Burn Baby Burn

I have always been one to enjoy a good bonfire or campfire or fire in the fireplace. I guess I like fire. It has come in handy here on more than a few occasions. Turns out that Zulus also like fire. They use it for disposing of trash, cooking in large pots for village functions, and what I learned most recently, spring cleaning of the yard.

The brush in front of Ncepheni Mountain
during its yearly controlled burn.

As we near the end of winter, the brush across the village and surrounding terrain is very brown and VERY dry. Apparently, this spells trouble. Most Zulus are quite worried that everything is going to go up in flames at any minute; so to prevent this disaster, they just burn it themselves. For a greater portion of the last month, I have seen these controlled burns in the distance. One evening, there was a large area on the backside of a nearby mountain being burned and it lit up the mountain in an eerie silhouette. I figured it was only a matter of time before we would take our turn and burn everything around our yard.

My host sister Niki makes sure that the small flames
are put out when the area is done with the burn.

I’m not really sure how it was decided what day we would light the grass ablaze, but late one afternoon this past week I saw some neighbors, surrounded by a fairly large group of kids from the village, lighting a match and waving on the flames. The next thing I knew, I heard a “crackle, crackle” and I realized my family was outside doing the same. The grass inside the fence is actually not to be touched; it is just all the grass that is in between yards and properties, mostly along dirt roads and paths. I also learned that it is better to complete this task at dusk or at night because it is easier to see the flames and less likely they will get out of control. The adults walked around with small buckets of water, sprinkling the grass and fence posts to create something of a boundary to contain the fire. Most of the kids held large, leafy branches to swat the flames down or out when they had burned the appropriate area. The smoke and ash that got caught in the wind was pretty intense at times, and I definitely found myself a little too close to the action once or twice. The whole process was somewhat amazing. Although, in the back of my mind I wondered how many times things didn’t go quite as planned. Luckily, that was not the case this time around. Whether or not there is any real reason to do this, I really can’t say. The Zulus believe it is absolutely necessary, so there’s no stopping them. I can’t say this for sure, but I don’t necessarily think the process is good for the soil if it is done year after year after year. But again, that is irrelevant. What is most important is that if someone carelessly flicks a lit cigarette butt on the ground now, there is a much smaller chance that the whole village will burn down. Which according to my host sister is the justification for all this burning. Very interesting…