LUSAKA, Zambia – The shortest day of the year in southern Africa was cut a little shorter today by the millennium’s first total solar eclipse, celebrated with cheers and firecrackers from thousands of observers gathered here from the world over.
“It’s so strange to see the darkness in the midst of light,” said Charles Mjima, a Zambian in a Lusaka shopping center parking lot that became a temporary observatory when the moon was circled by a halo of fire as it blanketed the sun.
Mjima, 26 – who had traveled four hours from the north to observe the phenomenon – joined families barbecuing and having picnics in the lot for the occasion.
Wearing protective glasses, Jonny Ndoro, left, and his sister Mary watch the progress of a solar eclipse in Lusaka, Zambia.
Over Lusaka, the only capital where the eclipse was visible, the moon completely shadowed the sun for three minutes and 14 seconds.
The eclipse first became visible over land at 8:38 a.m. EDT in Angola. It then traveled across Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique before heading out to the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar, getting shorter along the way. The eclipse coincided with the winter solstice – the shortest day of the year – in the southern hemisphere.
Street children dressed in rags walked by wealthier Zambians, who were talking on their cellular phones while staring into the sky through the silver film of their protective glasses.
In Angola, 60,000 people, including President Jose Eduardo dos Santos and 500 foreign scientists, flew to the fishing town of Sumbe to watch the eclipse.
“I have come to reassure those who thought the world was going to end today,” dos Santos said.
In Kinshasa, Congo, the eclipse – and vague government warnings about it – brought fear. Authorities had warned the public that the eclipse was dangerous and they should hide in their homes, but didn’t get across the message that the danger was only in staring at it directly.
In the Zambian capital Lusaka, hotels were fully booked as thousands of tourists, scientists and new age mystics poured in to observe the phenomenon. Farmers in the eclipse path rented out land for makeshift campsites.
“This is a big event for Zambia,” said Agnes Seenka, the head of the government’s eclipse committee.
The government expected more than 20,000 tourists – the most ever in Zambia – and deployed 2,500 police to patrol the streets of Lusaka and other tourist areas.
More than 4,000 people traveled from as far as Japan, Israel and Ecuador to sway to trance music at a farm about 30 miles north of Lusaka during a 10-day eclipse rave.
Zambians have been bombarded for months with front-page newspaper editorials, television commercials and special eclipse radio programs warning not to look directly at the sun without protective eyeglasses before it is fully eclipsed.
The state-owned Times of Zambia newspaper Thursday cautioned that a few tourists were deadly “enchanters” and “demon worshippers” who prayed to the sun and were “ready to sacrifice humans.”
In Zimbabwe, tribal healers warned the eclipse was a sign the ancestors were unhappy with a nation that had abandoned the traditional African values of peace and harmony. As retribution, they would bring further conflict to a country already suffering from political and economic turmoil and the crushing scourge of AIDS.
The last total eclipse was in Europe in August 1999. The next one will also hit southern Africa in December 2002, but that will be during the rainy season, when there is a greater chance of cloudy skies.
Chris Holmes, a 20-year-old astrophysics major at Williams College in Massachusetts, came to Zambia as part of a Williams team using more than 15 cameras attached to telescopes to take more than 1,000 photos of the eclipse.
“Who would turn down a chance to see an eclipse in somewhere as interesting as Zambia,” Holmes said. “For most people it’s a once in a lifetime or less opportunity.”
