“But you are a Zambian!” – How I rediscovered Zambia (and Zambia rediscovered me)

July 2007, Lusaka, Zambia

Lusaka high School, 2007

Part 1: The School

Only when I stepped into the office of the headmistress of Lusaka High School did it all come back. Suddenly I remembered vividly the last time I stood in that very spot.

I had arrived in Zambia in the morning after an absence of almost 40 years, accompanied by my own son and daughter who were both in their early twenties. Heading straight to my old school, I was invited to enter to the office where the headmistress was in a meeting. Now the staff of Lusaka High School was looking at me, with friendly, expectant faces.

That was when it hit me: The smell of red soil and charcoal fires that had lingered in my nostrils since we landed early in the morning, the open, rolling landscape with dry brown maize fields under a pale blue sky, the cream white and blue plaster walls in the hallway of the school - suddenly I was taken back to a time when the name of the school was not Lusaka High School, but Lusaka Boys’ School, and the principal was not a friendly African woman, but a very angry Englishman, and I was not a middle-aged man stumbling blindly down memory lane after four decades of self-imposed exile, but a ten year old schoolboy who had just been dragged into the headmaster’s office for fighting in the schoolyard.

His name was Mr. Hobbs, and (countless Monty Python sketches come to mind) he combined the stature of Michael Palin with the temperament of John Cleese. He had the pale bony-knees-under-baggy-shorts-appearance that you think is just a caricature of an Englishman in the colonies, complete with the closely cut hair and the small mustache. Now he was giving us the scolding of our lifetimes.



Off to school, 1968

I remember glancing at the bamboo cane that was placed conveniently within reach and well within our view, and wondering whether my dad’s conversation with the headmaster only a few weeks earlier would weigh in to my advantage. My brother had received a slap across the leg from a teacher, and my dad had paid Mr. Hobbs a visit to explain to him (calmly) the differences between Scandinavian and English disciplinary strategies, and (even more calmly) how in his opinion, there was essentially no difference between beating up a schoolboy and beating up a headmaster.

Whether it was my dad’s preemptive intervention that saved us or not, we were released with a telling off that was a masterpiece in English rhetoric, and well-designed to discourage us from ever repeating the offence, and I could only smile bleakly and shake my head when back in the classroom, I was whispered the obligatory question: Did you get the cane?

Back in the Headmasters office of 2007, I was starting to feel the pressure of all the curious eyes, and with dismay I realized how little interest a visit like mine must elicit from these people - how indifferent they must feel towards us little rich white boys coming back after so many years, expecting them to pay tribute to a sentimentality that must seem misplaced at best.

In 1967, while Zambia was fighting a desperate struggle to survive as a nation under the pressure of UDI and international sanctions against Southern Rhodesia, the majority of the country’s white population was mainly concerned with how they could take their savings with them to Rhodesia where they would continue their comfortable colonial lifestyles for another few years, served by a people constitutionally defined as a lower class, entrenching themselves against the condemnation of the rest of the world and driving the country into a civil war that would claim 30 000 lives and feed the hates and suspicions of a future class of autocratic politicians.

All right – so we weren’t “like that”, we were there supposedly to help, guided by sound democratic principles and a solid faith in Humanity, (We are, after all, Norwegians.) but who would honestly care about that today? Perhaps it had been a mistake to come back after so many years, thinking I would find any unbroken strings to my Zambian childhood or that our brief African interlude from 1967 to 1969 could possibly give rise to a feeling of kinship that anyone would recognize 40 years on?

I resisted the impulse to apologize for the intrusion and simply get out of there. Instead, with a voice that was hardly a demonstration of dignity, I presented my errand, and was all the more overwhelmed by the warmth I was met with. The questions they asked me demonstrated true interest, and they took time out of their meeting to answer mine. Inviting me to have a look around after I had signed their guestbook and left my E-mail address, they said they were always interested to keep in touch with the old boys.

The old boys ... such an English phrase.

Part 2: The town

In the afternoon I was apprehended by a uniformed security guard on Cairo Road. We had hailed a taxi outside the school and asked the driver to drop us off at the main post office. From there we walked southwards along the wide boulevard that in my mind is the very heart and soul of Zambia.



Cairo Road in 1967

The eerie sensation of disorientation in familiar surroundings that I experienced during my visit to the school, took hold again. It was the same place as 40 years before, and yet it was completely different. In the taxi, I had no problem naming buildings and places as we passed, or knowing what lay around the next corner, but what had essentially been a European small-town in the sixties, was now a big, bustling African city. The set decorations were the same, but the cast was new. In the old days, a European woman might be seen outside a shop loading groceries into the boot of her car, oftentimes assisted by an African in shorts. Now, crowds of Africans hurried by, some in suits and seemingly on their way to some important meeting, while the European lady was but a pale glint behind the dark windshield of a car passing by in the heavy traffic. Cairo Road had been repossessed by Zambia.




... and in 2007

As we walked past the square in front of OK Zambia (now Shoprite), I was dismayed to see that the familiar supermarket had been ravaged by fire and seemed deserted and neglected. It was an image of Africa-in-decay (so popular in Europe) that I had hoped I would not encounter. But there were Subway-stores and coffee shops, and it looked nothing like accounts I had read of Cairo Road during the years of hardship in the eighties, when shops were left empty with broken panes, and discarded newspapers would fly in the wind, unhindered by traffic.

Towards the southern roundabout, half a mile further down, I took out my video camera to record a new office complex where one of the buildings was named "Kenneth Kaunda House".  I thought this would be nice to show to my father who, having worked closely with the first president of Zambia, was interested to know if the old man still held a respected position.

In the recorded footage, one can hear a small commotion, and someone shouting. Then the picture shakes briefly and goes dark. Behind the camera, a firm grip on my shoulder reminded me that the old idiosyncratic ban on photographing public buildings was still in effect.

In preparation for the trip, I had put together a small photo album of the kind that grandmothers would keep to show off their grandchildren to other grandmothers before the age of camera phones. It included pictures of the family outside our house in Lusaka and of me in my LBS school uniform. There was also one of Kenneth Kaunda taken on the State House grounds on Africa Freedom Day in 1967, and one of him and my father, arms over the shoulders, that had been taken more recently outside a Church in Oslo where KK had visited in connection with a charity drive in 2004.



My father and KK in Oslo, 2004

Inside the guardhouse, confronted with the head of security of the government complex that included the Bank of Zambia, I took out the album, and adopting a very apologetic attitude, I explained that in the excitement of seeing this monument to my dad's old boss, I had completely forgotten about the regulation.

I watched with some apprehension as the security manager leafed through the album. I did not want to surrender the footage I had already recorded. But at one point I could see that his attitude changed, and his expression softened. I prefer to think that this was not a servile reaction to someone with friends in high places. After all - although still highly respected - Kaunda has limited real influence today. Rather, I have seen the same change in expression on later occasions, after presenting myself to someone in Zambia, saying I was a former resident of Lusaka and a pupil of Lusaka Boys' School. On one occasion, it was expressed thus:

Ah, but you are a Zambian!

In the end, he agreed not to confiscate my video camera, or even the cassette, and we parted amicably, with a vague promise on my part that I would work out how to delete the offending scene once I was back in my hotel where I could consult the user manual.

Part 3: The home

The next morning we hired a taxi for the day, and I gave the driver an address in the suburb of Chelston. He did not know the exact location, but once again, I found it surprisingly easy to guide him to the right location.

The taxi driver knocked on the gate on our behalf, and after a brief discussion, he returned to let us know that the owner of the house was out, but if we would care to wait, he would be home shortly.

The house in 1967

A high wall now enclosed he house, which had been our home for 18 months in 1967 and 1968. This was as I had expected. Crime rates were on the rise even in 1968, and by the time we left the country, every other house along our road would have a security guard arriving at dusk to spend the night on the front porch. But apart from the garden walls, nothing much had changed physically. The same unpaved roads with deep ditches and closely cut grass along the side gave access to spacious bungalows on half-acre plots.

Still, the impression was one of a mature neighbourhood, much in contrast to what you would have seen if you walked the streets of Chelston in 1967. It had been a new development then, built to offer housing to high-ranking officials and expatriate specialists in various fields that the country relied so heavily on in the first years of independence. Chelston of the late sixties had been populated by Europeans on two- or three-year contracts, who did not see much point in investing in their houses or gardens, and thus, most of them, like us, limited their gardening activities to keeping the grass low so snakes would not find shelter too close to the house.

From what I could tell, this had changed. Peeping through gates and over walls, I could see that even now in the middle of dry season, the  gardens were lush with bushes, flowers and green lawns. It was a place for people to live, not just to reside.

Watching people passing on the road reinforced this impression. Chelston was as African a place in 2007 as it had been European in 1967. Schoolchildren would hurry past with heavy satchels on their backs, and women would stop to chat with our driver, carrying baskets full of groceries, all behaving as people do when they are where they belong.

Finally, a car pulled up in front of the gate to the house, and the owner invited us inside. He was a big, jovial man, 10 years my senior and genuinely interested to hear my story.

Inside the gate, I could see that the house was more or less the same, although an extension had been added to the kitchen, and decorative wrought-iron burglary bars had replaced simple welded ones. Together with the neatly tended garden, they gave a much more welcoming impression than I remembered. Still, there was no doubt that this was my old home.


The house in 2007

As I was walking through the grounds where I had played with my brother and our friends 40 years earlier, the history I was seeking on this trip began to come to life. Suddenly it seemed that the gap in time between my present life and a reality that I had relegated to sometimes vague and distant memories might be bridged.

But that was not what closed the circle for me.

I chatted with my new acquaintance about the house then and now, and about the development that had taken place in the country. He asked why my family had come to Zambia in the first place, and although that story is much too long and winded to recount in the course of a brief encounter, I gave him the highlights of how the Norwegian labour movement had contributed with funds and staff toward the establishment of the Kenneth Kaunda Foundation, incorporating a national publishing company and distribution company for schoolbooks.

When I was looking for information about the companies, in preparation for my trip, I had found confirmation that they had thrived for many years, pouring books into the Zambian educational system, but most of what I had found had originated before 1990.

I had seen an announcement indicating that the company had been for sale in the 1990s, as part of the privatization campaign that took place after multiparty politics had been reinstated and the plethora of parastatal corporations of the Kaunda-era was being dismantled. But after that, there was nothing. And although my dad was waiting at home, hoping I would find some remnants of his work, or some confirmation that it had been worth the effort, I had little hope of being able to accommodate him.

But as I spoke, I noticed my new-found friend listening intently and nodding knowingly, in a way that made me ask him if he might have heard of the Kenneth Kaunda Foundation before. He answered:

“I know the Kenneth Kaunda Foundation very well. I worked for that organization for 23 years, and retired from a post as Managing Director. ... I was very interested to meet you, when I heard you were here.”

And thus, the circle was closed.

Part 4: The country

Zambians are proud of their country, and rightly so. It is a country almost unique to the continent, in that it has never seen war. Despite high temperatures, harsh words and dubious practices in Zambian politics, all transitions of power have been conducted peacefully.

To some extent, this is down to quirks of history. Cecil Rhodes never thought the northern territories held much of value other than an abundance of cheap labour for the mining industries further south, and for this reason he did not encourage European immigration. Consequently, Northern Rhodesia was to sort under the British Colonial Department as a protectorate rather than under the Commonwealth Department as a crown colony, like Southern Rhodesia did. This situation paved the way for an ordered transition to Independence in 1964 in the face of fierce opposition from the white minority.

But Zambia's peaceful history is also a legacy of the leaders of the liberation movement of the late fifties and early sixties, who combined shrewd political tactics with an uncompromising moral leadership. As underqualified leaders of a fledgling state they managed to forge a national unity out of the 70 tribes, speaking more than 40 languages, that had constituted the arbitrarily defined territory of Northern Rhodesia.

Nation building: President Kaunda honurs
Patrick Chella of the Kenneth Kaunda Foundation
for services to the Nation at the first Investiture
Ceremonies on Africa Freedom Day in 1967.
Mr Chella was tragically killed in an automobile
accident a few months later.

Over the years, the concept of "Zambia", formulated in 1958, more as a political slogan than as the designation of a state, has gained substance. When Kaunda in 1991 stepped down after losing the first multiparty election in 23 years, he made a huge contribution to the common understanding of what Zambia "is", and set a standard for other leaders to follow. And the people is keeping watch, through a wide variety of civil society organizations dedicated to governance, democracy and human rights.

Moreover, Zambians are quick to recognize that their present status is a result of contributions - positive and negative - from a number of different sources. Southern central Africa in the 1880s and '90s was a playground for adventurers, uncharted territory for explorers, a land of opportunity for farmers and traders and virgin country for the missionaries. Many came, as friends or as foes, but for the most part simply indifferent to the indigenous peoples. In the 20th century, hard-nosed investors and industrialists made a more determined effort to exploit the resources of the land, and in the 1970's and -80's an army of aid workers took over the field. Today the Chinese are arriving in numbers as investors, engineers and farmers.

They have all left their marks on the country, and Zambians are well aware that Zambia would not be what it is, were it not for the continual influx of people, culture, ideas, religion, technologies and investments, regardless of motives, and irrespective of whether people might leave with more than they brought.

Never have I heard a Zambian blame their misfortunes on their colonial history, and many times have I heard them state that it is their country and they must take responsibility for its development. The fact that Zambia welcomed the settlement of white Zimbabwean farmers during Mugabe's land grabbing campaigns or that Zambia in 2011 elected a white farmer as vice president speaks volumes of their recognition of and tolerance towards the country's own historical roots.

And so, whether you are a European farmer, a Boer businessman, an Asian tradesman or merely the son of a Norwegian media specialist who tangled with Zambia's nascent educational system in the late 1960s, they seem to be willing to welcome you and include you in the wide and varied legion of contributors, who in all fashions combine to constitute the concept of Zambia.

***

Well Zambia, I am back now - and thank you for keeping my place.