In 1992-1993, during the first years of Zambia’s multi-party democracy, we were posted to Lusaka, Zambia’s capital. Graham was charged with organising the distribution of European Union food aid to drought-stricken Zambians. (Part 1 is HERE and part 2 HERE)

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We soon discover that our household security provision falls short of official standards. European Union and British High Commission employees are advised to have internal security gates installed, external security lights, roof siren, alarm buttons, window bars, a pack of Dobermans and ridgebacks, a two-way radio and armed twenty-four-hour guards. The fortification of a property may cost around £5,000.

Somehow we survive without most of these devices, although the top of our garden wall, which also forms the rear boundary of the compound, is quite high and is further cemented with shards of broken glass.

The nights, though, can be nerve-wracking. Rounds of automatic gunfire are common after dark. Some European locals, we are told, have made a ritual of standing on their front lawn at 9 pm every night and shooting off their sporting rifles – just to let “the thieving bastards” know what’s what. These are the same people who will tell you that, when they are not trying to relieve you of your worldly goods, the Africans are really very charming.

But gunfire aside, it is anyway hard to sleep in the perpetual gloaming of the security lights dotted around our compound. The insects, too, grow louder as the night draws on, and then the dogs wake us.

I call it the Kabulonga Howling. For reasons unknown, it begins with a single canine, a lone keening which then swells from compound to compound in a relayed dog lament until finally a monstrous crescendo resounds across the suburbs. But once howling pitch is reached, it quickly subsides, and instead we are left with the beat of Zambian dance music, thrumming away beyond our perimeter wall.

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We have no idea who lives beyond our glass-spiked rampart. I have tried standing on the brick barbeque in the back yard, but I still cannot see over the wall. Instead, I often hear a Zambian boy badgering his little sister whose name is Lorna. Lorna is always being ordered to do something or other. There is meek compliance in her little voice. It is the lot of many Zambian women to defer to men. Already I feel sorry for her.

One day I find an arrow in the back garden – a stiff plant stem tipped with a bent Mosi beer bottle cap. For a moment, as I examine this makeshift missile, I think of Robinson Crusoe finding unsettling signs of life on his confining island shore.

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By day, Graham leaves early for the EU Delegation. It is only a five minutes’ drive away. I begin to tend the back garden, sowing beans, courgettes, carrots. Things quickly sprout, but the land snails are as big as my fist. I write and read, although finding books is a challenge. We can find no bookshops in Zambia since the nation can no longer support a publishing industry. Once a week we drive down to the British Council on Cairo Road to borrow books from their library. We do this, ignoring white Zambians’ warnings that our Suburu will be car-jacked if we park anywhere downtown. Whenever we go to the library, most of Zambia’s students seem to be there, studying hard. Every seat is taken. It is hard to gain qualifications in a land without books.

One of the parking boys who minds our car whenever we visit the British Council library. In ten months of parking on Cairo Road neither the car nor any of its parts go missing.

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And not only is there a lack of books,  but newsprint, too, is hard to come by. Newspapers sell out quickly each day and I have to rely on Graham bringing the Delegation copy home at lunch-time for quick scan through. Soon we hear that four Zambian Daily Mail accountants have been arrested for ripping off their own company’s limited newsprint stock and selling it to a rival newspaper.

Then there is the challenge of household shopping. Our local shop is Kabulonga supermarket where I frequently search the shelves to strains of  Michael Bolton’s The Lady in Red. A beautiful girl in cobalt blue chitenge and matching head-cloth tied with great flourishes, is often on the till. She has the poise of a princess.

It’s basically a matter of buying whatever is there and then thinking of something to do with it. Treats include cartons of delicious Ceres grape juice, and jars of sweet pickled beetroot imported from South Africa. The local yogurt comes in big tubs, plain or strawberry. Other staples include corned beef and South African wine. On the other hand, there is never a shortage of cleaning products, all heavily perfumed. At Christmas we see them parcelled up into apparently enticing gift packs along with small bales of second hand clothing.

We bought our bed from traders in  Kamwala Market

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There are of course shopping opportunities everywhere along Lusaka’s streets – cigarette and used clothes stalls, a man selling bread, another with his scrawny hens, fish from a freezer connected to nothing, caterpillars dried or roasted, large woodland mushrooms the colour of cygnet down, little pyramids of tomatoes. If I buy two piles of tomatoes from the young woman in the photo, she gives me an extra tomato as a “special gift”, and then wraps the lot in computer print-out. It’s one of those frequent incongruity moments.

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I also walk down to the Maluwa Co-operative in the hopes of something more interesting than beetroot and corned beef. Again, I never know what I will find there: perhaps, if I’m lucky, a good mission-reared chicken in the cold cabinet, or button mushrooms, some Gouda cheese, broccoli, new potatoes, French beans, bunches of roses. If he catches me walking, an elderly white Zambian in a pick-up, (his ‘boys’ in the back), always insists on giving me a lift. He means well, and it is easier to comply with his desire to save me from imagined predations of Zambians than to argue.

Maluwa Cooperative Store

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But I like it out on the road. There is so much life outside the high walled, razor-wired residences of the elite. People greet me. One day a taxi driver, trying to mend his broken-down car, stops struggling with things mechanical and offers me a lift. For a second I’m rooted to the spot. I note the rear tyre lodged on the back seat. Does he think if I say yes the car will conveniently right itself. He looks a touch sheepish when I smile and say no thanks. I like his style though: never miss the chance to cut a deal. As I step out again on the dirt road that has lost its asphalt, my footprints join the countless prints of others in the red dust.

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Graham spends his days rushing round to meetings with aid agencies. There are fears that donations of free maize will dissuade farmers from planting their own crops, despite the good rains. Too much free maize is also likely to depress the economy, and this must be avoided. Much is given out as payment for working on public enterprises such as road building or making bricks for the building of clinics. Unemployed women, in particular, are keen to do such work. Receiving a sack of mealie meal, sugar, beans and cooking oil in return for their labour gives them independence from menfolk who might otherwise take any cash earnings. Graham also has to travel down south to Choma and Kalomo to oversee the distribution of EU maize by the Red Cross. There are more trips out east and to the Copper Belt.

Villagers coming to collect cooking oil and maize meal from the Red Cross.

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A farmer shows Graham his empty granary.

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In March Graham comes home saying there is a bit of flap on. Brussels has phoned the E.U. Delegation saying that the BBC has reported a coup in Zambia: is everything all right there, they ask. The diplomats scratch their heads. No coup has been observed out in the suburbs. But then a few days later it is clear that something has happened. Major Rezi Kaunda, son of the long-serving and recently supplanted, ex-president, Kenneth Kaunda, has been arrested. He is reported as being under armed guard. Further details explain, somewhat bizarrely, that he is sitting in the yard of Woodlands police station with his flask of tea and a radio. Fourteen plotters in all have been arrested both in Lusaka and the Copper Belt. These include the editor-in-chief of the Zambia Times.

Later we hear that an incriminating document, The Zero Option, has been seized. It gives detailed plans of how members of the UNIP opposition old guard, led by Rezi, intend to make Zambia ungovernable by fuelling a crime wave, infiltrating the unions and government departments. It is mooted that this campaign of destabilisation has already been instigated and is responsible for the alarming crime wave.

President Chiluba has only been in office for a little over a year. His Movement for Multi-Party Democracy defeated Kenneth Kaunda in the first democratically held elections since Independence in 1964. Kaunda Senior had been in power all that time, but on defeat, chose to bow out gracefully. Meanwhile Frederick Chiluba claims that he is on a clean-up mission of this potentially rich, but now run-down state. He declares a limited State of Emergency while order is restored.

We all breathe a sigh of relief. No need for the emergency evacuation that the High Commission is so unlikely to provide for us. Besides, Graham still has much work to do, and there’s so much I still want to discover. One thing I am itching to know is how this copper-rich nation, with its deposits of sapphires and amethysts and airy upland mopane forests is one of the poorest on earth. Why are its impoverished, beleaguered but hard-working peoples being so ruthlessly ‘structurally adjusted’ by the World Bank? I am beginning to suspect that the spirit of Cecil Rhodes is restless and abroad once more, but that, as they say is another story.

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A view of one of the stands at the Annual Lusaka Agricultural Show. The 1993 show slogan is ‘Produce to Prosper’. Better, if less catchy, would be ‘Produce and get fair pay from multi-nationals.’

To be continued…

copyright 2024 Tish Farrell