nshima (hard porridge) per meal and that one would have to buy mealie meal every week to satisfy such a wife.

His parents also told him that Lamba women were prostitutes so if he married one she would sleep with all the men in the neighborhood and his own relatives.

Swala’s parents also condemned Eastern Zambian women as harlots who would sleep with any man who whistled suggestively to attract their attention.

His mother charged that Lozi people from Western Province were selfish and stingy people who would not share money, food and other things with their in-laws.

So, when Swala considered all that his parents had lectured him on, he had to go to his village as his parents had wished, so that he could take for a wife a Luvale virgin who would be loving, respectful and worth marrying.

When he reached his village in Kabompo in the North Western Province of Zambia, he stayed there for a month before marrying a beautiful twenty year old girl whom his parents had believed was a well behaved virgin.

After the wedding the couple travelled to Lusaka where two weeks later Judith complained of abdominal pains which a doctor attributed to pregnancy.

Swala at that time was excited because he had proved to people who closely observed young couples for pregnancy signs, that he was not impotent.

Swala was suspicious when the virgin gave birth six months into the marriage, so he demanded a DNA test for the baby which proved that he was not the father.

He was unaware that actually Judith did not know the father of her baby because she had been sleeping with a local primary school teacher, a shopkeeper, a second hand clothes hawker and a grade twelve boy who had passionately been dreaming of marrying her.

But Swala ‘won the Afcon trophy’ of her heart because of his Lusaka residency. Her desire was to go back to Lusaka where she had left her baby with his father four years earlier after an unwanted pregnancy.

Meanwhile barely a week into the marriage, he observed appalling levels of poor personal hygiene.

Judith would only brush her teeth and have a bath after a week or so. Whenever he left dirty dishes on the dining table or in the sink, he would find the same mess in the evening after work.

She would sweep the house after a week. Since it was rainy season, the front and back yards had become game reserves for snakes, lizards and frogs because she would not weed the yard at all.

Before he took her back to village, he knocked off earlier from work that night so that he could prepare fully for the long trip.

But when he entered the house, he was startled as a half naked man who had hidden behind the open door fled into the night leaving a four year old boy who facially closely resembled Judith.

When he interrogated his wife, she revealed tearfully that the four year old boy was her son and the man who had run away had ‘brought his child to see his mother’.

Having dumped the ‘virgin’ in the village, Swala underwent VCT which was positive and had to be on ARVs in Lusaka just because tribal prejudice had blindfolded him into marrying a lady from his province without any HIV test.

Having suffered the mental torturing long illness in a Lusaka hospital, before Swala died, he disclosed to church mates, friends and relatives at his bedside that he was a naïve victim of tribal stereotypes. He also wished he had put logical thinking before thoughtless tribal prejudice which plunged him into the HIV positive quagmire.

He advised them that in reality people were just people regardless of tribe or color. Swala reasoned that it took small minds to judge others on tribal prejudice .He said those who sowed seeds of tribalism had trouble and regrets to reap in the future.