Story and pictures by Salim Dawood
Ben Banda is a 17-year-old boy of Katete district’s Kashombe Village in the Eastern Province of Zambia – he can neither read nor write but owns three cows.
Ben and his twin sister are the first of their parents’ four children – all his siblings are in school.
But as for Ben, at the age of 10, he abandoned school in the fourth grade to take up a cow herding job.
After seven years of dedicated, uninterrupted and unsalaried service as a cow herder, Ben earned his pension of three cows from the same herd he tended to.
Ben then retired to herd his newly-acquired cattle and that of his father.
His daily routine revolves around animals – taking his three cows along with the seven of his father for grazing and drinking in the vast bushes of his village.
Although Ben has come to love herding cattle so dearly that it takes him almost three minutes of silence and deep thought to answer the question of what his choice would be between returning to school and continuing as cowherd, he knows too well that being able to read and write will come in handy when he finally accumulates the hundreds of animals he dreams of owning one day.
Listening to Ben narrate the biographies of each animal in his care, there is no doubt his job has taught him much – but it’s time to learn new and different lessons.
Ben has since decided to deport his three animals to his grandfather’s village and go back to class at a school whose name he can’t exactly recall but his resolve is resolute.
Part of Ben’s motivation to “exile” his animals from his village has been his father’s numerous but failed attempts to talk him into selling or slaughtering them for profit.
His father has found another young herder to replace Ben as he returns to school.
Ben’s story is just one of the numerous identical stories of Eastern Province where herding cattle takes precedence over the childhood and education of many children .
If he indeed manages to return to school, Ben will have slightly altered the common narrative of the many children like him growing up illiterate/Sugar Cane.
