Chainda Compound

Chainda Market

Chainda is a compound, one of twenty-seven, on the periphery of Lusaka. Compounds are unplanned settlements or shanty towns. I don't know why, but I don't like the term "shanty town". The settlement was created in the late 1960's, when the people, from many different Bantu tribes were moved here from nearby land in order that the city airport could be constructed and now covers an area of maybe just less than one square mile. Officially 26,000 people live here although the real figure could be twice as high. It is difficult to count people in Lusaka, there are so many, and those counting tend to be selective. There are a lot of children in the compound and extended families of up to 10 children and adults are normal. 

There is a main tarmac road that pops the footballs and runs along the north and eastern edge of the settlement, and from that road a bustling cramped market, selling things markets sell, takes you into the heart of the village. Another tarmac road leads around the back of the village. The main hub of the village in enclosed within these routes, although there is increasing over spill as space runs out and new land is sought. Plots are bought officially, but then people can build what they want. The houses are are anything from shacks made from tarpaulins on timber frames, to larger breeze block properties, interspersed with stalls and shops selling little bags of mealie

meal and lollipops, toilets and bars and are connected with dirt tracks, dry and dusty in the dry season but a quagmire in the rains. Some of the bars are more respectable than others and have tele's showing football, whilst others are simply  local maize brew drinking dens with one bench and a pile of crates, hidden behind tarpaulin drapes. Any space in the village, aside from the footy pitch, is taken up with the small scale subsistence cultivation of maize and geological outcrops of rock that the women and children hammer into little pieces all day long, to sell on the roadside. In the dry season, the only moisture is that around the communal taps where the people get their water from. It took me a month to find a familiar route across it and my strategy when lost was just to follow my nose and hope to hit the tarmac at some point. It usually worked in the daylight but at night I needed a guide. The electricity is dodgy and there are few lights.

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Officially, there are two types of compounds in the city. Government compounds, as in the case of Chainda, have a police presence and and infrastructure such as schools and clinics. Non-government ones don't. Whilst they differ in amenities, they have in common extreme poverty. Unemployment is unimaginable high, many children work who cannot go to school and those that work do do for as little as £15 a month. A bag of mealie meal that would last an adult a month costs roughly £10.

The rainy season

I am not familiar with all the compounds in Lusaka but the atmosphere in Chainda is one of friendliness and in the morning I would look forward to walking along the tarmac road to it. I knew, without doubt that i would meet new people along the way and talk with them. I spent a lot of time there exploring. It is a village with a lot of people living their lives, going shopping, arguing about the price of second hand Little Princess rucksacks, cursing crap batteries they have for sale in the market and getting their hair cut. There are millions of things, more than that, to say about the place and I hope to write more about more of it in the future...the markets, the noise and the schools, the buses and the little shops that you go to to get your phone topped up and the best eggs I have ever tasted.

This, I hope, will serve as an introduction.