Stefanus Nambara

NEPARA – An excitement of having yet another bumper harvest by a family at Nepara village in Kavango West was short lived as their traditional silos for mahangu grains were gutted by fire.

The incident, which occurred on Tuesday, destroyed two traditional silos packed with about 5 000 kilograms of mahangu and a traditional hut, where the fire was said to have started.

No one saw how the fire started as no one was inside the homestead at the time it broke out. It is, however, assumed that a mattress that was inside the hut may have fallen on a smouldering fire that was in the same hut when a whirlwind blew across the homestead.

According to Gelasius Masati who was with others outside the homestead threshing mahangu, neighbours alerted them of the incident after the whirlwind had passed.

“After a while, we could hear people calling us to alert us that there is a fire inside the homestead, so we quickly rushed to come inside,” Masati said.

Masati said a while later, the silos which were metres away from where the fire started also started burning.

This left the family reeling in shock, saying it was strange that the fire reached the silos.

“What is shocking to me is, from here where the hut burnt to the silos, a person can take about 30 steps to there,” said the head of the family, Johannes Ihemba Hairwa.

“Closer to where the hut burnt, there are wooden poles but none of them caught fire. There is also a sleeping room structure and an electrical cable, but did not also catch fire. It just went straight to the silos, so that I can perhaps starve of hunger,” he added.

Although they managed to save some of the mahangu from one of the silos, they are worried that they may be ruined by the water that was used in attempts to put out the fire. 

The family described the loss as a huge one, saying that they spent a lot by hiring tractors to plough at least 14 hectares of their crop field.

According to Hairwa, they always harvest more than 200 bags of mahangu each year, of which some is sold and some for their own consumption.

However, due to the unfortunate incident, Hairwa said they are now likely to depend on buying maize meal from shops, which may be a challenge for him as the head of the house because he has no stable financial income.

When this reporter visited the family on Wednesday morning, they were struggling with where to store all their mahangu that was saved and the ones they were threshing, thus appealed to any Good Samaritans to assist them.

The family said they also lost some of their household items such as washing basins, chairs, a mattress, a bed and two sofas.

The fire was extinguished with the assistance of the Nkurenkuru Town Council fire brigade.