A 37-YEAR-OLD man of Lundazi District in Eastern Province says all his children have a small left eye compared to the right one just like his left testicle and therefore a child whose eyes are of equal size could not have been fathered by him.
Summoned before an eminent court of distiguished Tumbuka elders, Oliver Chirwa rejected paternity of a newly-born child of his wife with who he has one child on account of the new infants dissimilarity to an important member of his genitals, namely, a left testicle.
Submitting before the village court, Chirwa, a charcoal burner averred without compromise that a newly-born infant born of his second wife Edith Goma, 19 was not his as it had eyes of the same size unlike all his other three children from her and his first wife who all had one eye bigger than the other just like his testicles which were of uneven size.
However, Edith prayed to the Tumbuka Court of Village Elders to reject her husband’s outlandish reason for rejecting the baby stating that;
“”ine chanisuzya chomene because I have not had any affair outside my marriage of two years, this child is his I don’t know why he keeps refusing the child.”
Meanwhile, based on his unique understanding of the relationship between gynecology and ophthalmology rebased to testicles and eyes, Oliver vehemently objected to his wife’s overtures and told the Tumbuka Court of Elders that, “”kulije sanga nkhale mwana wane, ndaba ine onse Bana bane baoneka monga Nima vwalo bane so uyu mwana ngati mwaonesesa maso yonse niyon lingana so sanga be wane,”.
Meanwhile, after considering all sciences and their relationships, viz-a-viz, relationship between the tongue and the finger, the left toe and the ear and of course Chirwa’s claim of a relationship between a testicle and an eye, the elders dismissed Chirwa’s ground for refusing the infant as no such relationship could be proven.
The elders further threatened to expel him from the village and confisticate whatever form of vegetation he was inhaling unless he dropped his rejection of the infant; a demand he obliged to secure his stay in the village.
©Kalemba