President Hakainde Hichlema must suspend or reverse any sale of the Shimwalule forest- Amb.  Emmanuel Mwamba

When the Sacred Is for Sale

What India’s Niyamgiri Hills Ruling Teaches Zambia About Shimwalule

…President Hakainde Hichlema must suspend or reverse any sale of the Shimwalule forest..

On customary land, the graves of kings, and why an independent court may be all that stands between the two and a sale.

By Ambassador Emmanuel Mwamba

There are persistent reports that large parcels of land have been sold in Muchinga province to senior government officials and UPND officials.

I’m yet to see an official response from the Bemba Royal Establishment (BRE) about this matter.

But of concern is the large tract of land that houses Shimwalule, the royal and sacred burial sites of persons that rose to become Mwine Lubemba, Chitimukulu, the paramount chief of the Bemba people.

For centuries, this area has served not onlybas final resting place of the Chitimukulu and other royals but also a spirtual sanctuary to which members of the community seek divine intervention in times of crisis or great disasters.
It is a living link between the  Bemba people and their forefathers

Therefore this development is deeply concerning.

●Mwalule (Shimwalule): This is the ultimate and most sacred traditional resting place.

It is the grave where early Bemba kings (including Chiti and Nkole) were laid to rest. It is highly sacred and administered by a hereditary royal priest and undertaker, who also holds the title Shimwalule.

●Kashika Royal Graveyard: This is the modern royal graveyard located near the Chitimukulu palace in Kasama. It is often used for the burial of other senior royals and family members.

●Chimuna Graveyard: Another important traditional royal graveyard located in the Chitimukulu village in Kasama, typically used for prominent members of the royal family such as the queen (known as Abasano Ba Mfumu).

●THESE LANDS ARE NOT FOR SALE

Some places are not ours to sell. They are ours to keep, to guard, and to hand on. For the Bemba people, Shimwalule is one of them. In the Mwalule Royal Cemetery  lie the Chitimukulu and the chiefs who went before him, their burials watched over for generations by the bakabilo, the rites kept so carefully that even the way a chief is laid to rest is held in secret.

This is not a parcel of land waiting for a buyer. It is the resting place of a people’s Kings. So when the Bemba Royal Establishment says the forest that holds Shimwalule should never have been sold – title deeds or none, gazetted or not – we should not hear an old grievance, but we should hear a question about the kind of country we are becoming.

It is a question another democracy has already had to face.

India faced it, and the answer it gave is one worth sitting with.

A hill, a tribe, and a court that listened
Far away in the Niyamgiri Hills of Odisha, in eastern India, live the Dongria Kondh. They worship a mountain god, Niyam Raja, who they believe dwells on the hilltop itself. And beneath that same hilltop sat bauxite worth an estimated two billion US dollars.

A mining venture linked to the Vedanta group, working with a state-owned company, wanted to dig it out. A sacred hill, a fortune in ore, a government keen to see it mined: Zambians will know the shape of this story without being told how it ends.

But the ending is the part that matters. In 2013, India’s Supreme Court ruled, in Orissa Mining Corporation v. Ministry of Environment & Forest (2013) 6 SCC 47, that neither the company nor the state could decide the hill’s fate on its own. Religious freedom, the Court said, protects more than private belief; it protects the worship and the rituals bound up with it.

The Dongria Kondh’s right to honour Niyam Raja had to be safeguarded. And the people with the most to lose, the Court held, must be the ones to decide, through their own village assemblies, the gram sabhas, under India’s Forest Rights Act.

When those assemblies finally met, every one of the twelve villages said no. The government refused the final clearance in 2014, and later courts shut the door on attempts to reopen it. The mine was never dug. The hill is still sacred today for one reason: a court that owed nothing to the powerful insisted that the law, and not somebody’s appetite, would have the final word.

●The Zambian gap: a chief’s signature is not a community’s consent

This is where the comparison begins to sting.
Under our Lands Act of 1995, all land belongs, in law, to the President, though customary tenure is recognised and meant to endure. Customary land can become leasehold, the Act says, once the chief and the local authority approve. Read that again, and notice who is missing. The chief must agree. The local authority must agree.

The people who live on the land, farm it, pray on it, and bury their dead in it need not be asked at all. Around nine in every ten hectares in this country are customary land, held in trust by our traditional leaders, and the law that decides how it is given away says nothing about the consent of the community whose home it is.

This is no distant worry as our own courts have already watched customary land sold out from under the families living on it, as in the Asa Lato case, where land changed hands without the community’s agreement.

The pattern repeats across Africa with a grim familiarity: papers are signed, a stamp comes down, and a community wakes one morning to find itself a stranger on its own ground. Lawful, it turns out, is not always the same thing as right.

Shimwalule pushes that worry to its breaking point. This is not somebody’s farmland or grazing strip. It is a royal burial place, the most sacred earth a Bemba can name. If land like this can be wrapped up and handed over without the free agreement of the people whose ancestors rest beneath it, then let us be honest with ourselves: no customary land in Zambia is truly safe.

Why this is a rule-of-law question for President Hichlema, not a tribal one
It is tempting to shrink all of this down to “tradition against progress” and move on. Don’t. That framing is the trap itself. What is really at stake is whether our law means what it says.

India did not save Niyamgiri by banning mining, or by treating one community’s feelings as untouchable. It saved Niyamgiri by holding the state to its own constitution and its own statutes, and by demanding a consent that was genuine rather than arranged. The hero of that story is neither the tribe nor the company. It is a court brave enough to rule against a state and a corporation standing side by side.

That courage is exactly what Zambia says it wants to grow. A UPND government that claims to build its name on the “rule of law and an independent judiciary” cannot then choose when those promises apply and when they do not.

Their whole worth lies in being there for the weak when they face the strong: for a forest village against a buyer with connections, for a royal house against a quiet signature in an office somewhere.

The court that could halt the sale of Shimwalule is the very same court that guards an investor’s contract, a journalist’s freedom, a voter’s ballot. We cannot keep a dependable rule of law for business and a flexible one for the sacred, and expect either to last.

●A deterrent worth building

There is a colder, more practical lesson here too, for anyone who looks at customary land and sees easy money. Niyamgiri cost its backers years in court, the quiet exit of international investors, a reputation bruised across three continents, and in the end the project itself.

Trampling sacred and customary rights is not a shortcut to development. It is a road to conflict, delay, and loss, as the bitter, still-unresolved stand-offs over Vedanta’s newer bauxite venture at Sijimali keep proving.

Zambia can take the wiser road, and it runs through a handful of plain commitments.

President Hakainde Hichlema must suspend or reverse any sale of the Shimwalule forest until there has been real consultation with the Bemba Royal Establishment and the communities concerned.

Close the gap in our law, so that parting with customary land, and above all a sacred site,  demands the community’s clear agreement, not just a single signature. And let our courts do their work without fear or favour.

A bench that can be trusted to weigh sacred heritage against commercial muscle is not the enemy of investment; it is the very ground that makes honest investment possible.

India’s highest court showed that a sacred mountain and a modern economy can live alongside each other, but only when the law draws the line between them, and only when the people whose heritage hangs in the balance are truly heard.

Shimwalule is our own version of that test. For centuries the kings of the Bemba have lain in that grove, kept by the Shimwalule and the bakabilo through every change of season and government.

Whether they can now be bought and sold will tell us, more plainly than any speech or manifesto, how far our promises about the rule of law really reach.