The Llomba

OK! Today’s serpent monster is from Zambia from stories told by the Lozi people.  This manufactured supernatural snake is called the llomba (in no way to be confused with a llama) and, according to lore, it can be constructed by a powerful witch doctor from his (or her?) own fingernails, skin and blood.  When these disgusting ingredients are properly mixed with magical herbs a baby llomba is born.  The witch doctor must feed the serpent with eggs and porridge until the monster’s fangs develop, whereupon the sorcerer can sic the creature upon their enemies.  To disinterested third parties, the llomba merely looks like a giant terrifying snake, however it appears as a snake version of the witch doctor to the designated target (and to the witch doctor himself).  When the llomba finds its prey, it consumes their soul in an orgy of primal serpentine terror! Woah!

So far all of this sounds great (uh, insomuch as black magic homicide goes), yet there are drawbacks for the witch doctor as well.  The llomba stays hungry and must constantly be fed. Once it has tasted human souls, eggs and porridge and Zambian breakfast foods no longer do the job.  If the witch doctor lets it starve, he dies too.  If the witch doctor gets weary of constantly feeding souls to a giant snake which looks like a snake version of himself, he can kill it through magic, but then he will be forever haunted by the llomba’s victims (not that this would necessarily bother someone killing people with evil power).  Also, you may want to take this talk of magic snakes made of fingernails and dark wizardry with a grain of salt: my sources identified the llomba as a sea snake and Zambia is extremely landlocked.

 

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The Flag of Zambia

A supervisor overlooks Metorox’s Chibuluma copper mine, near Kitwe, Zambia (image from Chinadaily)

Moving on in our flag tour across Africa we come to Zambia, a completely landlocked country. The economy of Zambia is almost entirely dependent on copper. When copper is expensive Zambia does well: when copper is cheap, the country falls apart (copper is expensive now due to China’s building boom, so the IMF lists Zambia as one of the world’s fastest improving economies). Of course most Zambians are subsistence farmers for who have relatively little to do with the world economy or even the larger Zambian economy, but to the Zambian elite (and to the world’s mining and construction magnates) copper matters greatly {ed’s note: and for us readers too—the computing device you are probably reading this on requires copper and copper wires]. The Zambian government hopes to someday diversify the nation’s exports away from overdependence on copper: which, in truth, is to say they hope maybe to also export nickel. All of this economics exposition also overlooks Zambia’s sometimes fraught trade routes across neighboring countries. Since Zambia is landlocked it must ship its metals and ores across other countries to reach the international market, and the neighbors have sometimes used this advantage to squeeze Zambia.

The current flag of Zambia

The flag of Zambia should probably just be “29” or “Cu”, but instead it is a bizarre off-center standard adapted after independence from the British (although admittedly it has a great deal of coppery-orange color in it). The majority of the flag is green, which stands for the nation’s fields, forests, and natural fertility. As in other African flags, red represents the nation’s bloody struggle for independence and black represents the Zambian people. Finally copper color stands for the country’s “mineral wealth”, and the copper color eagle stands for the people’s ability to soar above their problems. A cynical person might say the copper eagle represents the copper-rich merchants and politicians who control Zambia. The flag was adopted in 1964, but it changed slightly in 1996 to accommodate changed graphic sensibilities (the green became brighter and the eagle lost weight).

The Flag of Zambia from 1964-1996

For unknown reasons, copper-hungry China has taken great interest in Zambian politics and welfare. A news report from today (which has appeared since I started writing this post) details a technical cooperation grant agreement in which China has agreed to provide $64 million dollars worth of infrastructural, vocational, and environmental aid to the Zambian people. How generous!